Best quotes by Matthew Walker on Sleep

Checkout quotes by Matthew Walker on Sleep

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ If you were not to set an alarm clock, would you sleep past it? If the answer is yes, then there is clearly more sleep that is needed.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ The fact that we don't have that biologic pressure to have highly polyphasic sleep, I think, probably tells us something in terms of, truly, whether it's useful or not.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ When did a doctor prescribe, not sleeping pills, but sleep itself? It needs to be prioritised, even incentivised.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ Your subjective sense of how well you're doing under conditions of sleep deprivation is a miserable predictor of, objectively, how you actually are doing.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.'

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ If sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ Light is a profound degrader of our sleep.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ Some people actually sleep better when the significant other is with them. For other couples, it's the opposite.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ No one wants to give up time with their family or entertainment, so they give up sleep instead.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ Below seven hours of sleep, there are objective impairments in the body. Eight hours are recommended.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ Based on the science, you can make somewhat clear statements: The number of people who can survive on six hours of sleep without impairment is zero.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ It's simply that older adults don't seem to be able to generate sleep efficiently, and that's why they're not getting it.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call 'the sedatives.' And what you're doing is just knocking your brain out. You're not putting it into natural sleep.

  - Matthew Walker
  

• ‟ By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure.

  - Matthew Walker