---
product_id: 53862257
title: "Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams"
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# Sleep impacts longevity & disease risk #1 Sunday Times Bestseller 20 years of cutting-edge sleep science Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

**Price:** € 29.45
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## Summary

> 💤 Sleep smarter, live sharper — don’t miss out on the science that’s changing lives!

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams
- **How much does it cost?** € 29.45 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.gr](https://www.desertcart.gr/products/53862257-why-we-sleep-the-new-science-of-sleep-and-dreams)

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## Key Features

- • **Join the Sleep Revolution:** Be part of the movement transforming how professionals value rest—because thriving starts with sleeping well.
- • **Master Your Mind & Memory:** Learn how REM sleep boosts creativity, emotional intelligence, and memory consolidation for peak performance.
- • **Sleep Smarter, Live Longer:** Understand the vital role of sleep cycles in detoxifying your brain and enhancing immune function.
- • **Unlock the Science of Sleep:** Dive deep into two decades of groundbreaking research that reveals why sleep is your ultimate health superpower.
- • **Sleep: Your Secret Weapon Against Disease:** Discover how quality sleep dramatically lowers risks of Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, and more.

## Overview

Why We Sleep by Professor Matthew Walker is a #1 Sunday Times bestseller that unpacks 20 years of scientific research on sleep’s critical role in health, longevity, and brain function. It reveals how insufficient sleep is linked to major diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, and diabetes, while highlighting sleep’s power to enhance memory, creativity, and emotional regulation. This authoritative guide is essential for professionals seeking to optimize wellbeing and performance by prioritizing restorative sleep.

## Description

'Astonishing . . . an amazing book . . . absolutely chocker full of things that we need to know' Chris Evans 'Matthew Walker is probably one of the most influential people on the planet' Evening Standard THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER TLS, OBSERVER, SUNDAY TIMES, FT, GUARDIAN, DAILY MAIL AND EVENING STANDARD BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life, health and longevity and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences: every major disease in the developed world - Alzheimer's, cancer, obesity, diabetes - has very strong causal links to deficient sleep. In this book, the first of its kind written by a scientific expert, Professor Matthew Walker explores twenty years of cutting-edge research to solve the mystery of why sleep matters. Looking at creatures from across the animal kingdom as well as major human studies, Why We Sleep delves into everything from what really happens during REM sleep to how caffeine and alcohol affect sleep and why our sleep patterns change across a lifetime, transforming our appreciation of the extraordinary phenomenon that safeguards our existence. 'Startling, vital ... a life-raft' Guardian 'A top sleep scientist argues that sleep is more important for our health than diet or exercise' The Times 'Passionate, urgent . . . it had a powerful effect on me' Observer

Review: Brilliant book on sleep and its a superpower - This amazing book begins with an excellent introduction, explaining all the reasons and benefits that we are now learning about the value and importance of sleep, which can take up to a third of our life and over 25 years of existence, to learn why this is such an essential and important thing. We know more about reproduction and other medical factors and their importance and particularly around the main drivers of our life how we eat and how we reproduce but not about why we sleep. Walker explains all the things that we know 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 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 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, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality.” - DEMENTIA: Walker originally came upon the importance of sleep when he was doing studies on different types of dementia. People had different, disordered sleep patterns would indicate which type of dementia and he then realised that the role of sleep could indicate what type of dementia somebody might present. - The cyclical rhythms that we have that give us a time function throughout the day and control a whole range of things like when we sleep or the amount of urine we produce. Cyclical cycles exist in every animal that lives for over seven days, but it also exists in plants and is an essential function to how we live and exist. Interestingly, enough in experiments carried out on the cyclical time factor in our own body cover a 25-hour cycle rather than a 24-hour cycle and this cycle will occur whether we have a plant or a human in a dark place so long as they've already learned these cycles through daylight. - STAGES: Although there is only one stage to being awake, and that is wakefulness, there are four stages to sleep, of which one of those stages is known as REM. which is when you are most prone to dreaming, and whilst you're in the stage, your body is paralysed and unable to move. Things such as breathing remain active. - All animals, including things such as bacteria require sleep and yet animals require different amounts of sleep so that an elephant only requires four hours sleep, half as much as humans whereas tigers and lions devour 15 hours of sleep. - All mammals have REM sleep. Having such a large and sufficient REM sleep allows our brains to rationalise emotions and emotional responses and allows us to recognise and make appropriate decisions. Lack of sleep will impact on your ability to rationalism and use appropriate emotions. - MEMORY: There is some fascinating research around memory and how sleep can help improve skills such as motor skills. Once a task is done and looking at people mastering taps in certain sequences on a typewriter, and when they were asked to repeat the test - the amount of sleep you have corrected errors in tapping skills, so that motor memory would improve, but needed sleep to master this skills more effectively. This can be transferred to learning a musical instrument. - Good sleep did not just help motor memory, but it can also help repair and increase sports ability and connections required for plasticity in repairing a brain after stroke, but all of these are requiring sleep both before and after something has been acquired. - LEARNING: Sleep also helps to support creativity and it's as if our brains are given a real work out at night even though we think we're sleeping, it supports making new connections regarding learning and supporting and maintaining a healthy brain. - “Growing scientific evidence now supports the wisdom of later school start times. One longitudinal study tracked more than 5,000 Japanese schoolchildren and discovered that those individuals who were sleeping longer obtained better grades across the board. Controlled sleep laboratory studies in smaller samples show that children with longer total sleep times develop superior IQ, with brighter children having consistently slept forty to fifty minutes more than those who went on to develop a lower IQ.” - DRIVING: Sleep deprivation is one of the most significant causes of accidents in car fatalities, and it's far more prevalent in causing car accidents than drugs and alcohol combined. - An interesting fact about sleep deprivation is that people who become tired, are no longer functioning to their full potential and reduced capacity, and yet the sleep deprived do not seem to be aware that they are incapacitated by the sleep deprivation. However, tests show they have changed in the baseline and ability to perform mental task. - Experiments have shown different stages of sleep deprivation regarding 2 hours, 4 hours and 7 hours and then tests compared to people in stimulated car machines when driving a car when drunk and with lack of sleep. People who are drunk might be late at braking, but people who are sleep deprived begin to have micro sleep and fall asleep at the wheel. This will occur every 30 minutes and in America there will be a car crash due to somebody with sleep deprivation, and in fact, the numbers are even worse than if you drink and drive, although both are seriously bad to be doing. - MENTAL HEALTH: There is no mental health disorder (this includes schizophrenia, bipolar disorder conditions, ADHD, and autism), that doesn’t seem to show that sleep deprivation will always occurs in these conditions. - Conditions like bipolar disorder formally known as manic-depressive has been shown that sleep deprivation will trigger psychiatric element of manic disorder. The author does not make the claim that sleep deprivation is the cause of these conditions but is a factor in what might trigger psychiatric episodes. - AUTISM: There are possible issues around correlation between REM, lack of sleep and autism. In experiments, when rats’ brains have reduced REM sleep, they do become socially aloof and distance from the other rats. - DEMENTIA: There is also an important link between sleep deprivation or lack of sleep and Alzheimer's disease. We know that amyloid plaque build-up occurs in the brain and if you have a full night deep sleep, these are washed away by cerebrospinal fluid and this allows the brain to function properly, but lack of sleep will impact on the cleaning operation where the brain is flushed several times during the night to promote healthy brains and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. Sleep deprivation has been looked at both in assessment and diagnosis in supporting those in reducing the risk of Alzheimer's. We have at least 4 to 6 cycles of deep sleep in a full night’s sleep. - HUNGER: Sleep deprivation impacts on a hunger hormone, as well as increasing blood pressure and forming increased risk of diabetes. When we are hungry, we have hormones called ghrelin, which will impact on helping us to feel hungry and leptin hormone, which let the brain know that our body is full. But when sleep deprivation occurs, these hormones become altered and ineffective in regulating the metabolic state of the body so that when we are sleep deprived, we also tend to eat more type of carbohydrate type foods, junk food and confectionery. - When we are tired, we tend to eat more carbohydrate and rich sugary-based foods than when we are fully rested from the good night sleep. MRI studies have shown that there are parts of the brain that switch off and we only want protein-based foods and sleep deprivation is a perfect cause of increasing obesity, as we will eat more rubbish-based foods and the brain areas that would want you to eat more healthy based foods are switched off so that you want to eat richer, sugar-based foods. - Although lack of sleep is not the only factor in weight gain, it has been shown that lack of sleep does correlate with increased weight. - OBESITY: Children aged 3 who sleep less than 10 ½ hours or less have a 45% increased risk of being obese by age seven than those who get twelve hours of sleep a night. “Short sleep will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption, decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.” - MICROBIOME AND GUT HEALTH: Lack of sleep also impacts on the microbiome which is so important in our bodies in making sure we're able to absorb the right types of food, but when sleep deprivation occurs, the Microbiome is impacted on this and works less effectively. It has been shown that there is a two-way correlation between the Microbiome and sleep disorders, but currently we do not have robust evidence. - REPRODUCTION: Lack of sleep impacts on the hormone testosterone which we require for reproduction and for staying alert. Reductions in testosterone amounts leads has a significant impact on how well we can reproduce and the people with less sleep have reduced testosterone. Poor sleep of less than 5 hours in healthy males will reduce from baseline, will have a 29% lower sperm count and the sperm themselves will have deformities. - IMMUNE SYSTEM: Another important factor is how sleep strengthens the immune system. When you are ill, you need to sleep, and that is what sleep does in repairing the body and helping it to fight infection. Lack of sleep has been shown to reduce the effectiveness of the immune system, which then impacts on the growth of cancerous cells. Nightshift workers and people who do jobs which disrupt sleep how far greater risk of illness and cancer and has even been cited as the world health organisation (WHO). To be stronger and better we need to sleep. - REM: REM sleep in which we dream appears to be a by-product of neuronal activity as our brain becomes very active during REM sleep, although we are also left paralysed, and it also reduces adrenaline and noradrenaline - which raise heart rates. Adrenaline which often causes anxiety when we're awake but becomes reduced and stopped during REM sleep so that we might be able to work through emotional issues while sleeping. Tests seem to support this. - PTSD: People with post-traumatic stress disorder who were having recurring nightmares that the neuro adrenaline hormone was not being suppressed and thought that if you gave medication that reduces adrenaline, they might stop having post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares and the same time somebody was prescribing medication which activated on reducing blood pressure but also suppressed noradrenaline and these people stop having nightmares. It's now become a form of treatment in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. - CREATIVITY: REM sleep can make us creative. If you have a difficulty, it is worth dreaming on it or falling asleep because REM sleep will help us to have better periods of creativity. The adage that if you have a problem, sleeping on it can help. - MELATONIN: Melatonin is a hormone to help with sleep but becomes disrupted by staying up late and particularly blue light that you might find in iPads if you read them for an hour or two before you go to bed will impact on your sleep. - ALCOHOL: Alcohol will impact on your ability to learn and disrupt REM sleep, which is so important for learning and emotional control. Alcohol and drugs impact so abstinence is important if you want to have dreams and proper sleep. - CANCER: Sleep deprivation which has been assessed in rats and other animals shows that if you do not sleep, you will die and there are conditions that cause people not to sleep and they will suffer horrible health issues. They're immune system no longer functions properly, and they become ill and die due to diseases such as sepsis that would be otherwise minimal in somebody with healthy sleep. - SLEEPING PILLS: In America in the last month there would've been 10 million people taking prescription sleeping pills and yet these medications are harmful and shouldn't really be used. They are more sedatives than pills to support proper sleep. Walker suggests that the first line of appropriate treatment is cognitive behavioural therapy, which include things like reducing the amount of caffeine and sleep in a regular time. - HOW SLEEP HAS CHANGED: Data over the last century shows that only 2% of Americans were sleeping less than six hours a night and now it is currently almost 30% adult asleep in less than six hours every night. The book looks at how society and sleep are working and interacting. This is having a massive effect on people’s health and well-being and mood. Many people who run businesses will often send-off emails early in the morning and work late, but and this is almost seen as a piece of bravado, but actually the cost to companies where employees are working late and having a less sleep is costing billions to the workplace and the current economies and is actually counterproductive. Companies devalue the importance and they need to start to value sleep. - CHILDREN: Research is shown time and time again that in studies where children start school at later times. There is much higher score points in terms of all subjects and exam examination scores. - ADHD: Children with ADHD are irritable and moodier, The same symptoms that you would see in a child who had a lack of sleep as the same as you would see in a child with ADHD so if children aren't sleeping, they will present with a similar diagnosis or presentation, and if you tell the doctor all the symptoms and you don't mention that the child is having problems with sleep or not sleeping enough, then it may well be that the doctor will diagnose that child as having ADHD. - “The state of chronic sleep deprivation builds over time, the child will look ever more ADHD-like in temperament, cognitively, emotionally, and academically. Those children who are fortunate to have the sleep disorder recognized, and who have their tonsils removed, often prove that they do not have ADHD. In the weeks after the operation, a child’s sleep recovers, and with it, normative psychological and mental functioning in the months ahead. Based on recent surveys and clinical evaluations, we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications.” - ADHD MEDICATION: “Most people know the name of the common ADHD medications: Adderall and Ritalin. But few know what these drugs are. Adderall is amphetamine with certain salts mixed in, and Ritalin is a similar stimulant, called methylphenidate. Amphetamine and methylphenidate are two of the most powerful drugs we know of to prevent sleep and keep the brain of an adult (or a child, in this case) wide awake. That is the very last thing that such a child needs. Dr. Charles Czeisler, has noted, there are people sitting in prison cells, and have been for decades, because they were caught selling amphetamines to minors on the street. However, we seem to have no problem at all in allowing pharmaceutical companies to broadcast prime-time commercials highlighting ADHD and promoting the sale of amphetamine-based drugs (e.g., Adderall, Ritalin). To a cynic, this seems like little more than an uptown version of a downtown drug pusher.” - Children who have apnoea where they have problems with sleeping and it's causing them to wake and when surgery is used to correct this procedure and reduce lack of sleep in episode, these children symptoms of ADHD disappear. - The book argues that up to 50% of children who might have been presented with the symptoms of ADHD, have actually got sleep disorders or don’t sleep sufficient amount and they're having blue light on before they go to bed from their iPads and that's causing them to sleep yet. Many parents are unaware of this regarding ADHD. - Someone who has impaired sleep can have a similar level of behaviour as someone who is drunk and doctors and particularly new junior doctors who to do excessive amounts of training without sleep and do long 13 hours straight. Many doctors are after finishing long shift are 168% more likely to be involved in a car crash than others who aren't. - The effectiveness of a vaccine such as a flu vaccine is dramatically reduced because we need to sleep to help the vaccine work at its most effective and efficient rate. Some of the ideas to support sleep do include analogy that allows us to maximise the effectiveness of sleeping patterns in individuals and society. - Most children have had some form of education, around diets, the importance of exercise, the importance of vaccines and diet, but almost, no one has had any education or been provided information around the importance of sleep, excise, the food we eat, etc. and this needs to change. - PAIN: Another interesting fact that sleep deprivation is it when this occurs you will feel increased amount of pain and you would otherwise feel if you had a full night sleep. - NEONATES: A good night sleep can act like an anaesthetic in the same way as morphine and actually target the areas in the brain that such sedatives also impact on, but without all the harmful side-effects that you would associate with the kind of medicine such as morphine. And yet in hospitals, it's one of the most ineffective places to get sleep due to the constant beeping and noise levels and yet here we are once again causing more harm on individuals and reducing their ability to manage pain through reduced sleep patterns that are clearly associated with hospital stays. - END: Who would've thought that a book about sleep could be so eye-opening, and that a book about sleep could keep you awake with so many extraordinary facts and information about how important sleep is in so many ways, both in supporting our health, stopping us from feeling ill, impacts on our ability to think or concentrate or learn and the importance of something that takes up a third of our lives is only now being realised. This is a remarkable book.
Review: Essential reading to understand WHY it is critical to get enough sleep & at the right time for you! - I first heard about this study on BBC Radio 5live, when Phil Williams interviewed the author. I was so impressed by his approach & the way he described how the study was first designed & then developed & expanded that I read the book feeling, for the first time, that I was reading genuine findings & not someone’s unproven opinions. So without scepticism I felt able to completely embrace it as fact & I found it absolutely eye-opening! There are some incredible points that leapt out at me, such as: until this study scientists didn’t understand WHY we need to sleep - hence the title! With all the science we have available you would have thought we’d have known this long ago but it took this ‘proper’ investment to reach that knowledge & understanding. And another is WHEN; without this information the human race has set some ridiculous parameters around when we should sleep & decided they should apply to everyone. Worse, we’ve decided along the way that anyone who won’t or can’t live up to them is lazy or uncaring. We have designed our modern society around a set of non-scientific, irrelevant & sometimes even harmful ‘rules’, such as ‘working 9-5’ & ‘early start & early finish school times’. We believe all babies & small children should go to bed early. We go to great lengths to stop children napping, to get the sleep they need (possibly because they’ve had to get up some time before they were ready!), so that we can put them to bed early & enable parents to have an evening without them! The book shows us clearly that some babies & children won’t be able to go to sleep early (& stay asleep!) no matter how hard their parents try! One of the critical learning points is the necessity of sleep to our overall health, wellbeing & even life expectancy! I’ll never forget this & obviously we should be adopting it - as we are a first world society - now that we finally understand it! It’s ludicrous to ignore this knowledge just because we’ve got it wrong previously! I think anyone reading this book will end up with much better developed sleep strategies for themselves & their families. It’s really well written & interesting. Unsurprisingly it’s quite ‘meaty’ content & I found I tended to read a bit & then have to stop & have a think about it! But the key learning points are certainly sticking with me. I definitely think everyone can learn something from reading this book & I definitely recommend it!

## Features

- Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life
- Health and longevity and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society
- With devastating consequences every major disease in the developed world - Alzheimer's
- Has very strong causal links to deficient sleep
- Transforming our appreciation of the extraordinary phenomenon that safeguards our existence

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | 2,706 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) 32 in Higher Education of Biological Sciences 36 in Scientific Psychology & Psychiatry 53 in Biology (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 34,139 Reviews |

## Images

![Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71k+6XWQelL.jpg)

## Available Options

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Brilliant book on sleep and its a superpower
*by J***W on 7 October 2024*

This amazing book begins with an excellent introduction, explaining all the reasons and benefits that we are now learning about the value and importance of sleep, which can take up to a third of our life and over 25 years of existence, to learn why this is such an essential and important thing. We know more about reproduction and other medical factors and their importance and particularly around the main drivers of our life how we eat and how we reproduce but not about why we sleep. Walker explains all the things that we know 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 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 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, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality.” - DEMENTIA: Walker originally came upon the importance of sleep when he was doing studies on different types of dementia. People had different, disordered sleep patterns would indicate which type of dementia and he then realised that the role of sleep could indicate what type of dementia somebody might present. - The cyclical rhythms that we have that give us a time function throughout the day and control a whole range of things like when we sleep or the amount of urine we produce. Cyclical cycles exist in every animal that lives for over seven days, but it also exists in plants and is an essential function to how we live and exist. Interestingly, enough in experiments carried out on the cyclical time factor in our own body cover a 25-hour cycle rather than a 24-hour cycle and this cycle will occur whether we have a plant or a human in a dark place so long as they've already learned these cycles through daylight. - STAGES: Although there is only one stage to being awake, and that is wakefulness, there are four stages to sleep, of which one of those stages is known as REM. which is when you are most prone to dreaming, and whilst you're in the stage, your body is paralysed and unable to move. Things such as breathing remain active. - All animals, including things such as bacteria require sleep and yet animals require different amounts of sleep so that an elephant only requires four hours sleep, half as much as humans whereas tigers and lions devour 15 hours of sleep. - All mammals have REM sleep. Having such a large and sufficient REM sleep allows our brains to rationalise emotions and emotional responses and allows us to recognise and make appropriate decisions. Lack of sleep will impact on your ability to rationalism and use appropriate emotions. - MEMORY: There is some fascinating research around memory and how sleep can help improve skills such as motor skills. Once a task is done and looking at people mastering taps in certain sequences on a typewriter, and when they were asked to repeat the test - the amount of sleep you have corrected errors in tapping skills, so that motor memory would improve, but needed sleep to master this skills more effectively. This can be transferred to learning a musical instrument. - Good sleep did not just help motor memory, but it can also help repair and increase sports ability and connections required for plasticity in repairing a brain after stroke, but all of these are requiring sleep both before and after something has been acquired. - LEARNING: Sleep also helps to support creativity and it's as if our brains are given a real work out at night even though we think we're sleeping, it supports making new connections regarding learning and supporting and maintaining a healthy brain. - “Growing scientific evidence now supports the wisdom of later school start times. One longitudinal study tracked more than 5,000 Japanese schoolchildren and discovered that those individuals who were sleeping longer obtained better grades across the board. Controlled sleep laboratory studies in smaller samples show that children with longer total sleep times develop superior IQ, with brighter children having consistently slept forty to fifty minutes more than those who went on to develop a lower IQ.” - DRIVING: Sleep deprivation is one of the most significant causes of accidents in car fatalities, and it's far more prevalent in causing car accidents than drugs and alcohol combined. - An interesting fact about sleep deprivation is that people who become tired, are no longer functioning to their full potential and reduced capacity, and yet the sleep deprived do not seem to be aware that they are incapacitated by the sleep deprivation. However, tests show they have changed in the baseline and ability to perform mental task. - Experiments have shown different stages of sleep deprivation regarding 2 hours, 4 hours and 7 hours and then tests compared to people in stimulated car machines when driving a car when drunk and with lack of sleep. People who are drunk might be late at braking, but people who are sleep deprived begin to have micro sleep and fall asleep at the wheel. This will occur every 30 minutes and in America there will be a car crash due to somebody with sleep deprivation, and in fact, the numbers are even worse than if you drink and drive, although both are seriously bad to be doing. - MENTAL HEALTH: There is no mental health disorder (this includes schizophrenia, bipolar disorder conditions, ADHD, and autism), that doesn’t seem to show that sleep deprivation will always occurs in these conditions. - Conditions like bipolar disorder formally known as manic-depressive has been shown that sleep deprivation will trigger psychiatric element of manic disorder. The author does not make the claim that sleep deprivation is the cause of these conditions but is a factor in what might trigger psychiatric episodes. - AUTISM: There are possible issues around correlation between REM, lack of sleep and autism. In experiments, when rats’ brains have reduced REM sleep, they do become socially aloof and distance from the other rats. - DEMENTIA: There is also an important link between sleep deprivation or lack of sleep and Alzheimer's disease. We know that amyloid plaque build-up occurs in the brain and if you have a full night deep sleep, these are washed away by cerebrospinal fluid and this allows the brain to function properly, but lack of sleep will impact on the cleaning operation where the brain is flushed several times during the night to promote healthy brains and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. Sleep deprivation has been looked at both in assessment and diagnosis in supporting those in reducing the risk of Alzheimer's. We have at least 4 to 6 cycles of deep sleep in a full night’s sleep. - HUNGER: Sleep deprivation impacts on a hunger hormone, as well as increasing blood pressure and forming increased risk of diabetes. When we are hungry, we have hormones called ghrelin, which will impact on helping us to feel hungry and leptin hormone, which let the brain know that our body is full. But when sleep deprivation occurs, these hormones become altered and ineffective in regulating the metabolic state of the body so that when we are sleep deprived, we also tend to eat more type of carbohydrate type foods, junk food and confectionery. - When we are tired, we tend to eat more carbohydrate and rich sugary-based foods than when we are fully rested from the good night sleep. MRI studies have shown that there are parts of the brain that switch off and we only want protein-based foods and sleep deprivation is a perfect cause of increasing obesity, as we will eat more rubbish-based foods and the brain areas that would want you to eat more healthy based foods are switched off so that you want to eat richer, sugar-based foods. - Although lack of sleep is not the only factor in weight gain, it has been shown that lack of sleep does correlate with increased weight. - OBESITY: Children aged 3 who sleep less than 10 ½ hours or less have a 45% increased risk of being obese by age seven than those who get twelve hours of sleep a night. “Short sleep will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption, decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.” - MICROBIOME AND GUT HEALTH: Lack of sleep also impacts on the microbiome which is so important in our bodies in making sure we're able to absorb the right types of food, but when sleep deprivation occurs, the Microbiome is impacted on this and works less effectively. It has been shown that there is a two-way correlation between the Microbiome and sleep disorders, but currently we do not have robust evidence. - REPRODUCTION: Lack of sleep impacts on the hormone testosterone which we require for reproduction and for staying alert. Reductions in testosterone amounts leads has a significant impact on how well we can reproduce and the people with less sleep have reduced testosterone. Poor sleep of less than 5 hours in healthy males will reduce from baseline, will have a 29% lower sperm count and the sperm themselves will have deformities. - IMMUNE SYSTEM: Another important factor is how sleep strengthens the immune system. When you are ill, you need to sleep, and that is what sleep does in repairing the body and helping it to fight infection. Lack of sleep has been shown to reduce the effectiveness of the immune system, which then impacts on the growth of cancerous cells. Nightshift workers and people who do jobs which disrupt sleep how far greater risk of illness and cancer and has even been cited as the world health organisation (WHO). To be stronger and better we need to sleep. - REM: REM sleep in which we dream appears to be a by-product of neuronal activity as our brain becomes very active during REM sleep, although we are also left paralysed, and it also reduces adrenaline and noradrenaline - which raise heart rates. Adrenaline which often causes anxiety when we're awake but becomes reduced and stopped during REM sleep so that we might be able to work through emotional issues while sleeping. Tests seem to support this. - PTSD: People with post-traumatic stress disorder who were having recurring nightmares that the neuro adrenaline hormone was not being suppressed and thought that if you gave medication that reduces adrenaline, they might stop having post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares and the same time somebody was prescribing medication which activated on reducing blood pressure but also suppressed noradrenaline and these people stop having nightmares. It's now become a form of treatment in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. - CREATIVITY: REM sleep can make us creative. If you have a difficulty, it is worth dreaming on it or falling asleep because REM sleep will help us to have better periods of creativity. The adage that if you have a problem, sleeping on it can help. - MELATONIN: Melatonin is a hormone to help with sleep but becomes disrupted by staying up late and particularly blue light that you might find in iPads if you read them for an hour or two before you go to bed will impact on your sleep. - ALCOHOL: Alcohol will impact on your ability to learn and disrupt REM sleep, which is so important for learning and emotional control. Alcohol and drugs impact so abstinence is important if you want to have dreams and proper sleep. - CANCER: Sleep deprivation which has been assessed in rats and other animals shows that if you do not sleep, you will die and there are conditions that cause people not to sleep and they will suffer horrible health issues. They're immune system no longer functions properly, and they become ill and die due to diseases such as sepsis that would be otherwise minimal in somebody with healthy sleep. - SLEEPING PILLS: In America in the last month there would've been 10 million people taking prescription sleeping pills and yet these medications are harmful and shouldn't really be used. They are more sedatives than pills to support proper sleep. Walker suggests that the first line of appropriate treatment is cognitive behavioural therapy, which include things like reducing the amount of caffeine and sleep in a regular time. - HOW SLEEP HAS CHANGED: Data over the last century shows that only 2% of Americans were sleeping less than six hours a night and now it is currently almost 30% adult asleep in less than six hours every night. The book looks at how society and sleep are working and interacting. This is having a massive effect on people’s health and well-being and mood. Many people who run businesses will often send-off emails early in the morning and work late, but and this is almost seen as a piece of bravado, but actually the cost to companies where employees are working late and having a less sleep is costing billions to the workplace and the current economies and is actually counterproductive. Companies devalue the importance and they need to start to value sleep. - CHILDREN: Research is shown time and time again that in studies where children start school at later times. There is much higher score points in terms of all subjects and exam examination scores. - ADHD: Children with ADHD are irritable and moodier, The same symptoms that you would see in a child who had a lack of sleep as the same as you would see in a child with ADHD so if children aren't sleeping, they will present with a similar diagnosis or presentation, and if you tell the doctor all the symptoms and you don't mention that the child is having problems with sleep or not sleeping enough, then it may well be that the doctor will diagnose that child as having ADHD. - “The state of chronic sleep deprivation builds over time, the child will look ever more ADHD-like in temperament, cognitively, emotionally, and academically. Those children who are fortunate to have the sleep disorder recognized, and who have their tonsils removed, often prove that they do not have ADHD. In the weeks after the operation, a child’s sleep recovers, and with it, normative psychological and mental functioning in the months ahead. Based on recent surveys and clinical evaluations, we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications.” - ADHD MEDICATION: “Most people know the name of the common ADHD medications: Adderall and Ritalin. But few know what these drugs are. Adderall is amphetamine with certain salts mixed in, and Ritalin is a similar stimulant, called methylphenidate. Amphetamine and methylphenidate are two of the most powerful drugs we know of to prevent sleep and keep the brain of an adult (or a child, in this case) wide awake. That is the very last thing that such a child needs. Dr. Charles Czeisler, has noted, there are people sitting in prison cells, and have been for decades, because they were caught selling amphetamines to minors on the street. However, we seem to have no problem at all in allowing pharmaceutical companies to broadcast prime-time commercials highlighting ADHD and promoting the sale of amphetamine-based drugs (e.g., Adderall, Ritalin). To a cynic, this seems like little more than an uptown version of a downtown drug pusher.” - Children who have apnoea where they have problems with sleeping and it's causing them to wake and when surgery is used to correct this procedure and reduce lack of sleep in episode, these children symptoms of ADHD disappear. - The book argues that up to 50% of children who might have been presented with the symptoms of ADHD, have actually got sleep disorders or don’t sleep sufficient amount and they're having blue light on before they go to bed from their iPads and that's causing them to sleep yet. Many parents are unaware of this regarding ADHD. - Someone who has impaired sleep can have a similar level of behaviour as someone who is drunk and doctors and particularly new junior doctors who to do excessive amounts of training without sleep and do long 13 hours straight. Many doctors are after finishing long shift are 168% more likely to be involved in a car crash than others who aren't. - The effectiveness of a vaccine such as a flu vaccine is dramatically reduced because we need to sleep to help the vaccine work at its most effective and efficient rate. Some of the ideas to support sleep do include analogy that allows us to maximise the effectiveness of sleeping patterns in individuals and society. - Most children have had some form of education, around diets, the importance of exercise, the importance of vaccines and diet, but almost, no one has had any education or been provided information around the importance of sleep, excise, the food we eat, etc. and this needs to change. - PAIN: Another interesting fact that sleep deprivation is it when this occurs you will feel increased amount of pain and you would otherwise feel if you had a full night sleep. - NEONATES: A good night sleep can act like an anaesthetic in the same way as morphine and actually target the areas in the brain that such sedatives also impact on, but without all the harmful side-effects that you would associate with the kind of medicine such as morphine. And yet in hospitals, it's one of the most ineffective places to get sleep due to the constant beeping and noise levels and yet here we are once again causing more harm on individuals and reducing their ability to manage pain through reduced sleep patterns that are clearly associated with hospital stays. - END: Who would've thought that a book about sleep could be so eye-opening, and that a book about sleep could keep you awake with so many extraordinary facts and information about how important sleep is in so many ways, both in supporting our health, stopping us from feeling ill, impacts on our ability to think or concentrate or learn and the importance of something that takes up a third of our lives is only now being realised. This is a remarkable book.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Essential reading to understand WHY it is critical to get enough sleep & at the right time for you!
*by R***P on 3 January 2019*

I first heard about this study on BBC Radio 5live, when Phil Williams interviewed the author. I was so impressed by his approach & the way he described how the study was first designed & then developed & expanded that I read the book feeling, for the first time, that I was reading genuine findings & not someone’s unproven opinions. So without scepticism I felt able to completely embrace it as fact & I found it absolutely eye-opening! There are some incredible points that leapt out at me, such as: until this study scientists didn’t understand WHY we need to sleep - hence the title! With all the science we have available you would have thought we’d have known this long ago but it took this ‘proper’ investment to reach that knowledge & understanding. And another is WHEN; without this information the human race has set some ridiculous parameters around when we should sleep & decided they should apply to everyone. Worse, we’ve decided along the way that anyone who won’t or can’t live up to them is lazy or uncaring. We have designed our modern society around a set of non-scientific, irrelevant & sometimes even harmful ‘rules’, such as ‘working 9-5’ & ‘early start & early finish school times’. We believe all babies & small children should go to bed early. We go to great lengths to stop children napping, to get the sleep they need (possibly because they’ve had to get up some time before they were ready!), so that we can put them to bed early & enable parents to have an evening without them! The book shows us clearly that some babies & children won’t be able to go to sleep early (& stay asleep!) no matter how hard their parents try! One of the critical learning points is the necessity of sleep to our overall health, wellbeing & even life expectancy! I’ll never forget this & obviously we should be adopting it - as we are a first world society - now that we finally understand it! It’s ludicrous to ignore this knowledge just because we’ve got it wrong previously! I think anyone reading this book will end up with much better developed sleep strategies for themselves & their families. It’s really well written & interesting. Unsurprisingly it’s quite ‘meaty’ content & I found I tended to read a bit & then have to stop & have a think about it! But the key learning points are certainly sticking with me. I definitely think everyone can learn something from reading this book & I definitely recommend it!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Fascinating Book but the Tips on Sleep Haven't Worked for Me (so far)
*by J***E on 4 November 2017*

There are seemingly endless ways to sabotage a good night’s sleep – or have it sabotaged for you by various, sometimes terrifying, disorders: I thought I had it bad trying to get through the days on fewer than half a dozen hours sleep, but the story of a man suffering from Fatal Familial Insomnia rather put that into perspective and showed me to be utterly well-rested by comparison; and there are equally numerous health reasons to try to overcome the problems – and, with some neuroscientific help and inspiration, lots of proposed ways of beating the enemies of a good night’s rest, some of which – both enemies and solutions – I’d never even thought of. Walker is fascinated by and enthusiastic about sleep, and it’s contagious. From the astonishing sleeping abilities of birds and sea mammals, to the developmental issues that can be caused in children and adolescents by not getting a decent night’s shut-eye, it’s a revelation; and the nightmare health consequences Walker presents – from mental health problems to flu to heart attack to cancer – had me reaching for my jammies, determined to try to catch up on all those lost hours of slumber, even though the science suggests that this is, sadly, impossible. However, I was not, even in the early chapters, altogether convinced by much of the tone, nor some of the arguments; the book is very much US-orientated, pointing to US websites (National Sleep Foundation), and using US high school start times – the average of which, according to the CDC website, is 08:03, in contrast to around a quarter to nine in the UK. At times, there’s more than a whiff of American infomercials: Come on! Let’s do this! We can do it! I did it and lost 10lb/got a promotion/could afford to buy my dream house, and we’ll all live longer, fitter, happier, slimmer, wealthier lives! But the arguments, for me, collapse in the final 20% of the book, which is given over to Walker’s dreaming of an ideal sleep-obsessed society wherein we all live in houses and work in offices kitted out with technology geared towards helping us sleep – with smart lighting in every office cubicle that dims and brightens according to individual circadian rhythms, and a wild privacy-invading notion that our sleep times be fed into a central health database in order to judge when best we should get our flu jabs – for the good of society, of course (but who will watch the watchmen that will have unprecedented access to our private data? And will our failure to develop a regular sleep pattern be used against us by our workplace, which may then chastise us for irregular sleep and blame it, and us, for any performance blips, and by our doctors who will then use it as an excuse to patient-blame and deny us treatment for health concerns on the basis that it’s our own fault?) As much as I admire Walker’s attempts to fix the problems of society, the actual evidence, as opposed to theory, is slim that tackling sleep issues is a major part of the solution. Why We Sleep is fascinating and well worth a read for the scientific theories and research. I enjoyed the book a lot, though none of the suggestions for getting a better night's sleep have so far worked for me.

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