Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

By Matthew Walker, PhD

Part 1

This Thing Called Sleep

To Sleep…

Facts:

• Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep
• Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease.
• Inadequate sleep - even moderate reductions for just one week - disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as a pre-diabetic.
• Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure. Sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions.
• Too little sleep swells concentrations of a hormone that makes you feel hungry while suppressing a companion hormone that otherwise signals food satisfaction. Despite being full, you still want to eat more.
• Worse, should you attempt to diet but don’t get enough sleep while doing som it is futile, since most of the weight you will lose will come from lean body mass, not fat.
• Essentially: the shorter you sleep, the shorter your life span.
• Throughout history, sleep has kind of been a mystery.
• There does not seem to be one major organ within the body, or process within the brain, that isn’t optimally enhanced by sleep (and detrimentally impaired when we don’t get enough).
• There have been an explosion of discoveries over the past twenty years.
• Dreaming provides a unique suite of benefits to all species fortunate enough to experience it, humans included. Among these gifts are a consoling neurochemical bath that mollifies painful memories and a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge, inspiring creativity.
• The list is never ending for sleep benefits: cardiovascular health, immune system, blood pressure etc.
• The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarf those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise.
• Matthew Walker: Been studying sleep for over 20 years. Medicine wasn’t for him, it seemed more concerned with answers, whereas he was always more enthralled by questions. Started studying brainwaves activity in dementia patients. Sleep became his obsession.