Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Rating: 8/10

An eye-opening book about something we all do and, it turns out, really should do more and better.

I made a lot of notes/highlights in this book, as you’ll see. All worthwhile.

I always knew sleep was important, but now knowing just how important has really changed my views on my habits, the workplace, and a whole host of societal structures.

My only complaints are that there are some occasional leaps of analysis (although largely fair ones, anyway), and that once each chapter gets it’s point across, it continues for quite some additional pages to push the point home (which is not a problem per se, and it might work for a lot of people, but it may also restrict how many people finish the book… which is a problem).

General

Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep.
human beings are in fact the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep without legitimate gain.
“morning types,” make up about 40 percent of the populace. They prefer to wake at or around dawn, are happy to do so, and function optimally at this time of day. Others are “evening types,” and account for approximately 30 percent of the population. They naturally prefer going to bed late and subsequently wake up late the following morning, or even in the afternoon. The remaining 30 percent of people lie somewhere in between morning and evening types, with a slight leaning toward eveningness,
owls of course strongly dislike waking up early. They are unable to function well at this time, one cause of which is that, despite being “awake,” their brain remains in a more sleep-like state throughout the early morning. This is especially true of a region called the prefrontal cortex,
Sample the hormone levels circulating in the blood of these tired participants and you will find a marked drop in testosterone relative to their own baseline levels of testosterone when fully rested. The size of the hormonal blunting effect is so large that it effectively “ages” a man by ten to fifteen years in terms of testosterone virility.
Routinely sleeping less than six hours a night results in a 20 percent drop in follicular-releasing hormone in women—a critical female reproductive element that peaks just prior to ovulation and is necessary for conception.
The faces pictured after one night of short sleep were rated as looking more fatigued, less healthy, and significantly less attractive, compared with the appealing image of that same individual after they had slept a full eight hours.
the World Health Organization now labels the lack of societal sleep as a global health epidemic.
sleep is not like a credit system or the bank. The brain can never recover all the sleep it has been deprived of. We cannot accumulate a debt without penalty, nor can we repay that sleep debt at a later time.
one out of every two adults across all developed countries (approximately 800 million people) will not get the necessary sleep they need this coming week.
innumerable policies exist within the workplace regarding smoking, substance abuse, ethical behavior, and injury and disease prevention. But insufficient sleep—another harmful, potentially deadly factor—is commonly tolerated and even woefully encouraged.
Even the simplest daily routines that require slight effort, such as time spent dressing neatly or fashionably for the workplace, have been found to decrease following a night of sleep loss.

Alcohol and caffeine

Alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of.
The heady cocktail of sleep loss and alcohol was not additive, but instead multiplicative.
those who had their sleep laced with alcohol on the first night after learning suffered what can conservatively be described as partial amnesia seven days later, forgetting more than 50 percent of all that original knowledge.
caffeine is the most widely used (and abused) psychoactive stimulant in the world. It is the second most traded commodity on the planet, after oil.
administering caffeine to juvenile rats will also disrupt deep NREM sleep and, as a consequence, delay numerous measures of brain maturation and the development of social activity, independent grooming, and the exploration of the environment—measures of self-motivated learning.

Evolution and the animal world

there ought to have been a strong evolutionary pressure to prevent the emergence of sleep or anything remotely like it. As one sleep scientist has said, “If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.”
Without exception, every animal species studied to date sleeps, or engages in something remarkably like it. This simple fact establishes that sleep evolved with—or very soon after—life itself on our planet.
[Due to the natural distribution of ‘night owls’ and ‘morning larks’ in a group, having a desire to sleep at different times.] Consequently, the group as a whole is only collectively vulnerable (i.e., every person asleep) for just four rather than eight hours, despite everyone still getting the chance for eight hours of sleep. That’s potentially a 50 percent increase in survival fitness. Mother Nature would never pass on a biological trait—here, the useful variability in when individuals within a collective tribe go to sleep and wake up—that could enhance the survival safety and thus fitness of a species by this amount.
Elephants need half as much sleep as humans, requiring just four hours of slumber each day. Tigers and lions devour fifteen hours of daily sleep. The brown bat outperforms all other mammals, being awake for just five hours each day while sleeping nineteen hours. Total amount of time is one of the most conspicuous differences in how organisms sleep.
Regress evolutionary time still further and we have discovered that the very simplest forms of unicellular organisms that survive for periods exceeding twenty-four hours, such as bacteria, have active and passive phases that correspond to the light-dark cycle of our planet. It is a pattern that we now believe to be the precursor of our own circadian rhythm, and with it, wake and sleep.
a common, and perhaps erroneous, idea: sleep is the state we must enter in order to fix that which has been upset by wake. But what if we turned this argument on its head? What if sleep is so useful—so physiologically beneficial to every aspect of our being—that the real question is: Why did life ever bother to wake up? Considering how biologically damaging the state of wakefulness can often be, that is the true evolutionary puzzle here, not sleep. Adopt this perspective, and we can pose a very different theory: sleep was the first state of life on this planet, and it was from sleep that wakefulness emerged.
As the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky once said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.”
scientists wondered if the measure of choice—total minutes of sleep—was the wrong way of looking at the question of why sleep varies so considerably across species. Instead, they suspected that assessing sleep quality, rather than quantity (time), would shed some light on the mystery.
our most accurate estimate of why different species need different sleep amounts involves a complex hybrid of factors, such as dietary type (omnivore, herbivore, carnivore), predator/prey balance within a habitat, the presence and nature of a social network, metabolic rate, and nervous system complexity.
Both sleep and wake provide synergistic and critical, though often different, survival advantages. There is an adaptive balance to be struck between wakefulness and sleep. In humans, that appears to be around sixteen hours of total wakefulness, and around eight hours of total sleep, for an average adult.

Health: general

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 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.
Many of the major psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and ADHD are now considered disorders of abnormal development, since they commonly emerge during childhood and adolescence.
the lower an older individual’s sleep efficiency score, the higher their mortality risk, the worse their physical health, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, the less energy they report, and the lower their cognitive function, typified by forgetfulness.
the relationship between decreasing hours of sleep and increasing mortality risk of an accident is not linear, but instead exponentially mushrooms.
the sleep disruption—which almost always precedes the shift from a stable to an unstable manic or depressive state in bipolar patients—may well be a (the) trigger in the disorder
Adults forty-five years or older who sleep fewer than six hours a night are 200 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven to eight hours a night.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after.
[On an experiment where participants were infected with the common cold]: In those sleeping five hours on average, the infection rate was almost 50 percent. In those sleeping seven hours or more a night in the week prior, the infection rate was just 18 percent.
participants who obtained seven to nine hours’ sleep in the week before getting the flu shot generated a powerful antibody reaction, reflecting a robust, healthy immune system. In contrast, those in the sleep-restricted group mustered a paltry response, producing less than 50 percent of the immune reaction their well-slept counterparts were able to mobilize.

Health: autism

Our current understanding of what causes autism is incomplete, but central to the condition appears to be an inappropriate wiring up of the brain during early developmental life, specifically in the formation and number of synapses—that is, abnormal synaptogenesis. Imbalances in synaptic connections are common in autistic individuals: excess amounts of connectivity in some parts of the brain, deficiencies in others. Realizing this, scientists have begun to examine whether the sleep of individuals with autism is atypical. It is. Infants and young children who show signs of autism, or who are diagnosed with autism, do not have normal sleep patterns or amounts. The circadian rhythms of autistic children are also weaker than their non-autistic counterparts,
Most notable, however, is the significant shortage of REM sleep. Autistic individuals show a 30 to 50 percent deficit in the amount of REM sleep they obtain, relative to children without autism.
Irrespective of causality issues, tracking sleep abnormalities represents a new diagnostic hope for the early detection of autism.
epidemiological studies have linked alcohol use during pregnancy and an increased likelihood of neuropsychiatric illness in the mother’s child, including autism,

Health: dementia and Alzheimer’s

[Evidence] clearly shows how and why sleep disruption is a causal factor contributing to dementia in mid- and later life.
poor sleep is one of the most underappreciated factors contributing to cognitive and medical ill health in the elderly, including issues of diabetes, depression, chronic pain, stroke, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.
sleep disruption and Alzheimer’s disease are causally linked.
getting too little sleep across the adult life span will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Inadequate sleep and the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease interact in a vicious cycle. Without sufficient sleep, amyloid plaques build up in the brain, especially in deep-sleep-generating regions, attacking and degrading them. The loss of deep NREM sleep caused by this assault therefore lessens the ability to remove amyloid from the brain at night, resulting in greater amyloid deposition. More amyloid, less deep sleep, less deep sleep, more amyloid, and so on and so forth.

Health: food

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.
The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarf those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise.
sleep loss increases levels of circulating endocannabinoids, which, as you may have guessed from the name, are chemicals produced by the body that are very similar to the drug cannabis. Like marijuana use, these chemicals stimulate appetite and increase your desire to snack, otherwise known as having the munchies.
the less an individual sleeps, the less energy he or she feels they have, and the more sedentary and less willing to exercise they are in real-world settings. Inadequate sleep is the perfect recipe for obesity: greater calorie intake, lower calorie expenditure.
cravings for sweets (e.g., cookies, chocolate, and ice cream), heavy-hitting carbohydrate-rich foods (e.g., bread and pasta), and salty snacks (e.g., potato chips and pretzels) all increased by 30 to 40 percent when sleep was reduced by several hours each night. Less affected were protein-rich foods (e.g., meat and fish), dairy items (such as yogurt and cheese), and fatty foods, showing a 10 to 15 percent increase in preference
when you do not get enough sleep, and the body’s stress-related, fight-or-flight nervous system is revved up, this triggers an excess of circulating cortisol that cultivates “bad bacteria” to fester throughout your microbiome. As a result, insufficient sleep will prevent the meaningful absorption of all food nutrients
Three-year-olds sleeping just ten and a half hours or less have a 45 percent increased risk of being obese by age seven than those who get twelve hours of sleep a night.
When given just five and a half hours of sleep opportunity, more than 70 percent of the pounds lost came from lean body mass—muscle, not fat. Switch to the group offered eight and a half hours’ time in bed each night and a far more desirable outcome was observed, with well over 50 percent of weight loss coming from fat while preserving muscle. When you are not getting enough sleep, the body becomes especially stingy about giving up fat. Instead, muscle mass is depleted while fat is retained.
short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.
a four-day diet high in sugar and other carbohydrates, but low in fiber, resulted in less deep NREM sleep and more awakenings at night.

Health: cancer

nighttime shift work, and the disruption to circadian rhythms and sleep that it causes, up your odds of developing numerous different forms of cancer considerably.
A large European study of almost 25,000 individuals demonstrated that sleeping six hours or less was associated with a 40 percent increased risk of developing cancer, relative to those sleeping seven hours a night or more. Similar associations were found in a study tracking more than 75,000 women across an eleven-year period.
the scientific evidence linking sleep disruption and cancer is now so damning that the World Health Organization has officially classified nighttime shift work as a “probable carcinogen.”

