Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by
Matthew Walker
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
It is a passionate book about a very impassionate part of everyone's life - about sleep. Matthew Walker walks us through numerous studies, experiments and analogies to prove the point - sleep is essential for our wellbeing. However, being members of the fast-pacing modern world, we tend to cut on sleep.
It is enlightening book, based on the years of research and it is spiced up with a good dose of humour. Easy to read, but really makes you think - a wonderful combination.
At some point, I felt somewhat overflow of all these studies and examples to prove one point - that sleep helps against many maladies we experience. Still, a worthwhile read - it goes deep into the whole essence of what sleep is all about and what impacts it (and vice versa).
Some selected passages I found particularly interesting:
Our sleep cycles tend to be different during different periods of life. But our society is often not supporting them (in particular, teenagers whose natural sleep cycle would start and end later than what the school day requires of them).
"You do not know how sleep-deprived you are when you are sleep-deprived". The low-level exhaustion after just too little sleep chronically becomes our accepted norm, or baseline.
We need to sleep enough to reach the REM (or dreaming) phase of sleep. That makes us remember what we would like to remember from the day before - and provides emotional healing to cope with the difficult events in our lives. Moreover, the REM sleep literally creates new connections in our brains - allowing for greater creativity.
"In this fast-paced, information-overloaded modern world,
one of the few times we stop our persistent informational consumption and inwardly reflect is when our heads hit the pillow. There is no worse time to consciously do this. It is difficult to initiate sleep when we worry about things we did today, things that we forgot to do, things that we must face in the coming days, and even those far in the future."
One of the worst offenders of our sleep in the modern world are ubiquitous electric and LED lights.
"Artificial light in our indoor worlds tricks us into believing night is still day." Another backside of modern civilisation apparently is regularised temperature.
We are wired to sleep in the night when it is naturally colder. The room temperature should rather vary to reflect this natural pattern too.
Walker himself stresses that "If only adhering to one advice each and every day, then it is:
stick to a sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time of day no matter what (even on weekends)." There are many other valuable pieces of advice. Some are rather well-known like avoiding caffeine and alcohol before sleep. Yet others are less obvious, although very well explained like removing any visible clocks from the sleeping room (not to feed sleep anxiety)or not lying awake in bed for a significant time period (rather get out, do something relaxing, get sleepy and go back to bed).
I can definitely recommend it.
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