"Do you think you'd move back to Bahrain?" was a question I posed to two Bahraini friends recently.

"Nah," was their reply. "Bahrain makes us sleepy."

I was conjuring up images of Mom's home cooking causing passed out progeny after coming home from months of living away. Then I switched to images of worn out vacation-needing young entrepreneurs lazing on a beach and remembering they still had work to do.

But before I got too far, my friend Kamal clarified. "It has something to do with the oxygen."

"Wait...so this is literal."

"Oh yeah. It's hard to breathe there. We go there and the first thing we do is take a nap. Then we do something and then go take another nap."

Turns out, Bahrain, a small gulf island with a population of 702,000, ranks 9th on the world scale of highest carbon dioxide emissions per capita. The rank might be slightly less damning on the hazards of breathing conditions if it weren't for the fact that Bahrain is minuscule in terms of land mass when compared to many of the other eight countries listed as more pollution ridden.

But if the air is indeed making its people sleepy, it's not reflective in GDP. Bahrain is doing well on economic fronts, accounting for 0.05% of the world economy and unemployment reported at 3.7%.

While I couldn't find any comprehensive Napping Hours Per Capita charts on the Internet, research abounds that midday naps boost performance. If we wanted to draw an inaccurate correlation between the anecdotal need for naps in Bahrain to the country's stellar economic achievements, perhaps we could; but maybe more plausible is the fact that there might be a correlation between countries that have a high GDP and those that rank high on the list of having respiratory ailments--respiratory ailments that may cause sleepiness.

Even if sleep problems don't appear to be getting in Bahrain's economic way, the promise of a sunny GDP doesn't seem enough to quell civil unrest or lure some of its own back to its shores. For now, Kamal and Charles are planning on staying put in Dubai and attempting to save nap time for the weekends. When it comes to sleep, too much of a good thing might actually be, well, too much.