Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker.

4/5 rating. 340 pages.

Book #57 of 2021. Read August 28, 2021.

This book should be compulsory reading for everyone in high school and on.

Matthew lays out the myriad reasons why sleep is absolutely essential to our functioning, our thinking, and our happiness. There are so many stats and explanations in here that I already have changed my sleeping habits and my ideas around sleep. I already realized that sleep was important and was always the person who was willing to just go to bed if I was tired, but realizing all of the benefits, I’ve started prioritizing sleep even more.

I think that some of Matthew’s quotes will be most illuminating to drive home both the point of sleep, and the reason you should read this book.

• “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Inadequate sleep – even moderate reductions for just one week – disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic.”
• “It is disquieting to learn that vehicular accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined.”
• “Alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of.”
• “If this remains perplexing to parents, a different way to frame and perhaps appreciate the mismatch is this: asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change.”
• “After being awake for nineteen hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk.”

In short, READ THIS BOOK! And sleep more! It’s not lazy, it’s vital.

Additional Quotes:

“[T]he shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span. The old maxim ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ is therefore unfortunate. Adopt this mind-set, and you will be dead sooner and the quality of that (shorter) life will be worse.”

“[S]leep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day…”

“An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics.”

“Scientists have studied airplane cabin crews who frequently fly on long-haul routes and have little chance to recover. Two alarming results have emerged. First, parts of their brains – specifically those related to learning and memory – had physically shrunk, suggesting the destruction of brain cells caused by the biological stress of time-zone travel. Second, their short-term memory was significantly impaired.”

“Rather, caffeine is the most widely used (and abused) psychoactive stimulant in the world. It is the second most traded commodity on the planet, after oil.”

“When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities).”

“It is important to note, however, that regardless of the amount of recovery opportunity, the brain never comes close to getting back all the sleep it has lost.”

“But if you bring that person into a sleep laboratory, or take them to a hotel – both of which are unfamiliar sleep environments – one half of the brain sleeps a little lighter than the other, as if it’s standing guard with just a tad more vigilance due to the potentially less safe context that the conscious brain has registered while awake.”

“None of the individuals had a history of coronary heart disease or stroke at the start of the study, indicating the absence of cardiovascular ill health. However, those that abandoned regular siestas went on to suffer a 37 percent increased risk of death from heart disease across the six-year period, relative to those who maintained regular daytime naps. The effect was especially strong in workingmen, where the ensuing mortality risk of not napping increased by well over 60 percent.”

“An infant brain without sleep will be a brain ever underconstructed.”

“Alcohol is readily absorbed in a mother’s milk. Concentrations of alcohol in breast milk closely resemble those in a mother’s bloodstream: a 0.08 blood alcohol level in a mother will result in approximately a 0.08 alcohol level in breast milk.”

“Of concern is that administering caffeine to juvenile rats will also disrupt deep NREM sleep and, as a consequence, delay numerous measures of brain maturation and the development of social activity, independent grooming, and the exploration of the environment – measures of self-motivated learning.”

“As parents, we are often too focused on what sleep is taking away from our teenagers, without stopping to think about what it may be adding.”

“More generally, these and similar studies have confirmed that poor sleep is one of the most underappreciated factors contributing to cognitive and medical ill health in the elderly, including issues of diabetes, depression, chronic pain, stroke, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.”

“We will come to learn that sleep is the universal health care provider: whatever the physical or mental ailment, sleep has a prescription it can dispense.”

“Struck by the weight of damning scientific evidence, the Guinness Book of World Records has stopped recognizing attempts to break the sleep deprivation world record. Recall that Guinness deems it acceptable for a man (Felix Baumgartner) to ascend 128,000 feet into the outer reaches of our atmosphere in a hot-air balloon wearing a spacesuit, open the door of his capsule stand atop a ladder suspended above the planet, and then free-fall back down to Earth at a top speed of 843 mph (1,358 kmh), passing through the sound barrier while creating a sonic boom with just his body. But the risks associated with sleep deprivation are considered to be far, far higher. Unacceptably high, in fact, based on the evidence.”

“Ten days of six hours of sleep a night was all it took to become as impaired in performance as going without sleep for twenty-four hours straight.”

“After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping.”

“As a result, 1.2 million accidents are caused by sleepiness each year in the United States.”

“The very latest work in this area has revealed that sleep deprivation even impacts the DNA and the learning-related genes in the brain cells of the hippocampus itself. A lack of sleep therefore is a deeply penetrating and corrosive force that enfeebles the memory-making apparatus within your brain, preventing you from constructing lasting memory traces.”

“The upshot of all this work can be summarized as follows: short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.”

“As with the effects of sleep deprivation on memory, once you miss out on the benefit of sleep in the moment – here, regarding an immune response to this season’s flu – you cannot regain the benefit simply by trying to catch up on lost sleep. The damage is done, and some of that harm can still be measured a year later.”

“[T]he scientific evidence linking sleep disruption and cancer is now so damning that the World Health Organization has officially classified nighttime shift work as a ‘probable carcinogen.’”

“[Dr.] Dijk and his prolific team examined gene expression in a group of healthy young men and women after having restricted them to six hours of sleep a night for one week, all monitored under strict laboratory conditions. After one week of subtly reduced sleep, the activity of a hefty 711 genes was distorted, relative to the genetic activity profile of these very same individuals when they were obtaining eight and a half hours of sleep for a week.”

“With the absence of such emotional acuity, normally gifted by the re-tuning skills of REM sleep at night, the sleep-deprived participants slipped into a default of fear bias, believing even gentle- or somewhat friendly looking faces were menacing. The outside world had become a more threatening and aversive place when the brain lacked REM sleep – untruthfully so.”

“On day 7, participants in the control condition remembered everything they had originally learned, even showing an enhancement of abstraction and retention of knowledge relative to initial levels of learning, just as we’d expect from good sleep. In contrast, those who had their sleep laced with alcohol on the first night after learning suffered what can conservatively be described as partial amnesia seven days later, forgetting more than 50 percent of all that original knowledge.”

“There remains a contrived, yet fortified, arrogance in many business cultures focused on the uselessness of sleep. It is bizarre, considering how sensible the professional world is regarding all other areas of employee health, safety, and conduct.”

“[I]nadequate sleep costs America and Japan $411 billion and $138 billion each year, respectively.”

“Insufficient sleep robs most nations of more than 2 percent of their GDP – amounting to the entire cost of each country’s military. It’s almost as much as each country invests in education. Just think, if we eliminate the national sleep debt, we could almost double the GDP percentage that is devoted to the education of our children.”

“People often tell me that they do not have enough time to sleep because they have so much work to do. Without wanting to be combative in any way whatsoever. I respond by informing them that perhaps the reason they have so much work to do at the end of the day is precisely because they do not get enough sleep at night.”

“Numerous counties in several US states have shifted the start of schools to a later hour and their students experience significantly higher grade point averages.”

“It is clear that a tired, under-slept brain is little more than a leaky memory sieve, in no state to receive, absorb, or efficiently retain an education.”

“Based on recent surveys and clinical evaluations, we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications.”

“When sleep is abundant, minds flourish. When it is deficient, they don’t.”

“If you are about to receive medical treatment at a hospital, you’d be well advised to ask the doctor: ‘How much sleep have you had in the past twenty-four hours?’ The doctor’s response will determine, to a statistically probable degree, whether the treatment you receive will result in a serious medical error, or even death.”

“As I write this chapter, a new report has discovered that medical errors are the third-leading cause of death among Americans after heart attacks and cancer. Sleeplessness undoubtedly plays a role in those lives lost.”

#whywesleep #matthewwalker #sleep #bookrecommendations #readthisbook

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