YOU'RE GETTING DROWSY ... : IT'S LESS SLEEP, MORE NAPS AS QUICK FIX.

Byline: Heesun Wee Daily News Staff Writer

If you love to snooze midday and are tired of being ridiculed by your peers, hold your head up, grab your favorite blanket and seize that comfy bed or couch. Help has arrived - the Worldwide Nap Organization.

A self-described nap and sleep enthusiast, Amy Bellinger of Bloomington, Ind., founded the Worldwide Nap Organization and a quirky Web site by the same name. Since its debut on Jan. 1, 1996, more than 30,000 nap lovers from around the globe have visited the Web site, where nappers are extolled and critics of sleep are collectively booed.

Nap fans' most prominent poster boy may be Sir Winston Churchill, according to Bellinger. The vigorous prime minister of Great Britain snoozed regularly to keep up his energy. He encouraged his staffers to nap, too, preferably in pajamas, so they would be in tune with his schedule.

``Churchill didn't despise himself for wanting to take a nap the way most people do,'' Bellinger said.

But inventor Thomas Edison, who labored for days at a time - stopping only for short naps in his lab - would have been denied WNO membership if he were alive today. He detested humans' biological need for shut-eye.

Edison's attitude toward sleep lives on in this country, where the Protestant work ethic thrives.

``As a society, we feel if it causes us pleasure, there must be something wrong with it,'' said Mari Womack, a cultural anthropologist at California State University, Northridge. Some people even wear their sleep debt like a badge of honor, pooh-poohing snoozing as an activity for the wimpish and lazy.

But many Americans, running on six hours of sleep or less, have pushed aside sleep as a priority so much that they're turning to napping as a quick fix to survive.

``Many CEOs are now putting their heads down behind closed doors to survive,'' said James D. Maas, a sleep researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

In fact, napping is on the cusp of major trendiness as we throttle toward 2000, according to a think tank based in Rhinebeck, N.Y.

The Trends Research Institute predicts daytime snoozing will become a major part of overall health, especially as more companies offer flexible schedules and more people work out of their homes. Adults will pencil in naps as they do workouts.

Gerald Celente, the institute's director and author of ``Trends 2000'' (Warner Books), said many baby boomers now pushing 50 are beginning to believe they're working too hard and generally overbooking their lives.

``So they're easing back, slowing down,'' Celente said. ``Napping is a time to cool down.''

And there was light

But for many Americans, their harsh economic realities don't allow them to pay attention to millenarian trends. Take Tonoa Sullivan of Inglewood. The single mother of a 7-year-old boy sleeps little and occasionally naps out of necessity.

For 40 hours a week, from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., Sullivan answers telephones at a private answering service in Buena Park. For an additional 25 hours per week, she pops into her car and drives to Super Kmart in Carson, where she toils in the bakery department from 4 to 10:30 p.m.

Some days, Sullivan's so tuckered she naps in her car in the supermarket parking lot between jobs. Not a coffee drinker, she said the quick snooze allows her to recharge her batteries.

Many sleep researchers say sleep debt in this country can be traced to the Industrial Revolution. Since the spread of power-driven industries beginning in the mid-1800s in the United States, Americans have been working more and sleeping less - in large part due to the first electric light that sleep-loathing Edison fashioned in 1879. So today, instead of going to bed after sundown and rising at dawn, we labor for long hours, stay up to watch ``The Late Show With David Letterman'' and set the alarm clock early for another workday - all of which reduces our sleep time.

That need to cram as many activities into 24 hours has even fueled a rise in car accidents. According to a 1995 Gallup poll commissioned by the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, D.C., 52 percent of adults surveyed said they've driven a car while groggy at least once.

And drowsiness or fatigue is the main cause of an estimated 100,000 police-reported crashes annually, according to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

A July 1996 survey by the Gallup Organization in Princeton, N.J., offered some clues as to why so many of us are driving with our eyes half-closed. Only 24 percent of those polled said they get the recommended eight hours of sleep on an average weeknight. A whopping 56 percent said they get six to seven hours of sleep, and 11 percent said they sleep less than six hours. Seven percent said they snooze nine hours or more, and the remaining two percent said their sleep hours vary or had no opinion.

For Americans who do choose to follow the tradition of siestas in Spain and other countries, a restorative midday nap often is accompanied by guilt.

A WNO survey completed in March 1996 found women between ages 25 and 34 feel most culpable about napping.

``It's a hard-driving period in your life. Women in that age group believe: `If I'm going to make it, I better make it right now. I don't have time to rest,' '' Bellinger explained. Those least self-reproaching about napping in the WNO survery were men older than 50.

One in four Americans also believes you can't have a successful career and get enough sleep, according to a November 1995 Gallup poll for the National Sleep Foundation.

Who has time to snooze when you could be up early planting bulbs for spring, running five miles, planning a family day trip or squeezing in some more work, right?

Wrong, say sleep specialists. They say quality sleep time - and napping, when necessary - are vital for overall good health.

``We're trying to be `super humans' and `super parents' in this rat race, but we're fooling ourselves by staying up the extra hours. We become less efficient and sufficiently moodier,'' Mass said. ``People who claim little sleep are either sick all the time or napping.''

To nap is human

Most adults' body temperatures naturally drop between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. And if they close their eyes and lie down, they'll most likely fall asleep.

``It's natural. It's your circadian rhythm,'' said Jack Brunk, a sleep medicine specialist for Sleep Diagnostics Inc., a private clinic in Agoura Hills.

If you need to nap, sleep specialists recommend about 20 minutes to half an hour of shut-eye. A longer, deeper snooze can lead to grogginess, not rejuvenation.

Remember curling up on a mat during kindergarten? There was a medical reason for that. Children sleep more and deeper than adults. They need those extra, powerful zzzzs to develop strong bones and muscles - essentially, to age. As we reach young adulthood, our bodies require less energy for growing and therefore need less deep sleep and napping.

And when we hit our 50s and 60s, more changes to our circadian rhythms make deep sleep at night more difficult than ever. So, napping is important for older people who need to catch up on sleep during the day.

But adults in their 30s and 40s can benefit from napping, too.

``Take a 20-minute nap if you're not getting good nocturnal sleep,'' Maas advised.

``If you can find the time, use a nap to help you. You're going to feel much better, sharper,'' Brunk said. ``I wonder why they (Europeans who nap often) are healthier, and their cancer rates are less. There's no question there's a correlation there.''

Although research still continues on the long-term physiological effects of too little sleep, completed studies do show sleep deprivation can lead to poor immunity.

Margie Monroy, 54, of the Antelope Valley, for example, gets up at 4 a.m. weekdays to catch a commuter train to her job in North Hollywood. If she's lucky, she gets four or five hours of sleep nightly, including weekends.

In February, Monroy caught the flu and she couldn't get out of bed for four days. ``It scared me,'' recalled Monroy, who also cares for her disabled husband.

Despite the growing body of research that supports the benefits of sleeping and napping, don't expect siestas to become a national pastime. ``People brag about not sleeping,'' said Barbara Holland, author of ``Endangered Pleasures'' (Little, Brown and Co.). Napping is one of life's many joys celebrated in the collection of essays.

Holland, a nap fan, said what America needs is a famous napper to further the cause of snoozing. ``If someone with clout could just come forward and say, `This is good for you, too.' ''

But in the meantime, if you want to sleep on the job without getting fired, you may have to move to Japan. A Japanese culture magazine recently reported that one company in Japan, called Napping Shop, visits companies, armed with dark tents, earplugs and eye masks so workers can nap during breaks.

Could such a business thrive in the United States? Probably not, says Brunk.

``Most (U.S.) employers would never say, `OK. We're turning everything off at 2 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.' ''

CAPTION(S):

Drawing, Photo

Drawing: (Color) WHY YOU SHOULD BE SLEEPING ON THE JOB

Jon Gerung/Daily News

Photo: Margie Monroy gets up at 4 a.m. weekdays to catch a commuter train to her job.