Health: emotional

[In viewing images designed to trigger the fight-or-flight response, researchers observed] over a 60 percent amplification in emotional reactivity in the participants who were sleep-deprived.
Those who slept in between the two sessions reported a significant decrease in how emotional they were feeling in response to seeing those images again. In addition, results of the MRI scans showed a large and significant reduction in reactivity in the amygdala, that emotional center of the brain that creates painful feelings. Moreover, there was a reengagement of the rational prefrontal cortex of the brain after sleep that was helping maintain a dampening brake influence on emotional reactions. In contrast, those who remained awake across the day without the chance to sleep and digest those experiences showed no such dissolving of emotional reactivity over time. Their deep emotional brain reactions were just as strong and negative, if not more so, at the second viewing compared with the first, and they reported a similarly powerful reexperiencing of painful feelings to boot.
it was the dreaming state of REM sleep—and specific patterns of electrical activity that reflected the drop in stress-related brain chemistry during the dream state—that determined the success of overnight therapy
There are regions of your brain whose job it is to read and decode the value and meaning of emotional signals, especially faces. And it is that very same essential set of brain regions, or network, that REM sleep recalibrates at night.
With the absence of such emotional acuity, normally gifted by the re-tuning skills of REM sleep at night, the sleep-deprived participants slipped into a default of fear bias, believing even gentle- or somewhat friendly looking faces were menacing.
By removing REM sleep, we had, quite literally, removed participants’ level-headed ability to read the social world around them.
The less sleep you have had, or the more fragmented your sleep, the more sensitive you are to pain of all kinds.

Creativity

The second evolutionary contribution that the REM-sleep dreaming state fuels is creativity. NREM sleep helps transfer and make safe newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain.
mnemonic collisions during REM sleep spark new creative insights as novel links are forged between unrelated pieces of information. Sleep cycle by sleep cycle, REM sleep helps construct vast associative networks of information within the brain. REM sleep can even take a step back, so to speak, and divine overarching insights and gist: something akin to general knowledge—that is, what a collection of information means as a whole, not just an inert back catalogue of facts.
It is both the act of dreaming and the associated content of those dreams that determine creative success.
When awake, we see only a narrow set of all possible memory interrelationships. The opposite is true, however, when we enter the dream state and start looking through the other (correct) end of the memory-surveying telescope. Using that wide-angle dream lens, we can apprehend the full constellation of stored information and their diverse combinatorial possibilities, all in creative servitude.
As we enter REM sleep and dreaming takes hold, an inspired form of memory mixology begins to occur. No longer are we constrained to see the most typical and plainly obvious connections between memory units. On the contrary, the brain becomes actively biased toward seeking out the most distant, nonobvious links between sets of information.
participants went to bed with disparate pieces of the jigsaw and woke up with the puzzle complete. It is the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts) and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). Or, said more simply, learning versus comprehension. REM sleep allows your brain to move beyond the former and truly grasp the latter.
“sleep on it.” Interestingly, this phrase, or something close to it, exists in most languages (from the French dormir sur un problem, to the Swahili kulala juu ya tatizo), indicating that the problem-solving benefit of dream sleep is universal, common across the globe.
Memories remain perilously vulnerable to any disruption of sleep (including that from alcohol) even up to three nights after learning, despite two full nights of natural sleep prior.
shorter sleep amounts predict lower work rate and slow completion speed of basic tasks. That is, sleepy employees are unproductive employees. Sleep-deprived individuals also generate fewer and less accurate solutions to work-relevant problems
individuals who obtained less sleep in the preceding days are the same people who consistently select less challenging problems. They opt for the easy way out, generating fewer creative solutions in the process.
participants in [studies looking at length of sleep and selection and execution of work challenges] do not perceive themselves as applying less effort to the work challenge, or being less effective, when they were sleep-deprived, despite both being true. They seemed unaware of their poorer work effort and performance—a theme of subjective misperception of ability when sleep-deprived

