In brief, sleep produces complex neurochemical baths that improve our brains in various ways. Yet Walker concludes that the evolutionary upsides of sleep are far greater than these downsides. Why do we sleep? After all, when you’re sleeping-and all animals do-you can’t hunt, gather, eat, reproduce, or defend yourself.
Thomas Roth, of the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, “The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without impairment, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.” But even if you apply a mild discount factor, Why We Sleep is an important and fascinating book.īecause this is a short review, I’ll answer a few questions that I suspect are top of mind for you.ĭoes everyone really need seven or eight hours of sleep a night? The answer is that you almost certainly do, even if you’ve convinced yourself otherwise. In an effort to wake us all up to the harm of sleeping too little, he sometimes reports as fact what science has not yet clearly demonstrated. I don’t necessarily buy into all of Walker’s reporting, such as the strong link he claims between not getting enough sleep and developing Alzheimer’s. “The decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact,” Walker writes. Walker, the director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Human Sleep Science, explains how neglecting sleep undercuts your creativity, problem solving, decision-making, learning, memory, heart health, brain health, mental health, emotional well-being, immune system, and even your life span. The book was recommended to me by my daughter Jenn and John Doerr. Now that I’ve read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, I realize that my all-nighters, combined with almost never getting eight hours of sleep, took a big toll.
I knew I wasn’t as sharp when I was operating mostly on caffeine and adrenaline, but I was obsessed with my work, and I felt that sleeping a lot was lazy.
Once or twice, I stayed up two nights in a row. Back in my early Microsoft days, I routinely pulled all-nighters when we had to deliver a piece of software.
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