Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

by Matthew Walker

official instruction to commence the event of sleep, but does not participate in the sleep race itself.

To set our children on a pathway of ill health this early in life by way of sleep neglect is a travesty.

A meaningful, psychologically healthy life is an examined one, as Socrates so often declared.

Hot baths prior to bed can also induce 10 to 15 percent more deep NREM sleep in healthy adults.IV

No other species demonstrates this unnatural act of prematurely and artificially terminating sleep,

Overall, participants subjectively felt they fell asleep faster and slept more soundly with fewer awakenings, relative to the placebo. But that’s not what the actual sleep recordings showed. There was no difference in how soundly the individuals slept. Both the

placebo and the sleeping pills reduced the time it took people to fall asleep (between ten and thirty minutes), but the change was not statistically different between the two. In other words, there was no objective benefit of these sleeping pills beyond that which a placebo offered. Summarizing the findings, the committee stated that sleeping pills only produced “slight improvements in subjective and polysomnographic sleep latency”—that is, the time it takes to fall asleep.

Kripke discovered that individuals using prescription sleep medications are significantly more likely to die and to develop cancer than those who do not.

He wanted to explore whether there was a relationship between sleeping pill use and altered disease or mortality risk. There was.

individuals taking sleeping pills were significantly more likely to die across the study periods (usually a handful of years) than those who were not, the reasons for which we will soon discuss.

taking sleeping pills were 4.6 times more likely to die over this short two-and-a-half-year period than those who were not using sleeping pills. Kripke further discovered that the risk of death scaled with the frequency of use. Those individuals classified as heavy users, defined as taking more than 132 pills per year, were 5.3 times more likely to die over the study period than matched

very occasional users—those defined as taking just eighteen pills per year—were still 3.6 times more likely to die at some point across the assessment window than non-users.