Why We Sleep Quotes

“can never “sleep back” that which we have previously lost is one of the most important take-homes of this book,”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“sleep is the state we must enter in order to fix that which has been upset by wake.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“During REM sleep, there is a nonstop barrage of motor commands swirling around the brain, and they underlie the movement-rich experience of dreams. Wise, then, of Mother Nature to have tailored a physiological straitjacket that forbids these fictional movements from becoming reality, especially considering that you’ve stopped consciously perceiving your surroundings.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Once put in place, the postural body muscles, such as the biceps of your arms and the quadriceps of your legs, lose all tension and strength. No longer will they respond to commands from your brain. You have, in effect, become an embodied prisoner, incarcerated by REM sleep.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities).”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“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”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“signals of emotions, motivations, and memories (past and present) are all played out on the big screens of our visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensory cortices in the brain. Each and every night, REM sleep ushers you into a preposterous theater wherein you are treated to a bizarre, highly associative carnival of autobiographical themes.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“recent MRI scanning studies have found that there are individual parts of the brain that are up to 30 percent more active during REM sleep than when we are awake!”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Let’s say that you go to bed this evening at midnight. But instead of waking up at eight a.m., getting a full eight hours of sleep, you must wake up at six a.m. because of an early-morning meeting or because you are an athlete whose coach demands early-morning practices. What percent of sleep will you lose? The logical answer is 25 percent, since waking up at six a.m. will lop off two hours of sleep from what would otherwise be a normal eight hours. But that’s not entirely true. Since your brain desires most of its REM sleep in the last part”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“they took a trip into Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, one of the deepest caverns on the planet—so deep, in fact, that no detectable sunlight penetrates its farthest reaches. It was from this darkness that Kleitman and Richardson were to illuminate a striking scientific finding that would define our biological rhythm as being approximately one day (circadian), and not precisely one day.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Routinely sleeping less than six hours a night weakens your immune system, substantially increasing your risk of certain forms of cancer. Insufficient sleep appears to be a key lifestyle factor linked to your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“To be very clear, I am not anti-medication. On the contrary, I desperately want there to be a drug that helps people obtain truly naturalistic sleep. Many of the drug company scientists who create sleeping medicines do so with nothing but good intent and an honest desire to help those for whom sleep is problematic. I know, because I have met many of them in my career. And as a researcher, I am keen to help science explore new medications in carefully controlled, independent studies. If such a drug—one with sound scientific data demonstrating benefits that far outweigh any health risks—is ultimately developed, I would support it. It is simply that no such medication currently exists.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Parenthetically, and unscientifically, I have always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—two heads of state that were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping only four to five hours a night—both went on to develop the ruthless disease. The current US president, Donald Trump—also a vociferous proclaimer of sleeping just a few hours each night—may want to take note.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Numerous functions of the brain are restored by, and depend upon, sleep. No one type of sleep accomplishes all. Each stage of sleep—light NREM sleep, deep NREM sleep, and REM sleep—offer different brain benefits at different times of night. Thus, no one type of sleep is more essential than another. Losing out on any one of these types of sleep will cause brain impairment.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“depend”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“There are many things that I hope readers take away from this book. This is one of the most important: if you are drowsy while driving, please, please stop. It is lethal.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“By boosting the electrical quality of deep-sleep brainwave activity, the researchers almost doubled the number of facts that individuals were able to recall the following day, relative to those participants who received no stimulation. Applying stimulation during REM sleep, or during wakefulness across the day, did not offer similar memory advantages. Only stimulation during NREM sleep, in synchronous time with the brain’s own slow mantra rhythm, leveraged a memory improvement. Other methods for amplifying the brainwaves of sleep are fast being developed. One technology involves quiet auditory tones being played over speakers next to the sleeper. Like a metronome in rhythmic stride with the individual slow waves, the tick-tock tones are precisely synchronized with the individual’s sleeping brainwaves to help entrain their rhythm and produce even deeper sleep.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Inadequate sleep and the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease interact in a vicious cycle. Without sufficient sleep, amyloid plaques build up in the brain, especially in deep-sleep-generating regions, attacking and degrading them. The loss of deep NREM sleep caused by this assault therefore lessens the ability to remove amyloid from the brain at night, resulting in greater amyloid deposition. More amyloid, less deep sleep, less deep sleep, more amyloid, and so on and so forth. From this cascade comes a prediction: getting too little sleep across the adult life span will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Importantly, sleep spindles did not predict someone’s innate learning aptitude. That would be a less interesting result, as it would imply that inherent learning ability and spindles simply go hand in hand. Instead, it was specifically the change in learning from before relative to after sleep, which is to say the replenishment of learning ability, that spindles predicted.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Does the learning capacity of the human brain decline with continued time awake across the day and, if so, can sleep reverse this saturation effect and thus restore learning ability? Those who were awake throughout the day became progressively worse at learning, even though their ability to concentrate remained stable (determined by separate attention and response time tests). In contrast, those who napped did markedly better, and actually improved in their capacity to memorize facts.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Other questions that can draw out signs of insufficient sleep are: If you didn’t set an alarm clock, would you sleep past that time? (If so, you need more sleep than you are giving yourself.) Do you find yourself at your computer screen reading and then rereading (and perhaps rereading again) the same sentence? (This is often a sign of a fatigued, under-slept brain.) Do you sometimes forget what color the last few traffic lights were while driving? (Simple distraction is often the cause, but a lack of sleep is another culprit.)”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Rather than lambaste the students for these practices, I pointed a scolding finger directly at the faculty, myself included. I suggested that if we, as teachers, strive to accomplish just that purpose—to teach—then end-loading exams in the final days of the semester was an asinine decision. It forced a behaviour in our students—short sleeping or pulling all-nighters leading up to the exam—that was in direct opposition to the goals of nurturing young scholarly minds. I argued that logic, backed by scientific fact, must prevail, and that it was long past the time for us to rethink our evaluation methods, their contra-educational impact, and the unhealthy behaviour it coerced from our students.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The third key finding, common to both these studies, is the one I personally think is the most harmful of all. When participants were asked about their subjective sense of how impaired they were, they consistently underestimated their degree of performance disability. It was a miserable predictor of how bad their performance actually, objectively was. It is the equivalent of someone at a bar who has had far too many drinks picking up his car keys and confidently telling you, “I’m fine to drive home.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The 100-metre sprint superstar Usain Bolt has, on many occasions, taken naps in the hours before breaking the world record, and before Olympic finals in which he won gold. Our own studies support his wisdom: daytime naps that contain sufficient numbers of sleep spindles also offer significant motor skill memory improvement, together with a restoring benefit on perceived energy levels and reduced muscle fatigue.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“In other words, your brain will continue to improve skill memories in the absence of any further practice. It is really quite magical. Yet, that delayed, “offline” learning occurs exclusively across a period of sleep, and not across equivalent time periods spent awake, regardless of whether the time awake or time asleep comes first.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Emerging from this research renaissance is an unequivocal message: sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day—Mother Nature’s best effort yet at contra-death. Unfortunately, the real evidence that makes clear all of the dangers that befall individuals and societies when sleep becomes short have not been clearly telegraphed to the public. It is the most glaring omission in the contemporary health conversation.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“I usually conclude my response with a parenthetical low blow, noting that short sleep duration is significantly associated with smaller-sized testicles.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“As one sleep scientist has said, “If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.”II”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Additionally, after a thirty-hour shift without sleep, residents make 460 percent more diagnostic mistakes in the intensive care unit than when well rested after enough sleep. Throughout the course of their residency, one in five medical residents will make a sleepless-related medical error that causes significant, liable harm to a patient.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams