Why We Sleep Quotes

“One such early study, published in 1975, shows that progressively increased levels of physical activity in healthy males results in a corresponding progressive increase in the amount of deep NREM sleep they obtain on subsequent nights.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Sleep and physical exertion have a bidirectional relationship. Many of us know of the deep, sound sleep we often experience after sustained physical activity, such as a daylong hike, an extended bike ride, or even an exhausting day of working in the garden.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“(1) establish a regular bedtime and wake-up time, even on weekends, (2) go to bed only when sleepy and avoid sleeping on the couch early/mid-evenings, (3) never lie awake in bed for a significant time period; rather, get out of bed and do something quiet and relaxing until the urge to sleep returns, (4) avoid daytime napping if you are having difficulty sleeping at night, (5) reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts and worries by learning to mentally decelerate before bed, and (6) remove visible clockfaces from view in the bedroom, preventing clock-watching anxiety at night.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The obvious methods involve reducing caffeine and alcohol intake, removing screen technology from the bedroom, and having a cool bedroom”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“True even of the newer, shorter-acting sleeping pills on the market, these symptoms instigate a vicious cycle.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Waking up at the same time of day, every day, no matter if it is the week or weekend is a good recommendation for maintaining a stable sleep schedule if you are having difficulty with sleep.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“No other species demonstrates this unnatural act of prematurely and artificially terminating sleep,”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Thermal environment, specifically the proximal temperature around your body and brain, is perhaps the most underappreciated factor determining the ease with which you will fall asleep tonight, and the quality of sleep you will obtain.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“After having had participants perform hundreds of these problems, they were to return twelve hours later and once again work through hundreds more of these mind-numbing problems. However, at the end of this second test session, the researchers asked whether the subjects had cottoned on to the hidden rule. Some of the participants spent that twelve-hour time delay awake across the day, while for others, that time window included a full eight-hour night of sleep. After time spent awake across the day, despite the chance to consciously deliberate on the problem as much as they desired, a rather paltry 20 percent of participants were able to extract the embedded shortcut. Things were very different for those participants who had obtained a full night of sleep—one dressed with late-morning, REM-rich slumber. Almost 60 percent returned and had the “ah-ha!” moment of spotting the hidden cheat—which is a threefold difference in creative solution insight afforded by sleep! Little wonder, then, that you have never been told to “stay awake on a problem.” Instead, you are instructed to “sleep on it.” Interestingly, this phrase, or something close to it, exists in most languages (from the French dormir sur un problem, to the Swahili kulala juu ya tatizo), indicating that the problem-solving benefit of dream sleep is universal, common across the globe.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“let’s say that you choose to go on a strict, low-calorie diet for two weeks in the hopes of losing fat and looking more trim and toned as a consequence. That’s precisely what researchers did to a group of overweight men and women who stayed in a medical center for an entire fortnight. However, one group of individuals were given just five and a half hours’ time in bed, while the other group were offered eight and a half hours’ time in bed. Although weight loss occurred under both conditions, the type of weight loss came from very different sources. When given just five and a half hours of sleep opportunity, more than 70 percent of the pounds lost came from lean body mass—muscle, not fat. Switch to the group offered eight and a half hours’ time in bed each night and a far more desirable outcome was observed, with well over 50 percent of weight loss coming from fat while preserving muscle. When you are not getting enough sleep, the body becomes especially stingy about giving up fat. Instead, muscle mass is depleted while fat is retained. Lean and toned is unlikely to be the outcome of dieting when you are cutting sleep short. The latter is counterproductive of the former.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“After being awake for nineteen hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk. Said another way, if you wake up at seven a.m. and remain awake throughout the day, then go out socializing with friends until late that evening, yet drink no alcohol whatsoever, by the time you are driving home at two a.m. you are as cognitively impaired in your ability to attend to the road and what is around you as a legally drunk driver.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“It was only that content-specific form of dreaming that was able to accomplish clinical remission and offer emotional closure in these patients, allowing them to move forward into a new emotional future, and not be enslaved by a traumatic past.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Lean and toned is unlikely to be the outcome of dieting when you are cutting sleep short. The latter is counterproductive of the former.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The encouraging news is that getting enough sleep will help you control body weight.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

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

“if you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Simply disrupting the depth of an individual’s NREM sleep with infrequent sounds, preventing deep sleep and keeping the brain in shallow sleep, without waking the individual up will produce similar brain deficits and learning impairments.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“insufficient sleep during childhood significantly predicts early onset of drug and alcohol use in that same child during their later adolescent years, even when controlling for other high-risk traits, such as anxiety, attention deficits, and parental history of drug use.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“There is but a fraction of 1 percent of the population who are truly resilient to the effects of chronic sleep restriction at all levels of brain function”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“But in the subsequent studies that Dinges and many other researchers (myself included) have performed, neither naps nor caffeine can salvage more complex functions of the brain, including learning, memory, emotional stability, complex reasoning, or decision-making.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Based on epidemiological studies of average sleep time, millions of individuals unwittingly spend years of their life in a sub-optimal state of psychological and physiological functioning, never maximizing their potential of mind or body due to their blind persistence in sleeping too little.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“spindles offer a refining benefit to memory by allowing the storage site of your hippocampus to check in with the intentional filters carried in your astute frontal lobes, allowing selection only of that which you need to save, while discarding that which you do not.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“sleep is able to offer a far more discerning hand in memory improvement: one that preferentially picks and chooses what information is, and is not, ultimately strengthened. Sleep accomplishes this by using meaningful tags that have been hung onto those memories during initial learning, or potentially identified during sleep itself.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“sleep was far more intelligent than we had once imagined.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“forgetting is the price we pay for remembering.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“For every day you are in a different time zone, your suprachiasmatic nucleus can only readjust by about one hour.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Allowing and encouraging employees, supervisors, and executives to arrive at work well rested turns them from simply looking busy yet ineffective, to being productive, honest, useful individuals who inspire, support, and help each other. Ounces of sleep offer pounds of business in return.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The less you sleep, the more you are likely to eat. In addition, your body becomes unable to manage those calories effectively, especially the concentrations of sugar in your blood. In these two ways, sleeping less than seven or eight hours a night will increase your probability of gaining weight, being overweight, or being obese, and significantly increases your likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Tentative support has emerged from clinical studies in which middle- and older-age adults have had their sleep disorders successfully treated. As a consequence, their rate of cognitive decline slowed significantly, and further delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by five to ten years.IX My”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“It was not until relatively recently, however, that the association between disturbed sleep and Alzheimer’s disease was realized to be more than just an association. While much remains to be understood, we now recognize that sleep disruption and Alzheimer’s disease interact in a self-fulfilling, negative spiral that can initiate and/or accelerate the condition. 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. What struck me about this unexplained pattern was the location in the brain where amyloid accumulates early in the course of Alzheimer’s disease, and most severely in the late stages of the condition. That area is the middle part of the frontal lobe—which, as you will remember, is the same brain region essential for the electrical generation of deep NREM sleep in healthy young individuals. At that time, we did not understand if or why Alzheimer’s disease caused sleep disruption, but simply knew that they always co-occurred. I wondered whether the reason patients with Alzheimer’s disease have such impaired deep NREM sleep was, in part, because the disease erodes the very region of the brain that normally generates this key stage of slumber.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams