Celebrating professor William Anthony’s holiday today is remarkably easy – all participants have to do is lie down and close their eyes.

Coming a day after people lost an hour of sleep because of daylight-saving time, Anthony’s fifth-annual National Workplace Napping Day is an unofficial holiday designed to open employers’ eyes to the benefits of letting employees snooze at work.

“We encourage people, if they haven’t already, to figure out a way to nap at work and then have the courage to approach their boss and ask for a more nap-friendly policy at work,” said Anthony, a Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences professor and the director of Boston University’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation.

Those nap-friendly policies involve bosses telling employees that their reputations won’t suffer if they take 20-minute naps during their regular breaks.

“Our hope is to get some attention drawn to the fact that napping has some advantages and to get people to understand that napping makes sense,” Anthony said.

He and his wife Camille are celebrating today in Denver with Tom and Karen Renz, who developed the nation’s first roadside napping facility there.

Though other businesses and individuals are encouraged to participate by napping or considering napping policies, the Anthonys said last week that they didn’t know how many would celebrate.

William Anthony said they haven’t had time to recruit participants – both work full-time jobs not related to their napping advocacy – and Camille Anthony said she doesn’t think the holiday will be any bigger than it has been in previous years.

“Napping acceptability trends with good economic times, which doesn’t really make sense,” she said. “With all the cutbacks and layoffs, people are doing more and have more responsibilities and are more tired. I think the attitude now is, ‘Hey, just be lucky that you have a job.'”

When companies are looking to hire, as they were from 1998 to 2000, Camille Anthony said they tend to promote more perks such as letting employees wear jeans, providing fitness rooms or allowing napping.

Along with economic factors, William Anthony said their message also suffers from stigma and prejudice.

“We’re successful about getting the message out, but the overwhelming majority of employers still have tremendous concerns about letting people nap at the workplace,” he said.

Because some employees hide their napping, the Anthonys said they’ve heard from people who crawl under the shields of their desks, nod off sitting on toilets behind stall doors and even hold a bottle of eye drops as a cover.

Napping itself has become a business for the Anthonys. William Anthony authored “The Art of Napping,” which is in its third printing, and the couple wrote “The Art of Napping at Work,” in its second printing.

Camille Anthony, a chief financial officer for an insurance company, estimated that she naps more than her husband, dozing on the floor of her office with a sweater as a pillow and snoozing at home to prepare for nights out.

However, William Anthony said he comes close to napping every day, often on a couch in his BU office.

“I think BU is nap-friendly,” he said. “BU is a scientific community, and there are a lot of scientists researching napping who agree with what you’re doing.”

According to the National Sleep Foundation’s 2002 “Sleep in America” poll, 68 percent of adults get less than eight hours of sleep on weeknights, and 37 percent are so tired that lack of sleep interferes with their daily activities at least a few days each month.

William Anthony said the only minor problem his napping has caused at BU is a slight misunderstanding with his students.

“When my book first came out, my students said, ‘Oh, great. We can nap in class,'” he said.

But William Anthony quickly explained that like workplace nappers, his students were welcome to take a short snooze during the breaks in the middle of his three-hour classes.

“In college, a lot students really learn how to nap,” he said. “Then, unfortunately, you go out and have to work full-time and employers don’t understand the importance of napping.”