Why We Sleep Quotes

“There is just one thing. From this moment forth, and for the rest of your child’s entire life, he will repeatedly and routinely lapse into a state of apparent coma. It might even resemble death at times. And while his body lies still his mind will often be filled with stunning, bizarre hallucinations. This state will consume one-third of his life and I have absolutely no idea why he’ll do it, or what it is for. Good luck!”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“deep sleep for learning and memory, not to mention all branches of bodily health, from cardiovascular and respiratory, to metabolic, energy balance, and immune function.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“I advise two modifications for seniors. First, wear sunglasses during morning exercise outdoors. This will reduce the influence of morning light being sent to your suprachiasmatic clock that would otherwise keep you on an early-to-rise schedule. Second, go back outside in the late afternoon for sunlight exposure, but this time do not wear sunglasses. Make sure to wear sun protection of some sort, such as a hat, but leave the sunglasses at home. Plentiful later-afternoon daylight will help delay the evening release of melatonin, helping push the timing of sleep to a later hour.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“the lower an older individual’s sleep efficiency score, the higher their mortality risk,”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Most striking, the very last stop on the maturational journey was the tip of the frontal lobe, which enables rational thinking and critical decision-making.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“as Socrates so often declared.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“A meaningful, psychologically healthy life is an examined one,”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“When we are awake we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope if transformational creativity is our goal. We take a myopic, hyperfocused, and narrow view that cannot capture the full informational cosmos on offer in the cerebrum. When awake, we see only a narrow set of all possible memory interrelationships. The opposite is true, however, when we enter the dream state and start looking through the other (correct) end of the memory-surveying telescope. Using that wide-angle dream lens, we can apprehend the full constellation of stored information and their diverse combinatorial possibilities, all in creative servitude.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Once, our dreams were our own. We got to decide whether or not to share them with others and, if we did, which parts to include and which parts to withhold.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The giant insurance company Aetna, which has almost fifty thousand employees, has instituted the option of bonuses for getting more sleep, based on verified sleep-tracker data.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“When birds are alone, one half of the brain and its corresponding (opposite-side) eye must stay awake, maintaining vigilance to environmental threats.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“No matter what you may have heard or read in the popular media, there is no scientific evidence we have suggesting that a drug, a device, or any amount of psychological willpower can replace sleep. Power naps may momentarily increase basic concentration under conditions of sleep deprivation, as can caffeine up to a certain dose.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“It was once thought that sharks did not sleep, in part because they never closed their eyes. Indeed, they do have clear active and passive phases that resemble wake and sleep. We now know that the reason they never close their eyes is because they have no eyelids.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“If you have a bed partner, try observing their eyelids the next time they are drifting off to sleep. You will see the closed lids of the eyes deforming as the eyeballs roll around underneath”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The steady, slow, synchronous waves that sweep across the brain during deep sleep open up communication possibilities between distant regions of the brain, allowing them to collaboratively send and receive their different repositories of stored experience.”
― 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. The global health cost of diabetes is $375 billion a year. That of obesity is more than $2 trillion. Yet for the under-slept individual, the cost to health, quality of life, and a hastened arrival of death are more meaningful. Precisely how a lack of sleep sets you on a path toward diabetes and leads to obesity is now well understood and incontrovertible.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“next-day fatigue and sleepiness can still occur because you are suffering from an undiagnosed sleep disorder, of which there are now more than a hundred. The most common is insomnia, followed by sleep-disordered breathing, or sleep apnea, which includes heavy snoring. Should you suspect your sleep or that of anyone else to be disordered, resulting in daytime fatigue, impairment, or distress, speak to your doctor immediately and seek a referral to a sleep specialist. Most important in this regard: do not seek sleeping pills as your first option.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

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

“Of relevance to this behavior is a recent discovery 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

“Consider that the original Star Wars movies—some of the highest-grossing films of all time—required more than forty years to amass $3 billion in revenue. It took Ambien just twenty-four months to amass $4 billion in sales profit, discounting the black market. That’s a large number, and one I can only imagine influences Big Pharma decision-making at all levels.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“Forcing youthful brains to become early birds will guarantee that they do not catch the worm, if the worm in question is knowledge or good grades.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The old maxim “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is therefore unfortunate. Adopt this mind-set, and you will be dead sooner and the quality of that (shorter) life will be worse.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“Earlier I described the component stages of sleep. Here, I reveal the attendant virtues of each. Ironically, most all of the "new," twenty-first century discoveries regarding sleep were delightfully summarized in 1611 in Macbeth, act two, scene two, where Shakespeare prophetically states that sleep is "the chief nourisher in life's feast."* Perhaps, with less highfalutin language, your mother offered similar advice, extolling the benefits of sleep in healing emotional wounds, helping you learn and remember, gifting you with the solutions to challenging problems, and preventing sickness and infection. Science, it seems has simply been evidential, providing proof of everything your mother, and apparently Shakespeare, knew about the wonders of sleep.

----------------------------------
*"Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care,
The death of each day's life, source labour's bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast,--"
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Folger Shakespeare Library (New York: Simon & Schuster; first edition, 2003).”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The part of his brain that was damaged was the hippocampus. It is the very same structure that sleep deprivation will attack, blocking your brain’s capacity for new learning.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“adolescents have a less rational version of an adult brain, one that takes more risks and has relatively poor decision-making skills.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“synaptic pruning that features prominently during adolescence.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“Analogous to looping your favorite songs in a repeating playlist at night, we cherry-pick specific slices of your autobiographical past, and preferentially strengthen them by using the individualized sound cues during sleep.VIII I’m sure you can imagine innumerable uses for such a method. That said, you may also feel ethically uncomfortable about the prospect, considering that you would have the power to write and rewrite your own remembered life narrative or, more concerning, that of someone else. This moral dilemma is somewhat far in the future, but should such methods continue to be refined, it is one we may face.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Electric light put an end to this natural order of things.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Artificial light in modern societies thus tricks us into believing night is still day, and does so using a physiological lie.”
― 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,”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams