Words matter. These are the best Matthew Walker Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My name is Matthew Walker, I am a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and I am the author of the book ‘Why We Sleep.’
The gross demonstration of caffeine is that it prevents you from falling asleep. The slightly more nefarious aspect of caffeine is that maybe you can fall asleep, but we know that the depth of deep sleep you’re getting if caffeine is still in your system is severely less.
Sleep is Mother Nature’s best effort yet to counter death.
Stay away from screens, especially those LED screens. Those blue-light emitting devices fool your brain into thinking that it’s still daytime, even though it’s night-time and you want to get to sleep.
If sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it’s the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.
People dramatically underestimate how much sleep is linked to all the diseases killing us. We know a lack of sleep is linked to numerous forms of cancer – bowel, prostate, breast cancer.
As you try to tweak your sleep one way or the other, you might be, you might be doing great – you might do better at remembering details of an event, but you might end up being poorer at abstracting the gist or the rules associated with it.
Falling asleep is like landing a plane. It takes time. You’ve got to sort of gradually descend. I think one of the problems with insufficient sleep is people are not very good at predicting how poorly they are doing when they are under-slept.
No one wants to give up time with their family or entertainment, so they give up sleep instead.
The amount of sleep – the total amount of sleep that you get – starts to decrease the older that we get. I think one of the myths out there is that we simply need less sleep as we age, and that’s not true, in fact.
We now know that we imprint information during the day. We sort of – that seed is planted there within the brain during the day. In other words, we learn information. But we also know that that vision that was planted in the brain still remains in the sound of silence, in this – in the dark of night.
Individuals fail to recognise how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health.
Deep non-REM sleep almost hits the save button on those recently acquired informational pieces so that when you wake up the next morning, you have remembering rather than forgetting.
I have long been puzzled by the entrenched mentality, and often enforced practice, of longer work hours and less sleep. Innumerable policies exist within the workplace regarding smoking, substance abuse, ethical behaviour, and injury and disease prevention.
I think the first general point to make from epidemiological studies across millions of people is the following – that short sleep predicts a shorter life. It predicts all cause mortality.
That short-sleeping that we’re now suffering is a consequence of our lifestyle. It’s not a consequence of evolutionary habituation.
No one would look at an infant baby asleep, and say ‘What a lazy baby!’ We know sleeping is non-negotiable for a baby. But that notion is quickly abandoned.
We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness.
I think many people walk through their lives in an under-slept state not realizing it. It’s become this new natural baseline.
I think sleep is probably the neglected stepsister in the health conversation today. I think we’ve done a good job regarding physical activity and diet, but sleep has remained out there in the cold, and that’s surprising to me.
I think we perhaps are, with sleep, where we were with smoking about 50 years ago, in that we had all of the science, and it was right there for the public discussion, but it’s not yet adequately sort of percolated out into policy or even just public wisdom.
By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure.
Sleep is the Swiss army knife of health. When sleep is deficient, there is sickness and disease. And when sleep is abundant, there is vitality and health.
Sleep-deprived individuals also generate fewer and less accurate solutions to problems.
What is dreaming, and what happens, and are there any real benefits to dreaming? Well, to take a step back, I think it’s important to note that dreaming essentially is a time when we all become flagrantly psychotic.
