Name: Vojtech's review of Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Item: Why We Sleep
Rating: 5
Author: Vojtech

Matthew Walker

“Why We Sleep is an important and fascinating book…Walker taught me a lot about this basic activity that every person on Earth needs. I suspect his book will do the same for you.” —Bill Gates A New York Times bestseller and international sensation, this “stimulating and important book” (Financial Times) is a fascinating dive into the purpose and power of slumber. With two appearances on CBS This Morning and Fresh Air's most popular interview of 2017, Matthew Walker has made abundantly clear that sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when it is absent. Compared to the other basic drives in life—eating, drinking, and reproducing—the purpose of sleep remains more elusive. Within the brain, sleep enriches a diversity of functions, including our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge, inspiring creativity. In this “compelling and utterly convincing” (The Sunday Times) book, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker provides a revolutionary exploration of sleep, examining how it affects every aspect of our physical and mental well-being. Charting the most cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and marshalling his decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood and energy levels, regulate hormones, prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, slow the effects of aging, and increase longevity. He also provides actionable steps towards getting a better night’s sleep every night. Clear-eyed, fascinating, and accessible, Why We Sleep is a crucial and illuminating book. Written with the precision of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Sherwin Nuland, it is “recommended for night-table reading in the most pragmatic sense” (The New York Times Book Review).

Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

Why We Sleep

Vojtech

Phrased differently, and perhaps more simply, wakefulness is low-level brain damage, while sleep is neurological sanitation.

Yeni Uyku ve Rüya Bilimi

Nicin Uyuruz

Faux Ghost 

"Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity ... An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now ... neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming"--Amazon.com.

Matt Stein

My review: https://mattstein.com/books/why-we-sleep

Tuago

Must read for the sake of your health. Sleep more and sleep better!

Ali Angco

This is a must for every human being who wants to live a healthy life. The benefits of sleep are just too many to count. Matthew Walker outlines and explains sleep from a biological, psychological, and even evolutionary perspective. I personally found this book easy to read. It brought me back to my uni days when I was studying psychology so I found this easy to consume.

If that's not your style, I still recommend you try reading/listening to it. The sleep education he gives you are just too good to ignore.

It's a great book a real eyes opener for the importance of sleep and its beneficial impact on memorizing new information, well-being, and performance. Highly recommend it to every software developer.

Mateusz Gostanski

Gavin

[The following review is too credulous: I wrote it before it became clear that the book is at best a noble-lie exaggeration and at worst statistical fraud with unjustified practical claims. Downgrade your credence in all nonfiction that's outside your expertise, including reviews like this one.]



Walker: 
  	Scientists have discovered a revolutionary treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested?


Important topic: he claims there's a free, riskless intervention to add years to your lifespan and fundamentally improve your mind. (The flip side of this claim is a horror story about a society that mentally disables its members.)

Our school system, ladies and gents:

  	More than 80 percent of public high schools in the United States begin before 8:15 a.m. Almost 50 percent of those start before 7:20 a.m. School buses for a 7:20 a.m. start time usually begin picking up kids at around 5:45 a.m. As a result, some children and teenagers must wake up at 5:30 a.m., 5:15 a.m., or even earlier, and do so five days out of every seven, for years on end. This is lunacy...

	Previously, we noted that the circadian rhythm of teenagers shifts forward dramatically by one to three hours. So really the question I should ask you, if you are an adult, is this: Could you concentrate and learn anything after having forcefully been woken up at 3:15 a.m., day after day after day? Would you be in a cheerful mood? Would you find it easy to get along with your coworkers and conduct yourself with grace, tolerance, respect, and a pleasant demeanor? Of course not. Why, then, do we ask this of the millions of teenagers and children in industrialized nations?


And elsewhere he notes that time in school is useless without restfulness. Burn it down.

  	Insufficient sleep has also been linked to aggression, bullying, and behavioral problems in children across a range of ages. A similar relationship between a lack of sleep and violence has been observed in adult prison populations; places that, I should add, are woefully poor at enabling good sleep that could reduce aggression, violence, psychiatric disturbance, and suicide


The theory of sleep (circadian rhythm and adenosine cycle determining when, NREM and REM determining what) is very neat but I'm not qualified to say if it's mature. There's also vast and baffling cross-species variation, which Walker doesn't pretend to understand: "amount (e.g., [hours per day]), form (e.g., half-brain, whole-brain), and pattern (monophasic, biphasic, polyphasic)" or ground / tree.

The adenosine cycle - the absolutely failsafe connection between activity and fatigue - is one of my favourite theories in biology. (The account here doesn't do it justice.)

He's sceptical of oral melatonin therapy, but he doesn't consider the main argument in favour, which is that our many hours of blue-light at night is a systematic deviation from ancestral conditions, with no sensible alternative mitigation (f.lux can only do so much). (He instead puts faith in warm LEDs and smart bulbs, currently thousands of dollars each.) At least he doesn't spread the unsupported idea that taking it results in negative hormonal feedback. This doesn't surprise me:

  
	Scientific evaluations of over-the-counter brands have found melatonin concentrations that range from 83 percent less than that claimed on the label, to 478 percent more than that stated


- but this is the price of having it over-the-counter in the first place. (It is anyway completely safe to take a 6x dose, just much less effective.)

He's very in favour of afternoon naps, the "biphasic" pattern, based on relatively weak observational evidence:

  
	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."



There's lots of evolutionary speculation, which really pisses off some readers for some reason, even when tagged as speculation. (e.g. Do teenagers stay up later to procreate outwith parental supervision?)

He is a crusader all right - for instance, he doesn't really do any cost-benefit consideration, instead just maximising sleep, even instead of taking your asthma meds. Yes, the costs of sleep deprivation are extremely high - but so's the cost of spending 30 years in a coma.

I think I'm pretty much optimised: I already quit caffeine, redshifted all screens, got 0.3mg melatonin, started wearing an eye mask, don't drink much, exercise every day, fixed a bedtime, and live somewhere quiet with big bedroom windows. (I also got a less melodramatic and anxious worldview by studying economic history, which Walker doesn't cover - fair enough, since the intervention can only help scared intellectuals.) Things which I enjoy enough to handle the sleep cost: nicotine and eating late. 



  Twelve Tips for Healthy Sleep:

1. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day.
2. Exercise is great, but not too late in the day. 
3. Avoid caffeine and nicotine. 
4. Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed. 
5. Avoid large meals and beverages late at night. 
6. If possible, avoid medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep.
7. Don’t take naps after 3 p.m. 
8. Relax before bed... reading or listening to music, should be part of your bedtime ritual.
9. Take a hot bath before bed. 
10. Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom.
11. Have the right sunlight exposure. Try to get outside in natural sunlight for at least thirty minutes each day.
12. Don’t lie in bed awake... get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy.

Bouke van der Bijl

This book is pretty terrifying. We have a societal sleep deficiency, and the impact of not sleeping enough is much worse than I expected. There are a lot of comparisons of how too little sleep can quickly impact you, for example if you wake up at 7am, go to work, go out after work with friends and *don’t* drink, but you drive home at 2am you will be impaired enough from sleep to have your behavior reflect that of someone over the legal drinking limit. 

There are also many impacts a lack of sleep seem to have on learning. All very concerning when looking at things like the early start times of schools. 

Sometimes I was annoyed by some sloppiness of the writer around causation, but it didn’t detract too much from the book. Recommended read for anyone who enjoys (a lack of) sleep.

Vince Nguyen

Finally finished the last 20% of this book maybe after a year 😂 - but the first 80% was absolutely transformative. It had made me rethink my relationship with sleep as well as other habits such as coffee drinking, exercising. It had also allowed me to be more conscious and be able to say no to activities that could damage my sleep. 

I also found this to be an amazing positive feedback loop e.g. better sleep > healthier body, mind and relationships > higher performance at work and exercises > be more happy, fulfilled in life > better sleep

1000% recommend to everyone to at least read the first two chapters of the books. 

One for the lifetime!

Rushali Parikh

Simao Freitas

Mind blowing. It’s sometimes scary to learn so many of the facts about sleep and the consequences of sleep deprivation. Written in a very approachable yet scientific way, this book is a must read and a must recommend.

Nick Gracilla

If sleep were packaged as a pill, we’d be emptying our wallets for it. It reduces the risk of cancer, heart attacks, stroke, colds, and flu; enhances our sex lives, memory, creativity, and happiness; decreases anxiety, depression, and weight. So why it is valued so poorly in modern culture? Matthew Walker steps us through the evolutionary biology, scientific discoveries, and current research findings in this book that sets out clearly—sleep is foundational, non optional, and critical for our mental and physical health. Occasionally long on analogies, it’s still an accessible read. I recommend it.

poprika

Everyone should read it, especially the gouvernoment lol

Felipe Saldarriaga 

Un asunto de salud del que se habla muy poco y por lo general no se divulga mucha información al respecto. En este libro se recopilan muchos aspectos de lo que se ha investigado en como afectan tener hábitos/desórdenes de sueño.

Mykyta Barabanov

The author goes out of his way to present the latest findings on the sleep, all well-meaning and well constructed, the points may seem trite at the edges at times. 

The book's section on substances that affect sleep misses cannabis - given the release date, and growing appeal of the under-researched impact of endocannabinoids on sleep patterns could help light sleepers to understand the effects the substances really has on the quality of sleep. 

Should you find yourself short on time to read/listen to this, just keep in mind that imporving/fixing your health should always start with an examination of your sleep. 

If you are looking to have a better shot at life, sleep well, listen to what your body tells you, don't neglect the 8h routine and try to get drunk early in the morning if you ought to.

Hellboy TCR

This book is quintessential to comprehend the biggest life hack you could encounter: sleeping properly. Over the different chapters, the author walks you through the many consequences that not sleeping accordingly can have an impact on your life. It goes in scientific detail without turning boring or pedantic (there’s one study on the effects of alcohol at night and its impact on knowledge retention through the days after that blew my mind), and it’s full of practical insights that you can take on your own. I cannot recommend this book enough as I’ll certainly revisit this lecture from time to time to remind myself the importance of having a healthy sleeping routine beyond any other practice we tend to prioritize over.

