A 60-minute nap
An hour is two thirds of a cycle: long enough to be inside one, short enough not to finish it.
| Stage | Time |
|---|---|
| 2:00 pm | you lie down |
| 2:15 pm | asleep, give or take |
| 3:15 pm | the alarm goes |
That is 1h 15m of lying down for 1h of sleep, allowing 15 minutes to drop off.
The four lengths from the same moment
| Nap | Up at | Lying down for |
|---|---|---|
| 20 minutes | 2:35 pm | 35m |
| 30 minutes | 2:45 pm | 45m |
| 60 minutes | 3:15 pm | 1h 15m |
| 90 minutes | 3:45 pm | 1h 45m |
What the length is
Sixty minutes is the awkward one arithmetically. It is well past the point where a cycle has started and thirty minutes short of where one would end, so unlike twenty, thirty or ninety it is the only length on this site that reliably lands in the middle of something.
If that matters to you, the ninety-minute page is the next length up and finishes a cycle rather than interrupting one. If it does not, an hour is an hour and the sum is the same as every other page here.
A nap is counted straight, not in cycles. The only assumption borrowed from the rest of the site is how long it takes you to fall asleep, and it is the same number you set on a wake page. Nothing here says a nap of any length will do anything for you.
Against the break rules
An hour asleep is seventy-five minutes lying down at the default drop-off. That is longer than any meal or rest break the law sets in these three countries. It overruns South Africa's hour-long meal interval by fifteen minutes. Seventy-five minutes is also exactly the point past which the Basic Conditions of Employment Act says the rest of a meal interval must be paid, unless the employee lives on the premises where they work. The United Kingdom's rest break is twenty minutes, and United States federal law requires no lunch or coffee break. A meal period there, typically thirty minutes or more, is not counted as work time.
The other three
A whole night instead
Past about three hours a nap is a short night, and short nights are counted in cycles on the wake-time pages, one for every quarter hour of the day.