Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

✍️ Matthew Walker

Tags: matthew-walker , science , lang-en

“Sleep is nonnegotiable”

This book is a must read!

Nowadays many people consider sleeping a “waste of time” and jokingly say that “We will have all the time to sleep when we are dead”.

This is a great book with tons of information (some of them shocking and disturbing). The author, Matthew Walker, is a sleep scientist at UC Berkeley and takes the reader to a journey of every aspect of sleep such as the physiology of sleep, how other animals sleep (fascinating chapter), why we dream and the dangers of sleep deprivation (here we are presented with the damaging health outcomes - all results based on scientific studies).

Quoting the author: “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.”

Walker also provides an interesting discussion on how our modern lifestyle damaged the quality of our sleep with laptops and smartphone screens, very early school times and increased office hours.

The book also gives some advice on how to improve sleep quality. Most of them are no-nonsense and easy to apply. For example, I already started a fixed sleep schedule and greatly reduced my smartphone and laptop use at night.