When sleep is abundant, minds flourish. When it is deficient, they don't.
the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span
Forcing youthful brains to become early birds will guarantee that they do not catch the worm, if the worm in question is knowledge or good grades.
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.
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.
It's not clear whether the brain actually is designed to have nightmares or whether this is actually the process going awry.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
Many business leaders still believe that time on-task equates to productivity. Even in the industrial era of rote factory work, this was untrue. It is a misguided fallacy, and an expensive one, too. Every key facet required for business success will fail when sleep becomes short within an organisation.
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.
Some people actually sleep better when the significant other is with them. For other couples, it's the opposite.
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.
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.
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.
Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.
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.
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.