Raúl Barroso Moreno

Dana Kraft

The first 20% of this book was interesting to me but I quickly got to the point where I was convinced of the importance of sleep. I lost interest in even more detailed studies of how a lack of sleep hurts you.

Edited my review after reading a pretty powerful fact check on this book. Apparently, this supposedly academic book is riddled with sloppy, incorrect and misleading citations and statistics. Sure, you need enough sleep but it seems we may know a lot less about the details of that than the author claims.

Mike Sapiton

Впечатляющий по своей убедительности рассказ о том, зачем нужно спать и к чем может закончиться наплевательское отношение ко сну. Если вкратце, то депривация сна — это медленная эвтаназия. Вы будете менее внимательны, здоровы и даже эмоционально стабильны, если не приучите себя вовремя засыпать и просыпаться. Крайне советую.

Kyle S

Everybody should read this book, or at the very least a good summary of the contents. I've been struggling with sleep most my life, not in an insomniac sort of way but in a it's a time sink that I'd rather be doing something else instead. Over the past few years I've let go of that sort of thinking as I've learned more and more the benefits of sleep health and boy was wrong. Sleep is one of the, if not the most, important pillars of health and the author makes the very clear. A must read.

Liza 

As a chronically sleep deprived person, this book was terrifying. I learned too late not to read this before bed, since it would just keep me up at night thinking about how I really need to fall asleep, making it more difficult to fall asleep.

Walker presents many really interesting discoveries he and others have made about the nature of sleep (the coolest sounding to me is the sleep spindles, and how they help move memories from our short term memory buffer in the hippocampus to our long term memory stores in the cortex during sleep, freeing up the buffer to store more short term memories - our brains are so cool!!!) The book has inspired me to seriously commit to no fewer than seven hours of sleep per night, and give myself a sleep opportunity of _at least_ eight hours per night.

One thing I did not like about this book is that at times it felt like Walker was talking to a child in the dumbed-down explanations of some of the studies and concepts presented. I am not a sleep expert, but I'm also not an idiot - I would have liked more straightforward information and fewer simplified comparisons to completely unrelated concepts. I know that this was an attempt to make things more digestible, but he really over-chewed and regurgitated this stuff sometimes.

Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life, health and longevity and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences- every major disease in the developed world - Alzheimer's, cancer, obesity, diabetes - has very strong links to deficient sleep. In this book, the first of its kind written by a scientific expert, Professor Matthew Walker explores twenty years of cutting-edge research to solve the mystery of why sleep matters. Looking at creatures from across the animal kingdom as well as major human studies, Why We Sleepdelves in to everything from what really happens in our brains and bodies when we dream to how caffeine and alcohol affect sleep and why our sleep patterns change across a lifetime, transforming our appreciation of the extraordinary phenomenon that safeguards our existence.

Ugis

Great book! Made me rethink the importance of sleep in my life completely. I'm already changing my habits. Recommended read for everyone. [reading time: 14h10m]

Cams Campbell

As I was reading this, I was thinking to myself that this should be compulsory material for schools. Then the author hit upon that very point towards the end of the book. He talked about how school pupils surveyed responded that they had learned about sex, about nutrition, about general health and exercise but NOT about the importance of sleep.

I can see me buying this book for people as gifts. In fact, I'm going to do just that today for my wife. Then there will be a hardcopy round the house for me to dip into as well. 

The Audible version is very well narrated: easy to follow and a pleasant voice to listen to. 

12 Tips for Better Sleep from the Appendix:

1. Sleep schedule. Set a bedtime alarm.
2. Exercise not too late in the day. 
3. Avoid caffeine and nicotine. It can take 8 hours for caffeine to leave your body. 
4. Avoid alcohol before bed. It robs you of REM sleep. 
5. Avoid large meals late at night.
6. Avoid medicines that delay your sleep. 
7. Don't nap after 3pm.
8. Relax before bed. 
9. Take a hot bath before bed to reduce your core temperature.
10. Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom. 
11. Get exposure to daylight through the day. 
12. Don't lie in bed awake. Get up after having been awake for 20 minutes.

Catherine Matheson

I learnt soo much from this book. I recommend everyone gives it a read. I like how it talks about the affects of not getting enough sleep but also at the end has practical things we can change to get more sleep.

While I enjoy most of the books I read, it is not common that I would like to give or recommend the book to everyone I know. But 

 is this case. One of the most important books I have read so far. After reading this book you will think again about staying awake to fix computer bugs. (If you are a programmer just like I am.) I highly recommend this book, especially after his tip about drinking alcohol in the morning, because this way it will not impact your sleep quality during night...

While I enjoy most of the books I read, it is not common that I would like to give or recommend the book to everyone I know. But Why we sleep is this case. One of the most important books I have read so far. After reading this book you will think again about staying awake to fix computer bugs. (If you are a programmer just like I am.) I highly recommend this book, especially after his tip about drinking alcohol in the morning, because this way it will not impact your sleep quality during night...

Vojtech &
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club

Vojtech &Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club

Vojtech &
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker