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Why We Sleep Paperback – January 1, 2018

by Matthew Walker (Author)

4.7 31,026 ratings

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Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life, health and longevity and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences: every major disease in the developed world - Alzheimer's, cancer, obesity, diabetes - has very strong causal links to deficient sleep.

Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why its absence is so damaging to our health. Compared to the other basic drives in life - eating, drinking, and reproducing - the purpose of sleep remained elusive.

Now, in this book, the first of its kind written by a scientific expert, Professor Matthew Walker explores twenty years of cutting-edge research to solve the mystery of why sleep matters. Looking at creatures from across the animal kingdom as well as major human studies, Why We Sleep delves in to everything from what really happens during REM sleep to how caffeine and alcohol affect sleep and why our sleep patterns change across a lifetime, transforming our appreciation of the extraordinary phenomenon that safeguards our existence.

Print length

368 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Random House
Publication date

January 1, 2018
Dimensions

7.8 x 5.08 x 0.87 inches
ISBN-10

9780141983769
ISBN-13

978-0141983769
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Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

For every day you are in a different time zone, your suprachiasmatic nucleus can only readjust by about one hour.
Highlighted by 10,585 Kindle readers
First, after waking up in the morning, could you fall back asleep at ten or eleven a.m.? If the answer is “yes,” you are likely not getting sufficient sleep quantity and/or quality. Second, can you function optimally without caffeine before noon? If the answer is “no,” then you are most likely self-medicating your state of chronic sleep deprivation.
Highlighted by 9,145 Kindle readers
Melatonin simply provides the official instruction to commence the event of sleep, but does not participate in the sleep race itself.
Highlighted by 8,721 Kindle readers
Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.
Highlighted by 6,712 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

The international bestseller by neuroscientist, Matthew Walker

Sleep Facts

An afternoon nap increases the brain's learning capacity by 15-20%
Sleep improves your memory, halting forgetting by 30-50%, relative to staying awake
Not getting enough sleep increases sweet and salty cravings by 30-40%
Sleep offers a three-fold bost in creativity and problem solving
A good night's sleep improves time to physical exhaustion when exercising by 10-30%

Why We Sleep

The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

More than exercise, diet and wealth, science has shown that sleep is the most important factor to our physical and mental wellbeing.

In the first book of its kind written by a scientific expert, Professor Matthew Walker explores twenty years of cutting-edge sleep science.

From what really happens during REM sleep to how caffeine and alcohol affect sleep and why our sleep patterns change as we grow older, Why We Sleep is the wake-up call we need: transforming our appreciation of the vital role of sleep in all aspects of our lives.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0141983760
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Random House; 0 edition (January 1, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780141983769
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141983769
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.8 x 5.08 x 0.87 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #432,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #134 in Medical Psychology Reference
- #294 in Medical Neuropsychology
- #581 in Popular Neuropsychology

Customer Reviews:
4.7 31,026 ratings

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Stephen T Simms

Required Reading for a healthy life

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2024

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Get the most accurate information about how important it is to get sleep from the Sleep Scientist. I was impressed with the author, Matthew Walker, and his eloquent writing talent. My English teachers would be impressed with the quality of the diction and vocabulary. A thoroughly education and enjoyable read. Now, get some good sleep! This book will show you how important it is.

3 people found this helpful

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LenZen

A Wake-Up Call for Better Sleep

Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2023

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"I was once fond of saying, 'Sleep is the third pillar of good health, alongside diet and exercise.' I have changed my tune. Sleep is more than a pillar; it is the foundation on which the other two health bastions sit. Take away the bedrock of sleep, or weaken it just a little, and careful eating or physical exercise become less than effective, as we shall see."

― from “Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams”

Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" is one of the two most important books I have read in my life1. Having done a little stock trading along with having survived several tech industry "death marches," things which are quite antithetical to good sleep, I had little idea just how destructive to your health lack of sleep is. A few years back, however, I began to hear that lack of sleep was correlated with diseases such as Alzheimer's, but this did not strike me as convincing since correlation is not causation. Indeed, a little later, I heard about this book at work but was somewhat ambivalent. It's just going to tell me that doctors think sleep is essential but are vague as to why were my thoughts.

Luckily I noticed an episode of Sam Harris's podcast "Making Sense" in which he interviewed Walker. Since Sam Harris is a figure whose judgment I highly respect, and I know he is very discerning about whom he invites on as guests, I decided there was probably more of value to say about sleep than I initially thought.

Correlation and Causation

Walker's book makes a compelling case that sleep is the bedrock of good health. He convincingly demonstrates that lack of good sleep can lead to downward spirals in health with the development of health conditions that make it hard to sleep, leading to more serious health conditions due to lack of sleep, making it even harder to sleep… and so on into a vicious cycle. Walker is careful to lay out in detail when the causal mechanisms are well understood, as in the case of Alzheimer's and cancer, and when lack of sleep is currently a suspect, although the exact causal mechanism has yet to be established. By the end of the book, I realized, however, that sleep is so foundational that even a mere correlation to some bad health condition is enough to make lack of good sleep a prime suspect worth considering as a cause.

Organization and Style

According to Walker, "Why We Sleep" is organized so that later chapters can be read without a strict need to read earlier ones first. Thus, if you use sleeping pills and want to know why you should not, he says it is okay to and, indeed, encourages you to jump to that section right away. That being said, I found the writing style so engaging (with a few minor instances of excessive detail) and the content so important that I read it straight through. Having read it this way, my sense was that the book frontloads its most important content: It explains in detail, with specifics such as the chemicals involved, why you feel more tired at certain parts of the day than others. To give you the motivation to get good sleep, the deleterious effects of lack of sleep also come near the beginning of the book.

The Enormous and Far-Ranging Effects of Poor Sleep

The effects of lack of sleep go beyond just affecting your physical health, however, and Walker shows just how destructive lack of sleep will be on your ability to learn new things. One of the most remarkable findings is that you need to get good sleep after learning new information. You cannot even get a single night of suboptimal sleep the first night, or some information will be lost permanently.

Conversely, if you get that first night of good sleep after learning something new, sleep on subsequent nights will continue to solidify what you have learned: all while you sleep! This is just one case where Walker details how, unfortunately, missed sleep cannot be well compensated for by more sleep later: Permanent losses are involved.

Dreams

Some of the most fascinating information in the book is on the role of dreams. Here we learn of their therapeutic qualities, including some of the underlying biochemistry involved. Discoveries here have led to a better understanding of PTSD, including better treatment methods. Walker also describes how dreams foster creativity by establishing connections between distantly related pieces of information stored in the brain. Here Walker includes a particularly fascinating anecdote of how Edison enhanced his creativity by waking himself from naps and immediately recording his thoughts.

Empathy For Different Circadian Rhythms

Throughout the book, Walker emphasizes how what we have learned about sleep has implications for how we should view people who may not have what seem like "normal" sleep patterns more empathetically. In particular, he emphasizes that teenagers want to get up and go to bed later, not due to laziness but because they run on a different circadian rhythm. It is something that is biologically hardwired into them. A consequence is that forcing school start times incompatible with this has devastating effects on how well they learn compared to well they could. Similar facts are true of people who are naturally "night owls" and run on different circadian rhythms than the rest of us.

Minor Flaws

Walker's book has only a few minor flaws:

1. Although he provides an excellent explanation of why most sleeping pills should be avoided, he does not mention whether this includes melatonin.

2. His discussion of the nationwide dollar impacts of poor sleep could be better presented. The unfortunate truth is that given the numbers we have heard spent on wars and, especially, financial bailouts and stimulus, rattling off numbers that are “merely” in the hundreds of millions or even low billions hits us in a place we are now numb.

3. Although Walker's discussion of creativity in the dream state and the state when just waking from dreams is a fascinating part of the book, I would have liked to see some discussion of how objectively accurate intuitions are during these moments. Anecdotally, I used to joke that my best ideas came to me during this time or not at all. Sometimes, however, the thoughts just turned out to be overconfident upon more profound reflection. Is that true for just me, or is it true for people, generally speaking?

Conclusion

Overall, Walker's "Why We Sleep" is a must-read for anyone who sleeps: in other words, everyone. This book will not only absolve you of any guilt associated with prioritizing sleep, but it will also arm you with the knowledge to make the best choices for your physical and mental health. Walker guides you through the critical benefits of sleep, from its integral role in memory and creativity to its power to process and put to rest the day's experiences: especially the more troubling ones.

While the damaging effects of lack of sleep seem exponential, Walker argues that some of the most significant benefits come in the final two hours. Thus getting eight full hours of sleep is crucial. After reading this book, you will not want to miss a full night's sleep again.

To help you achieve a full night's sleep regularly, Walker provides 12 concrete steps in an appendix. Some of these suggestions are initially counterintuitive. For example, Walker maintains that a cooler room temperature of around 65F is best for optimal sleep. Already, I've been putting this and his other advice to the test, and the results seem promising.

90 people found this helpful

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A. Menon

Informative overview of the necessity of sleep

Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2019

Verified Purchase

Why We Sleep is an overview of the author's research into the purpose of sleep as well as the consequences of a lack of it. It discusses a lot of issues and the author gives his views on the evolutionary benefits and distinctiveness of humans, so it really is quite comprehensive. Most people today, myself included, just are somehow unable to get a healthy amount of uninterrupted sleep and the author does a good job of explaining the consequences of that to the individual through multiple cognitive lenses. He also considers the consequence to the country as a whole through its loss of productive capacity due to overworking.

The book is split into four, largely independent sections. The author begins by discussing how sleep occurs, including some of the neuroscience and the chemical cycles associated with our sleep schedule. The reader learns about the marginal differences between certain physiological cycles and the 24 hour day. In addition the causes of jetlag are explored as well as the required adjustment for changing time zones. The author discusses a bunch of experiments done where we were able to learn about our cicadian cycles and some of the differences in sleep requirements any cycle times by age. The author also highlights his novel view on how REM sleep was associated with human ability to light a fire which allowed them to sleep on the ground rather than be in an unstable position in a tree and this evolutionary advancement was essential for modern development. Perhaps, probably not, but the author truly is impassioned about the subject with strong views. The author then gets into why we need sleep and discusses with abundant experimental evidence, the benefits of sleep to cognitive abilities and the necessity of it for healthy living. Some remarkable pathologies are discussed, for example there was an individual who lost the ability to go to sleep and their body slowly lost its ability to function and the disease proved quickly fatal. The author highlights that the Guinness Book of World Records struck the longest period without sleep as a category due to its terrible health consequences and the author spends time on the consequences of lack of sleep to driving abilities highlighting the large number of fatalities that follow. The author also discusses the benefits of sleep to overall body health and gives substantial experimental evidence to the regenerative benefits of sleep to natural ailments. The author does highlight that sleep will not just cure cancer but simultaneously implicitly argues that it might. So the author, with evidence, strongly argues that sleep has the ability to help one regenerate far more than the general scientific community currently advocates. The author gets into dreaming and how sleep breaks up. He discusses how each form of sleep is required and they have different functional benefits. Furthermore the body needs for NREM and REM sleep differ in immediate priority but not in absolute priority and these results are discussed with experimental evidence for how the body catches up on sleep after being deprived. The author discusses multiple memory experiments that depend on prior sleep conditions and highlights the substantially better performance statistics of students who have had enough sleep prior to trying to learn facts. The author then discusses the consequences of sleeping pills, which are considered significant and detrimental. The author also clarifies the difference between sedation and sleep and makes it very clear that sedation is not sleep and does not serve as a remedy and can be counterproductive. Alcohol's detrimental effects are considered by their impact on sleep for example. The author goes through several common sleeping tablets and makes it clear he does not believe any are substitutes and argues they can become dependencies that create major long term problems. The author then discusses how much better the world could be if we all paid more attention to sleep and how overall productivity of the society could be enhanced. This sort of analysis is interesting but also in need of being the most skeptical of in terms of being a realistic analysis.

Why We Sleep is informative and entertaining. It is exaggerated at times and so aspects of the credibility of the book can be highlighted. The author argues multiple times how even one night of sub optimal sleep has distinct impacts on ability and how an all nighter can be catastrophic, only to bring up an example in which an individual goes without sleep for multiple days to then sleep and make a major scientific discovery. The point of the example was to display the benefits of sleep but it erodes the earlier argument that any lack of sleep puts the individual at a massive handicap. Thus the author argues too forcefully for the unrealistic, that we need 8 hours a day without exception, while highlighting that he himself often cant sleep properly once a week. Despite the at times marginally inconsistent tone, the book is a good reminder of the importance of sleep, a good reference for the scientific benefits of sleep and important tutorial on the health requirements for sleep.

27 people found this helpful

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Mauricio Antonio Tamer

Everybody shall read it

Reviewed in Brazil on January 17, 2024

Verified Purchase

Life changing book. You will learn why to sleep, including a very consistent and technical answer. After reading this book, for sure, you will learn how to improve many areas of your life.

One person found this helpful

Diego

Me cambió la vida este libro

Reviewed in Mexico on September 29, 2023

Verified Purchase

Amo este libro. Me lo recomendó una amiga porque yo tenía muy malos hábitos de sueño. Desde el capítulo uno me cambió la vida. Se lo recomendaría a cualquier persona, sin importar sus hábitos de sueño. La lectura es un poco pesada porque de pronto es muy técnico, entonces no lo recomiendo para niños y jóvenes, sobre todo si no están habituados a leer

2 people found this helpful

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Jonathan Lauzon

Excellent book, very informative!

Reviewed in Canada on November 21, 2023

Verified Purchase

I learned a lot of things about sleep, this book is great and Matthew knows his so much subject as he is one of the best sleep expert scientist in the world.

I even subscribed to the Masterclass platform in part to watch his video Masterclass, which is essentially a condensed version of the book but to hear him talk with passion about his subject was very complementary to the book. He is very well articulated and speaks clearly.

Conclusion: Everyone should read this book. Sleep is so underrated in our society.

Amazon Customer

Must read!

Reviewed in Spain on April 21, 2024

Verified Purchase

Top, top, top!!

Deep Knowledge

Must have for everymember of family

Reviewed in India on April 11, 2024

Verified Purchase

One the most important book written in a classic way. I am on page 72 and my sleep cycle has drastically improved. I am buying a copy for everyone in my family. I will make sure all of read this atleast twice.

2 people found this helpful

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Why We Sleep Paperback – January 1, 2018

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The international bestseller by neuroscientist, Matthew Walker

Sleep Facts

Why We Sleep

The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

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About the authors

Matthew Walker

Matthew Walker PhD

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