Why We Sleep

This book by Matthew Walker is an absolutely revelatory walkthrough of cutting-edge science around sleep and dreams. As I've probably mentioned before in posts on here, I don't have the best relationship with sleep - I was hoping reading this would help spur me into developing healthier habits. And (I'm writing this post a few weeks after reading, I had a bit of a blog backlog) largely it has helped; there is a really handy appendix with twelve key factors to consider when manoeuvring your sleep into healthier pattern - but oh so much more than those practical tips, the sheer depth & scope of ways in which proper sleeping is utterly, holistically foundational to so much of our health was an eye-opening challenge that simply made me sit up & take it much more seriously. I learnt so much hard science from this book that is the result of decades of research into what we spend a third of our lives doing & yet day-to-day barely consider why - lack of sleep has demonstrable links to cancer, obesity & diabetes, dementia, anxiety & depression, schizophrenia, and so much more. Some of the facts are astonishing. If you stay awake for more than eighteen hours, your brain function is the same as if you were drunk. If you stay awake for several days, you will almost certainly start to experience signs of psychosis.* Even if you're getting what feels like "enough" sleep, if that sleep doesn't carry through to a good couple of hours of proper REM dreaming, you will slip in neurological & cognitive function pretty quick. The studies & statistics are indisputable, and have damning implications for how the temporal structure of modern life dispute or deny the reality of sleeping's importance. Walker makes a very strong case for later start times for school in particular (as adolescents' circadian rhythms tend toward the later) and work for those of us with a "night owl" predisposition - which, he argues, is not a mere label for lazy pillow-lovers but a real genetic tendency to thrive later in the solar cycle than the workday is hegemonically structured around. I could go on listing nuggets & ramifications for a very long post as this is a very data-heavy book, but if you're at all interested in human health, and, chances are your thinking about sleep factors into that probably only very little, absolutely read this. It's extremely readable for such a science-packed book, and will make you fall in love with those Eight Hours of Slumber.

* Something I can identify with from personal experience; when I had my psychotic episode in 2020, the triggering events that led up to the climax of the trip happened over four days in which I didn't sleep. Prolonged sleep deprivation is so psychologically dangerous that the Guinness Book of World Records has banned it as a record for people to attempt to break.