“Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker, PhD

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  • Sleep disruption plays with your hormones, causing you to be more hungry, and spikes blood sugar
  • Fatigue leads to more car accidents than being intoxicated
  • We use sleep to strengthen memories
  • Most living thing have their own internal clocks
  • Even very little sun light resets our internal rhythm
  • Genetics tend to determine chrono type
    • Owls are not owls by choice
  • Melatonin kicks off sleep but does not actually cause sleep
  • Adenosine accumulate once you are awake
    • Caffeine occupies the adenosine receptors so you do not realize how tired you are
    • Decafe is not caffeine free
    • Adenosine requires sleep to draw down
  • It takes about one day to adjust per hour travelled across time zones
  • Prolonged sleep deprivation can require several days to recover from
  • All psychiatric disorders have bad sleep associated with them
    • Sleep management generally helps treatment
  • Sleep deprivation prevents learning new things
  • We replay memories during dreams at slower speeds than originally experienced
    • (Is this why we relive things in dreams and often are caught running slowly or being stuck)?
  • nREM sleep mostly happens early at night with REM happening mostly later
  • nREM sleep is mostly about pruning memories
  • Waking up early, cuts into REM sleep
  • We have “sleep spindles” that layer in “noise” to help us better ignore real noise in the environment
  • Everything with a brain sleeps
    • Only animals and birds REM sleep
  • Animals that sleep longer tend to sleep better
  • Pinnipeds sleep on land and in water, but only REM on land
  • After sleep deprivation, nREM is the most quickest to recover
  • We can never fully recover missed sleep
  • Sleep deprivation triggers more eating because the mind thinks food is scarce
  • The notion of “second sleep” seems to be more of a fashion, not biology
  • Siestas are great for humans
  • Babies moving in the womb are generally asleep
  • Infant sleep deprivation arrests brain development
  • Put your child to bed when they are drowsy, not after they are asleep
  • Any alcohol in the a woman’s blood affects in utero’s ability to sleep well
  • Teenagers need more, later sleep then adults and older children
  • “No child needs caffeine.”
  • Older adults still need as much sleep, they just struggle to get it
  • nREM helps facts memories best
  • Rocking during sleep allows for deeper sleep
  • “Practice plus sleep makes prefect”
  • People do not know how tired they are
  • Sleep deprivation literally shortens your ability to manage emotions
  • Staying awake all night only burns an extra ~140 calories
  • REM sleep + dreams are critical for healthy mind operation
  • Dreaming of emotional trauma helps dissolve emotions related to those memories
  • Dreams help tune our emotional processing centers
  • REM sleep likes to make bizarre and eclectic connections
  • Sleep deprivation kills us
  • “sleep opportunity” (having an appropriate environment) is different from actual sleep
  • Fading light and cool air control the release of melatonin
  • Sleeping cold is good
  • Sleeping pills disconnect your brain but do not enable healthful sleep
  • The original factory whistle was supposed to wake you up so you could get to work on time
  • Don’t hit the Snooze button! It is a small heart-attack multiple times in the morning
  • “REM sleep stands between rationality and lunacy”
  • Amphetamine is a power “awake drug”
  • Some ADHD are actually sleep deprived
  • A lack of sleep increasing the chances of one being unethical

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