Why We Sleep Quotes

“We, and not the rotating mechanics of planet Earth, would now decide when it was “night” and when it was “day.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“during REM sleep, the brain paralyzes the body to keep you from acting out your dreams.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“chronic activation of the fight-or-flight nervous system causes myriad health problems, one of which is now recognized to be insomnia.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

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

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

“paradoxical insomnia.”
― 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

“Driving drunk or driving drowsy were both dangerous, and equally dangerous.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Not only does sleep maintain those memories you have successfully learned before bed (“the vision that was planted in my brain / Still remains”), but it will even salvage those that appeared to have been lost soon after learning. In other words, following a night of sleep you regain access to memories that you could not retrieve before sleep. Like a computer hard drive where some files have become corrupted and inaccessible, sleep offers a recovery service at night. Having repaired those memory items, rescuing them from the clutches of forgetting, you awake the next morning able to locate and retrieve those once unavailable memory files with ease and precision.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“The pent-up REM-sleep pressure erupts forcefully into waking consciousness, causing hallucinations, delusions, and gross disorientation. The technical term for this terrifying psychotic state is “delirium tremens.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“For as long as the state of insufficient sleep lasts, and for some time thereafter, the body remains stuck in some degree of a fight-or-flight state. It can last for years in those with an untreated sleep disorder, excessive work hours that limit sleep or its quality, or the simple neglect of sleep by an individual. Like a car engine that is revved to a shrieking extreme for sustained periods of time, your sympathetic nervous system is floored into perpetual overdrive by a lack of sleep. The consequential strain that is placed on your body by the persistent force of sympathetic activation will leak out in all manner of health issues, just like the failed pistons, gaskets, seals, and gnashing gears of an abused car engine.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Cartwright had shown that it was not enough to have REM sleep, or even generic dreaming, when it comes to resolving our emotional past. Her patients required REM sleep with dreaming, but dreaming of a very specific kind: that which expressly involved dreaming about the emotional themes and sentiments of the waking trauma. 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: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“Dijk and his prolific team examined gene expression in a group of healthy young men and women after having restricted them to six hours of sleep a night for one week, all monitored under strict laboratory conditions. After one week of subtly reduced sleep, the activity of a hefty 711 genes was distorted, relative to the genetic activity profile of these very same individuals when they were obtaining eight and a half hours of sleep for a week.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“A number of prominent epidemiological studies have reported that nighttime shift work, and the disruption to circadian rhythms and sleep that it causes, up your odds of developing numerous different forms of cancer considerably. To date, these include associations with cancer of the breast, cancer of the prostate, cancer of the uterus wall or the endometrium, and cancer of the colon.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“Denmark recently became the first country to pay worker compensation to women who had developed breast cancer after years of night-shift work in government-sponsored jobs, such as nurses and air cabin crew. Other governments—Britain, for example—have so far resisted similar legal claims, refusing payout compensation despite the science.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“those older adults with the greatest loss of deep sleep showed the most catastrophic overnight forgetting. Poor memory and poor sleep in old age are therefore not coincidental, but rather significantly interrelated. The findings helped us shed new light on the forgetfulness that is all too common in the elderly, such as difficulty remembering people’s names or memorizing upcoming hospital appointments.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“Using performance as a measure of sleep need is perilous in older adults, since older adults are already impaired in their reaction times to begin with. Said unkindly, older adults don’t have much further to fall in terms of getting worse, sometimes called a “floor effect,” making it difficult to estimate the real performance impact of sleep deprivation.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“After participants had been restricted to four to five hours of sleep for a week, the cells of these tired individuals had become far less receptive to insulin.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Raskind had been treating his war veteran patients with a generic drug called prazosin to manage their high blood pressure. While the drug was somewhat effective for lowering blood pressure in the body, Raskind found it had a far more powerful yet entirely unexpected benefit within the brain: it alleviated the reoccurring nightmares in his PTSD patients.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“While some have contested how accurate or sound the Edina test case is, well-controlled and far larger systematic studies have proved that Edina is no fluke. Numerous counties in several US states have shifted the start of schools to a later hour and their students experienced significantly higher grade point averages.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Each hour of sleep lost vastly amplifies that crash likelihood, rather than incrementally nudging it up.”
― 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. Therefore, the back of the brain of an adolescent was more adult-like, while the front of the brain remained more child-like at any one moment during this developmental window of time.XIII”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Dentro del cerebro, el sueño enriquece una diversidad de funciones, como nuestra capacidad para aprender, memorizar y tomar decisiones lógicas.”
― Matthew Walker, Por qué dormimos: La nueva ciencia del sueño

“deberíamos ser capaces de reducir las dosis de estupefacientes en los hospitales mejorando las condiciones del sueño. A su vez, esto disminuiría los riesgos para la seguridad, suavizaría la gravedad de los efectos secundarios y limitaría la interacción entre medicamentos.”
― Matthew Walker, Por qué dormimos: La nueva ciencia del sueño

“Debería ser posible diseñar un sistema de atención médica que privilegie el sueño como elemento central del cuidado del paciente. En”
― Matthew Walker, Por qué dormimos: La nueva ciencia del sueño

“The discovery proved that sleep could potentially be used as a new early diagnostic litmus test to understand which type of dementia an individual would develop.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Counter to common belief, there isn’t just one type of dementia. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common, but is only one of many types. For a number of treatment reasons, it is critical to know which type of dementia an individual is suffering from as soon as possible.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day—”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Within the brain, sleep enriches a diversity of functions, including our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions and choices. Benevolently servicing our psychological health, sleep recalibrates our emotional brain circuits, allowing us to navigate next-day social and psychological challenges with cool-headed composure.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“affirming what a remarkable Swiss Army knife of health and wellness sleep truly is. Then we turn to how and why a lack of sufficient sleep leads to a quagmire of ill health, disease, and untimely death—a wakeup call to sleep if ever there was one.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams