Why We Sleep Quotes

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

“Not sleeping enough, which for a portion of the population is a voluntary choice, significantly modifies your gene transcriptome—that is, the very essence of you, or at least you as defined biologically by your DNA. Neglect sleep, and you are deciding to perform a genetic engineering manipulation on yourself each night, tampering with the nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health story.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“These napping communities have sometimes been described as “the places where people forget to die.” From a prescription written long ago in our ancestral genetic code, the practice of natural biphasic sleep, and a healthy diet, appear to be the keys to a long-sustained life.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“I suspect that you cannot recall any truly significant action in your life that wasn’t governed by two very simple rules: staying away from something that would feed bad, or trying to accomplish something that would feel good. This law of approach and avoidance dictates most of human and animal behavior from a very early age.
The forces that implement this law are positive and negative emotions. Emotions make us do things, as the name suggests (remove the first letter from the word). They motivate our remarkable achievements, incite us to try again when we fail, keep us safe from potential harm, urge us to accomplish rewarding and beneficial outcomes, and compel us to cultivate social and romantic relationships. In short, emotions in appropriate amounts make life worth living. They offer a healthy and vital existence, psychologically and biologically speaking. Take them away, and you face a sterile existence with no highs or lows to speak of. Emotionless, you will simply exist, rather than live.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change. Furthermore, asking that same teenager to wake up at seven the next morning and function with intellect, grace, and good mood is the equivalent of asking you, their parent, to do the same at four or five a.m.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. It is far more than that.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“...certain business leaders mistakenly believe that time on-task equates with task completion and productivity. Even in the industrial era of rote factory work, this was untrue. It is a misguided fallacy, and an expensive one, too.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“To sleep, perchance to heal.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Similarly problematic is baseline resetting. With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will actually acclimate to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels. That low-level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline. Individuals fail to recognize how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Irwin demonstrated that a single night of four hours of sleep—such as going to bed at three a.m. and waking up at seven a.m.—swept away 70 percent of the natural killer cells circulating in the immune system, relative to a full eight-hour night of sleep. That is a dramatic state of immune deficiency to find yourself facing, and it happens quickly, after essentially one “bad night” of sleep.”
― 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. In contrast, the brain scans of those individuals who were given a full night’s sleep evinced a controlled, modest degree of reactivity in the amygdala, despite viewing the very same images. It was as though, without sleep, our brain reverts to a primitive pattern of uncontrolled reactivity. We produce unmetered, inappropriate emotional reactions, and are unable to place events into a broader or considered context.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Caffeine is not a food supplement. Rather, caffeine is the most widely used (and abused) psychoactive stimulant in the world.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Caffeine—which is not only prevalent in coffee, certain teas, and many energy drinks, but also foods such as dark chocolate and ice cream, as well as drugs such as weight-loss pills and pain relievers—is one of the most common culprits that keep people from falling asleep easily and sleeping soundly thereafter, typically masquerading as insomnia, an actual medical condition.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“By the time that same individual has reached sixteen years of age, their circadian rhythm has undergone a dramatic shift forward in its cycling phase.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.”VII”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“a 20 percent learning advantage for those who slept.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“Universal parental wisdom knows that bad sleep the night before leads to a bad mood and emotional reactivity the next day.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“We will come to learn that sleep is the universal health care provider: whatever the physical or mental ailment, sleep has a prescription it can dispense.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“People consuming even moderate amounts of alcohol in the afternoon and/or evening are thus depriving themselves of dream sleep.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“After four hours of sleep for six nights, participants' performance was just as bad as those who had not slept for twenty-four hours straight--that is, a 400 percent increase in the number of microsleeps. By day 11 on this diet of four hours of sleep a night, participants' performance had degraded even further, matching that of someone who had pulled two back-to-back all-nighters, going without sleep for forty-eight hours.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“quote on the topic of sleep and emotion by the American entrepreneur E. Joseph Cossman: “The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.”VII”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Before Edison, and before gas and oil lamps, the setting sun would take with it this full stream of daylight from our eyes, sensed by the twenty-four-hour clock within the brain”
― 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. [..] Many of us think we can overcome drowsiness through sheer force of will, but sadly, this is not true.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“When we compared the effectiveness of learning between the two groups, the result was clear: there was a 40 percent deficit in the ability of the sleep-deprived group to cram new facts into the brain (i.e. to make new memories), relative to the group that obtained a full night of sleep. To put that in context, it would be the difference between acing an exam and failing it miserably!”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called noradrenaline are completely shut off within your brain when you enter this dreaming sleep state. In fact, REM sleep is the only time during the twenty-four-hour period when your brain is completely devoid of this anxiety-triggering molecule.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“Visit cultures that are untouched by electricity and you often see something rather different. Hunter-gatherer tribes, such as the Gabra in northern Kenya or the San people in the Kalahari Desert, whose way of life has changed little over the past thousands of years, sleep in a biphasic pattern. Both these groups take a similarly longer sleep period at night (seven to eight hours of time in bed, achieving about seven hours of sleep), followed by a thirty- to sixty-minute nap in the afternoon.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“We try to recover one (NREM) a little sooner than the other (REM), but make no mistake, the brain will attempt to recoup both, trying to salvage some of the losses incurred. It is important to note, however, that regardless of the amount of recovery opportunity, the brain never comes close to getting back all the sleep it has lost. This is true for total sleep time, just as it is for NREM sleep and for REM sleep. That humans (and all other species) can never “sleep back” that which we have previously lost is one of the most important take-homes of this book, the saddening consequences of which I will describe in chapters 7 and 8.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day—Mother Nature’s best”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“Comparing the patterns of brain activity between the two conditions within the same individual, we discovered that supervisory regions in the prefrontal cortex required for thoughtful judgments and controlled decisions had been silenced in their activity by a lack of sleep.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams