Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

I bought this book out of general interest. It is an international bestseller by a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and is currently a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.Here is why I am reviewing this book in a business newspaper.I believed, as you may, that “pulling an all-nighter” was a badge of honour, a clear sign of commitment and fortitude. President Trump brags of sleeping only 4 hours a night. Just last week a client told me with an element of pride, that he sleeps less than five hours a night. And he wasn’t the first.With what we know now, this is about as absurd as bragging that you are a wife-beater, and that you drive drunk!Consider the facts. Driving without having had sufficient sleep is the cause of hundreds of thousands of traffic accidents and fatalities each year. In the US, one person dies in a traffic accident every hour due to a fatigue-related error, exceeding road deaths caused by alcohol and drugs - combined.“Every component of wellness, and countless seams of societal fabric, are being eroded by our costly state of sleep neglect: human and financial alike,” author Matthew Walker explains.Just to get your attention, consider that reams of reliable research indicate that routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, and more than doubles your risk of cancer. It is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Sleep deprivation increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, which boosts cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure.Less dramatically, you have probably noticed a desire to eat more when you’re tired. This is because too little sleep increases a hormone that makes you feel hungry and suppresses a hormone that signals food satisfaction.The need to sleep is a foolish biological phenomenon that evolution should have cleaned out of the system. When you sleep you cannot fulfil the basic drives of life: to eat and drink, reproduce and protect yourself. And yet, across the animal kingdom sleeping is a common factor.The World Health Organization has declared sleep loss an epidemic throughout industrialized nations. Two-thirds of adults do not have the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep. “Society’s apathy toward sleep has, in part, been caused by the historic failure of science to explain why we need it,” Walker explains. The fact that sleeping persists throughout evolution means there must be tremendous benefits that far outweigh all the obvious hazards and detriments.In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists used recordings from electrodes placed on the scalp to provide a general sense of the type of brainwave activity underpinning ‘REM’ (rapid eye movement) sleep. ‘Deep sleep’ describes the bodily state of inactivity, while ‘REM sleep’ describes high levels of brain activity with the eyes moving rapidly in different directions. The older technology limited our ability to understand what was happening during REM sleep that makes it so important.In the early 2000s, with the advent of brain-imaging machines, we could reconstruct three-dimensional visualizations of brain activity during REM sleep. This has enriched science’s understanding.Sleeping aids the body by restoring our immune system to fight malignancy, prevent infection, and ward off all manner of sickness. Adequate sleep maintains a flourishing microbiome in your gut which ensures nutritional health. The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarfs those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise.Dreaming provides humans with many gifts, among these are nightly neurochemical baths that mollify painful memories, and allow the brain to combine past and present knowledge, and inspire creativity.It is believed that “time heals all wounds.” However, Walker suggests that it might be that time spent in dream sleep offers a form of overnight therapy. REM sleep dreaming takes the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes you may have experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning. This happens because REM sleep is the only time during the twenty-four-hour period when your brain is completely devoid of the anxiety-triggering molecule. Sleep is clearly needed for us to heal emotional wounds.Sleep is also a creative incubator. In the dreaming sleep state, your brain will cogitate on vast amounts of knowledge you have acquired, and then extract overarching rules and commonalities. When we wake we are often able to find solutions to previously impenetrable problems. This is the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts), and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together).Mendeleev formulated the periodic table in a dream, something his waking brain was incapable of. When he awoke he wrote it down, and in only one place was a correction necessary.The neuroscientist, Otto Loewi, formulated how nerve cells communicate with each other in a dream. For this he received a Nobel Prize.Paul McCartney’s origination of the songs “Yesterday” and “Let It Be” were derived from dreams and then written down. “I couldn’t believe I’d written it. I thought, no, I’ve never written anything like this before. But I had, which was the most magic thing!”Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones had a similar experience with his music. Mary Shelley’s dreams provided the vision and narrative for the spectacular gothic novel, Frankenstein.Laboratory tests have shown how problem-solving abilities increase by 15 to 35 % when participants are emerging from REM sleep compared with daytime performance! The REM-sleep dreaming brain was utterly uninterested in bland, common sense, linear type links. In REM-sleep the brain drops the logic guard and ignores the obvious in` favour of very distantly related concepts.So, how do you know whether you’re routinely getting enough sleep? The rule of thumb is whether you could go back to sleep at ten or eleven that morning, or whether can you function optimally without caffeine before noon. And of course, whether you would sleep past your waking time if you didn’t set an alarm clock.Like a loan in arrears, your sleep debt will continue to accumulate. It will roll over into the next payment cycle, and the next, and the next, producing a condition of prolonged, chronic sleep deprivation from one day to another.The implications for your professional performance or management style should be clear. Coming to work sleep-deprived is no better than coming in hungover. And when next you hear someone brag about how little sleep they get, give them Walker’s book to read, or even just this column.We need to revise our cultural appreciation of sleep and reverse our neglect of it.Readability Light --+-- SeriousInsights High +---- LowPractical High -+--- Low*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of the recently released ‘Executive Update.

Sleep is perhaps one of the most important sustaining functions a person must accomplish. To keep living. To be healthy. To learn. Sleep deprivation is SO bad. It really opened my eyes to my own sleep debt and how our US culture ignores it and generally supports cultural practices and medicine that interfere with the full gambit of sleep we need. Very intelligent writer. Great research mentioned. Opens doors to many other areas of research and understanding the human body and our human condition. Buy it or borrow…

Why We Sleep is an overview of the author's research into the purpose of sleep as well as the consequences of a lack of it. It discusses a lot of issues and the author gives his views on the evolutionary benefits and distinctiveness of humans, so it really is quite comprehensive. Most people today, myself included, just are somehow unable to get a healthy amount of uninterrupted sleep and the author does a good job of explaining the consequences of that to the individual through multiple cognitive lenses. He also considers the consequence to the country as a whole through its loss of productive capacity due to overworking.The book is split into four, largely independent sections. The author begins by discussing how sleep occurs, including some of the neuroscience and the chemical cycles associated with our sleep schedule. The reader learns about the marginal differences between certain physiological cycles and the 24 hour day. In addition the causes of jetlag are explored as well as the required adjustment for changing time zones. The author discusses a bunch of experiments done where we were able to learn about our cicadian cycles and some of the differences in sleep requirements any cycle times by age. The author also highlights his novel view on how REM sleep was associated with human ability to light a fire which allowed them to sleep on the ground rather than be in an unstable position in a tree and this evolutionary advancement was essential for modern development. Perhaps, probably not, but the author truly is impassioned about the subject with strong views. The author then gets into why we need sleep and discusses with abundant experimental evidence, the benefits of sleep to cognitive abilities and the necessity of it for healthy living. Some remarkable pathologies are discussed, for example there was an individual who lost the ability to go to sleep and their body slowly lost its ability to function and the disease proved quickly fatal. The author highlights that the Guinness Book of World Records struck the longest period without sleep as a category due to its terrible health consequences and the author spends time on the consequences of lack of sleep to driving abilities highlighting the large number of fatalities that follow. The author also discusses the benefits of sleep to overall body health and gives substantial experimental evidence to the regenerative benefits of sleep to natural ailments. The author does highlight that sleep will not just cure cancer but simultaneously implicitly argues that it might. So the author, with evidence, strongly argues that sleep has the ability to help one regenerate far more than the general scientific community currently advocates. The author gets into dreaming and how sleep breaks up. He discusses how each form of sleep is required and they have different functional benefits. Furthermore the body needs for NREM and REM sleep differ in immediate priority but not in absolute priority and these results are discussed with experimental evidence for how the body catches up on sleep after being deprived. The author discusses multiple memory experiments that depend on prior sleep conditions and highlights the substantially better performance statistics of students who have had enough sleep prior to trying to learn facts. The author then discusses the consequences of sleeping pills, which are considered significant and detrimental. The author also clarifies the difference between sedation and sleep and makes it very clear that sedation is not sleep and does not serve as a remedy and can be counterproductive. Alcohol's detrimental effects are considered by their impact on sleep for example. The author goes through several common sleeping tablets and makes it clear he does not believe any are substitutes and argues they can become dependencies that create major long term problems. The author then discusses how much better the world could be if we all paid more attention to sleep and how overall productivity of the society could be enhanced. This sort of analysis is interesting but also in need of being the most skeptical of in terms of being a realistic analysis.Why We Sleep is informative and entertaining. It is exaggerated at times and so aspects of the credibility of the book can be highlighted. The author argues multiple times how even one night of sub optimal sleep has distinct impacts on ability and how an all nighter can be catastrophic, only to bring up an example in which an individual goes without sleep for multiple days to then sleep and make a major scientific discovery. The point of the example was to display the benefits of sleep but it erodes the earlier argument that any lack of sleep puts the individual at a massive handicap. Thus the author argues too forcefully for the unrealistic, that we need 8 hours a day without exception, while highlighting that he himself often cant sleep properly once a week. Despite the at times marginally inconsistent tone, the book is a good reminder of the importance of sleep, a good reference for the scientific benefits of sleep and important tutorial on the health requirements for sleep.

I don't so much have difficulty sleeping, but I do lack the discipline to get to bed early enough for sufficient sleep. Why We Sleep looks at why sleep is so important for virtually every aspect of human life--health, longevity, memory, physical fitness, attentiveness, relationships, etc. Truth is, we start falling apart in every way when we get neither the quantity or quality of sleep we need. Full of statistics, stories, and practical solutions, the data is convincing--I need to make sleep a priority. I have already put many of the author's recommendations into practice.

I have already started changing my sleep habits as a result of reading this book, so there’s some great information in here. But man, some of the contact was very dry, and it took me a few weeks to read because it was so long! I wasn’t compelled to read every single day, so I took breaks in between. However, I’m glad I stuck with it!

I can't say how many times I've recommended this book. I prefer the audiobook because the narrators voice puts me to sleep (but not in a boring monotone type of way, in a good way). There is so much knowledge in this book and it has definitely made me make sleep a priority!

*WARNING* Don’t read this if you suffer from any sort of sleeping problem. It will just make you worse. I thought it would be interesting but actually it just made me feel really anxious about sleeping, so much so that I developed full-blown insomnia! It’s all a bit scary for someone who is prone to sleeping problems. Read only when you’re in a healthy state of mind.

There is far more detail than most people would want. I feel he rather overstates his case - you are given the impression that if you don't get 8 hours, and get it every single night, you're doomed to a life of failure and mediocrity. And I didn't find much prescription. If you are having sleep trouble, what's the good of being told how terrible that is without being told how to do something about it?I have given 3 stars on account of the serious research that has gone into the book. Otherwise it would be even less.

Sleep is a mystery. And this book is a lifesaver.For normal folks like you and me, and for doctors or scientists as well, sleep's been always a mysterious phenomena. We humans sleep (preferably) one third of our whole life. This is an enormous amount of time which demands some attention. Though historically the attention has not been allotted to sleep it deserves, academically or culturally.If you read this book (and you should; whether you love or hate or enjoy or avoid or have problem with or have some queries on sleeping) you'd understand why the evolutionary process didn't eliminate sleep from our biological dictionary. Why, though seemingly unnecessary/time-wasting/futile/unproductive, we still need to get a good night's sleep to get a long list of physiological, biological, psychological benefits. And if you by any chance fail to get the necessary amount of sleep (voluntarily or otherwise), you're a big gambler who doesn't have the idea about the grave repercussions. (No kidding.)This book will be beneficial to everybody except those smart dudes who have unwavering faith in some generic and prejudiced sayings like: "Six hours of sleep is enough for a functional adult" or "You'll have chance to sleep all you need when you're dead" or "Our great leader sleeps only four hours/day, hence I should do the same to be like him." etc.Don't trust them for Kumbhkarna's sake. Don't mess with sleep.Some curious takeaways from the book:● Not only the starting phase of sleep is important, when you're going to wake up in the morning is equally significant too. If you get up earlier without fulfilling your sleep-quota, there will be consequences. Serious consequences.● Melatonin doesn't make you feel drowsy; it just reminds your brain, "Time to go to bed, fella." Part of a whole set of timekeeping mechanism actually. The chemical substance which in fact pressurize your system to make you feel sleepy is named Adenosine.● Dreaming makes you more visionary/creative/shrewd, really. And dreaming is not just some "commercial breaks" between slumber, it has serious impact on your mindset/thinking/worldview/self assessment and many things more.● Homo sapiens is "biphasic" in case of sleep requirement. That is, we humans are biologically inclined to get sleep two times a day. Taking a siesta is not just a cultural phenomena in origin, but deeply biological. Dozing after lunchtime is absolutely human-like, nothing shameful if you think so.● It's not mere practice that makes a person perfect. Practice, followed by a good night of sleep is what required for perfection. And the writer is serious about that.● You can sleep as many hours trying to recover/make up the sleep that you've lost or skipped; but make no mistake, humans can never "sleep back"/rebound the sleep once lost.● "Night owls" are real, not myth. As real as the "Morning larks" are. Don't bully them; or feel guilty of being one.● Caffeine is the most widely used (rather abused) addictive psychoactive stimulant drug in the world. It is also the only addictive substance that we readily give to our children and teens.● And a lot more.

I'm afraid this book is undermined by too many nonsequiturs. The fact that two things typically occur together does not mean that one causes the other. I note the huge number of glowing reviews on the book cover and within its introductory pages are written by journalists, not scientists. I'd be interested to know what scientists in the author's line of business thinks of it. Be very wary of accepting it's conclusions without a great deal of scepticism.

This book has been eye opening for me. Are there days when you don't have a clear mind? Are you sometimes forgetful? Are you sometimes less optimistic than you used to be? How patient are you? Do you feel you're not performing well enough at sports? Do you sometimes feel dizzy? Do you have headaches? Why do you think that is? Are you having too much coffee? Are you having too little? Maybe you have high blood pressure? Or low? Maybe you need glasses or maybe it's your glasses or contact lenses that are making you dizzy and not focused and giving you headaches?Well there could be a much simpler explanation. You could be sleep deprived. Lots of people are and many don't even know.This book explains why we sleep, the positive effects of sleeping in your mind, body and health and the negative effects that not sleeping enough has on them.I really enjoyed this book. I am sleeping more now and I definitely feel a lot better, more clear minded and energetic. I can now clearly understand the effect a few nights in a row of not sleeping enough have on me... and I can detect it and easily fix it by just going to bed earlier! Life changing.