My eldest daughter has just visited China.

“People sleep everywhere,” she told me, while showing me a succession of photographs of individuals snoozing on park benches, on buses, even behind the counters in shops.

The Chinese take every opportunity to have a nap, squeezing them into their routines. Many factories in the country allow workers a 30 minute nap every day after lunch, apparently boosting productivity by 30 per cent. They take this at their work stations, lolling back in their seats.

While sitting in the office, I tried to imagine my colleagues slumbering at their desks. I couldn’t. We British can’t nap and go. We would fall asleep, most likely with our mouths open. We would probably snore and dribble and end up splashed all over Facebook. When the time came to wake up we would take ages to come round, and spend the rest of the day feeling groggy and disorientated. Far from it being a so-called ‘power nap’, it would be a lethargic doze and set us back several hours.

York Press:

I have no doubt that having 40 winks is good for you. It has been medically proven that a mid-day snooze doesn’t just have the power to revive - it could reduce blood pressure and prevent a future heart attack. Research involving almost 400 middle-aged men and women found that those who had a nap at noon had lower blood pressure than those who stayed awake throughout the day.

This may be so, but the reality is we are all too busy to sleep. We live a 24-hour lifestyle - go to the gym at dawn, work all day, shop on an evening, and fit in housework and other things when we can. With our minds still racing, we attempt to sleep during the handful of hours left over, then we do it all again.

I don’t know how the Spanish manage to accommodate their daily siestas. On a visit to Madrid, my husband and I were amazed by the number of businesses - some of them major tourist attractions - that closed on an afternoon so that workers could have a two to three-hour slumber. After that length of time I would find it really hard to snap back into work mode. It also means that you don’t finish work until late into the evening.

A colleague who worked in China told me that he found the constant napping “really unsettling.” “Sometimes I felt like I was the only person in the country not asleep,” he said.

Winston Churchill once said: “you must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner...you will accomplish more.” His naps supposedly sustained him through the war years. Napoleon and Leonardo da Vinci were famous nappers, and for all we know David Cameron is too - his sister-in-law famously posted a picture of herself on the Instagram website, with the Prime Minister dozing in the background. And let’s face it, the House of Commons sees many a snoozing MP.

They say that a power nap of just 45 minutes can boost your memory by five times. That’s another reason to pass on it - there are more things in my life that I’d rather forget.