Why We Sleep Quotes

“that sleep loss increases levels of circulating endocannabinoids, which, as you may have guessed from the name, are chemicals produced by the body that are very similar to the drug cannabis. Like marijuana use, these chemicals stimulate appetite and increase your desire to snack, otherwise known as having the munchies.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Nedergaard made a second astonishing discovery, which explained why the cerebrospinal fluid is so effective in flushing out metabolic debris at night. The glial cells of the brain were shrinking in size by up to 60 percent during NREM sleep, enlarging the space around the neurons and allowing the cerebrospinal fluid to proficiently clean out the metabolic refuse left by the day’s neural activity.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“With a full night of plentiful sleep, we have a balanced mix between our emotional gas pedal (amygdala) and brake (prefrontal cortex). Without sleep, however, the strong coupling between these two brain regions is lost.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“A structure located in the left and right sides of the brain, called the amygdala—a key hot spot for triggering strong emotions such as anger and rage, and linked to the fight-or-flight response—showed well over a 60 percent amplification in emotional reactivity in the participants who were sleep-deprived.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“A reasonable expectation was that performance in the fourth group of participants would reflect the additive impact of these two groups: four hours of sleep plus the effect of alcohol (i.e., twelve times more off-road deviations). It was far worse. This group of participants drove off the road almost thirty times more than the well-rested, sober group. The heady cocktail of sleep loss and alcohol was not additive, but instead multiplicative.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Sixty years of scientific research prevent me from accepting anyone who tells me that he or she can “get by on just four or five hours of sleep a night just fine.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Sadly, neither society nor our parental attitudes are well designed to appreciate or accept that teenagers need more sleep than adults, and that they are biologically wired to obtain that sleep at a different time from their parents.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Si descuidas tu sueño, estás decidiendo realizar una manipulación de ingeniería genética en tu persona cada noche, alterando el alfabeto de los núcleos que detallan tu historial de salud diario. Si permites lo mismo en tus hijos, les estás imponiendo un experimento de ingeniería genética similar.”
― Matthew Walker, Por qué dormimos: La nueva ciencia del sueño

“Mendeleev was provided a dream-inspired formulation of the periodic table. It was his dreaming brain, not his waking brain, that was able to perceive an organized arrangement of all known chemical elements. Leave it to REM-sleep dreaming to solve the baffling puzzle of how all constituents of the known universe fit together—an inspired revelation of cosmic magnitude.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Deep NREM sleep strengthens individual memories, as we now know. But it is REM sleep that offers the masterful and complementary benefit of fusing and blending those elemental ingredients together, in abstract and highly novel ways.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Plentiful sleep maintains a flourishing microbiome within your gut from which we know so much of our nutritional health begins.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Those who were dreaming, but not dreaming of the painful experience itself, could not get past the event, still being dragged down by a strong undercurrent of depression that remained.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“only those patients who were expressly dreaming about the painful experiences around the time of the events who went on to gain clinical resolution from their despair, mentally recovering a year later as clinically determined by having no identifiable depression.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Sleep, and specifically REM sleep, was clearly needed in order for us to heal emotional wounds.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“This was the theory of overnight therapy. It postulated that the process of REM-sleep dreaming accomplishes two critical goals: (1) sleeping to remember the details of those valuable, salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them into autobiographical perspective, yet (2) sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that had previously been wrapped around those memories. If true, it would suggest that the dream state supports a form of introspective life review, to therapeutic ends.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“We have conducted just such an experiment, and the findings were so: we could predict with confidence the form of someone’s dream—would it be visual, would it be motoric, would it be awash with emotion, would it be completely irrational and bizarre?—before the dreamers themselves reported their dream experience to the research assistant.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic. It will happen again tonight. Before you reject this diagnosis, allow me to offer five justifying reasons. First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there—you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true—you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person—you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions—something psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth (and how delightful!), you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience—you were suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you’d be seeking immediate psychological treatment. Yet for reasons that are only now becoming clear, the brain state called REM sleep and the mental experience that goes along with it, dreaming, are normal biological and psychological processes, and truly essential ones, as we shall learn.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Exactly how and why sleep disruption is linked to certain forms of cancer is also becoming clear. Part of the problem relates back to the agitating influence of the sympathetic nervous system as it is forced into overdrive by a lack of sleep. Ramping up the body’s level of sympathetic nervous activity will provoke an unnecessary and sustained inflammation response from the immune system. When faced with a real threat, a brief spike of sympathetic nervous system activity will often trigger a similarly transient response from inflammatory activity—one that is useful in anticipation of potential bodily harm (think of a physical tussle with a wild animal”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“What if sleep is so useful—so physiologically beneficial to every aspect of our being—that the real question is: Why did life ever bother to wake up?
Considering how biologically damaging the state of wakefulness can often be, that is the true evolutionary puzzle here, not sleep. Adopt this perspective, and we can pose a very different theory: sleep was the first state of life on this planet, and it was from sleep that wakefulness emerged. It may be a preposterous hypothesis, and one that nobody is taking seriously or exploring, but personally I do not think it to be entirely unreasonable.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Knowing what I know
about the relationship between sleep and memory, it is the greatest form of flattery for me to
know that you, the reader, cannot resist the urge to strengthen and thus remember what I am
telling you by falling asleep. So please, feel free to ebb and flow into and out of consciousness
during this entire book. I will take absolutely no offense. On the contrary, I would be delighted.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Aside from being a stoic sentinel that guards your sanity and emotional well-being, REM sleep and the act of dreaming have another distinct benefit: intelligent information processing that inspires creativity and promotes problem solving.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“But it is telling that, based on epidemiological data, any adult sleeping an average of 6.75 hours a night would be predicted to live only into their early sixties: very close to the median life span of these tribespeople.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Insufficient sleep is only one among several risk factors associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Sleep alone will not be the magic bullet that eradicates dementia. Nevertheless, prioritizing sleep across the life span may be a significant factor for lowering Alzheimer’s disease risk.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Nedergaard’s findings completed the circle of knowledge that our findings had left unanswered. 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”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“These findings, however, were only half of the story, and admittedly the less important half. Our work had shown that the amyloid plaques of Alzheimer’s disease may be associated with the loss of deep sleep, but does it work both ways? Can a lack of sleep actually cause amyloid to build up in your brain to begin with? If so, insufficient sleep across an individual’s life would significantly raise their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“We discovered a chain-reaction effect. Those individuals with the highest levels of amyloid deposits in the frontal regions of the brain had the most severe loss of deep sleep and, as a knock-on consequence, failed to successfully consolidate those new memories. Overnight forgetting, rather than remembering, had taken place. The disruption of deep NREM sleep was therefore a hidden middleman brokering the bad deal between amyloid and memory impairment in Alzheimer’s disease. A missing link.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Alzheimer’s disease is associated with the buildup of a toxic form of protein called beta-amyloid, which aggregates in sticky clumps, or plaques, within the brain. Amyloid plaques are poisonous to neurons, killing the surrounding brain cells. What is strange, however, is that amyloid plaques only affect some parts of the brain and not others, the reasons for which remain unclear.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The two most feared diseases throughout developed nations are dementia and cancer. Both are related to inadequate sleep.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Major depression has as much to do with absence of positive emotions, a feature described as anhedonia: the inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences, such as food, socializing, or sex.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“research team in Italy examined bipolar patients during the time when they were in this stable, inter-episode phase. Next, under careful clinical supervision, they sleep-deprived these individuals for one night. Almost immediately, a large proportion of the individuals either spiraled into a manic episode or became seriously depressed. I find it to be an ethically difficult experiment to appreciate, but the scientists had importantly demonstrated that a lack of sleep is a causal trigger of a psychiatric episode of mania or depression.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams