Matthew Walker Quotes
-
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.
-
No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation. It sinks down into every possible nook and cranny. And yet no one is doing anything about it.
-
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.
-
I just tell people I'm a dolphin trainer. It's better for everyone.
-
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.
-
Do you tend to sleep in during the weekends? That usually signals that you're trying to sleep off a debt you've accumulated during the week.
-
You should not actually stay in bed for very long awake, because your brain is this remarkably associative device, and it quickly learns that the bed is about being awake. So you should go to another room - a room that's dim. Just read a book - no screens, no phones - and, only when you're sleepy, return to the bed.
-
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.
-
Below seven hours of sleep, there are objective impairments in the body. Eight hours are recommended.
-
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.
-
That short-sleeping that we're now suffering is a consequence of our lifestyle. It's not a consequence of evolutionary habituation.
-
Dream sleep provides a fascinating neurochemical soothing balm. It is during dream sleep and only during dream sleep when our brain shuts off a stress-related neurochemical called noradrenalin.
-
It's not clear whether the brain actually is designed to have nightmares or whether this is actually the process going awry.
-
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.
-
Sleep is Mother Nature's best effort yet to counter death.
-
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.
-
By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure.
-
Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain. Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it.
-
If we didn't need eight hours of sleep and could survive on six, Mother Nature would have done away with 25 percent of our sleep time millions of years ago. Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do.
-
When I give lectures, people will wait behind until there is no one around and then tell me quietly, 'I seem to be one of those people who need eight or nine hours' sleep.' It's embarrassing to say it in public.
-
Midnight is the time when we think, 'Well, we should probably send our last email; let me just check Facebook one more time.'
-
We know that efficiency and effectiveness are increased when you're getting sufficient sleep, and it will take you longer to do the same thing on an underslept brain, which means you end up having to stay awake longer. So goes the vicious cycle.
-
It's not that we simply get old, and memory starts to go, and sleep starts to deteriorate. But those two things actually are significantly interrelated.