Business

business leaders mistakenly believe that time on-task equates with task completion and productivity. Even in the industrial era of rote factory work, this was untrue.
Why, then, do we overvalue employees that undervalue sleep?
A study across four large US companies found that insufficient sleep cost almost $2,000 per employee per year in lost productivity. That amount rose to over $3,500 per employee in those suffering the most serious lack of sleep.
Insufficient sleep robs most nations of more than 2 percent of their GDP—amounting to the entire cost of each country’s military. It’s almost as much as each country invests in education.
Individuals also like their jobs less when sleep-deprived—perhaps unsurprising considering the mood-depressing influence of sleep deficiency.
employees who sleep six hours or less are significantly more deviant and more likely to lie the following day than those who sleep six hours or more.
under-slept employees are more likely to blame other people in the workplace for their own mistakes,
Dr. Christopher Barns, a researcher in the Foster School of Business at Washington University, has found that the less an individual sleeps, the more likely they are to create fake receipts and reimbursement claims, and the more willing to lie to get free raffle tickets. Barns also discovered that under-slept employees are more likely to blame other people in the workplace for their own mistakes, and
under-slept employees are more likely to blame other people in the workplace for their own mistakes, and even try to take credit for other people’s successful work:
Ethical deviance linked to a lack of sleep also weasels its way onto the work stage in a different guise, called social loafing. The term refers to someone who, when group performance is being assessed, decides to exert less effort when working in that group than when working alone. Individuals see an opportunity to slack off and hide behind the collective hard work of others. They complete fewer aspects of the task themselves, and that work tends to be either wrong or of lower quality, relative to when they alone are being assessed. Sleepy employees therefore choose the more selfish path of least resistance when working in teams, coasting by on the disingenuous ticket of social loafing.
many of these studies report deleterious effects on business outcomes on the basis of only very modest reductions in sleep amount within an individual, perhaps twenty- to sixty-minute differences between an employee who is honest, creative, innovate, collaborative, and productive and one who is not.
Differences in individual leadership performance fluctuate dramatically from one day to the next, and the size of that difference far exceeds the average difference from one individual leader to another. So what explains the ups and downs of a leader’s ability to effectively lead, day to day? The amount of sleep they are getting is one clear factor.
The lower the quality of sleep that the supervisor reported getting from one night to the next accurately predicted poor self-control and a more abusive nature toward employees the following day, as reported by the employees themselves.
There was another equally intriguing result: in the days after a supervisor had slept poorly, the employees themselves, even if well rested, became less engaged in their jobs throughout that day as a consequence. It was a chain-reaction effect,
Unfortunately for bosses, a sleep-deprived employee will erroneously perceive a well-rested leader as being significantly less inspiring and charismatic than they truly
an hour of extra sleep still returned significantly higher wages in those eastern locations, somewhere in the region of 4 to 5 percent.

Performance

the likelihood of breaking an Olympic record has been clearly tied to time of day, being maximal at the natural peak of the human circadian rhythm in the early afternoon.
job performance of ‘owls’ as a whole is far less optimal in the mornings, and they are further prevented from expressing their true performance potential in the late afternoon and early evening as standard work hours end prior to its arrival. Most unfortunately, owls are more chronically sleep-deprived, having to wake up with the larks, but not being able to fall asleep until far later in the evening.
Obtain anything less than eight hours of sleep a night, and especially less than six hours a night, and the following happens: time to physical exhaustion drops by 10 to 30 percent, and aerobic output is significantly reduced. Similar impairments are observed in limb extension force and vertical jump height, together with decreases in peak and sustained muscle strength. Add to this marked impairments in cardiovascular, metabolic, and respiratory capabilities that hamper an underslept body, including faster rates of lactic acid buildup, reductions in blood oxygen saturation, and converse increases in blood carbon dioxide, due in part to a reduction in the amount of air that the lungs can expire. Even the ability of the body to cool itself during physical exertion through sweating—a critical part of peak performance—is impaired by sleep loss.
Post-performance sleep accelerates physical recovery from common inflammation, stimulates muscle repair, and helps restock cellular energy in the form of glucose and glycogen.
What is the recycle rate of a human being? That is, how long can a human go without sleep before their performance is objectively impaired? How much sleep can a human lose each night, and over how many nights, before critical processes of the brain fail? Is that individual even aware of how impaired they are when sleep-deprived? How many nights of recovery sleep does it take to restore the stable performance of a human after sleep loss?
The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.
With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will actually acclimate to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels. That low-level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline. Individuals fail to recognize how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health.
When participants were asked about their subjective sense of how impaired they were, they consistently underestimated their degree of performance disability.
Ten days of six hours of sleep a night was all it took to become as impaired in performance as going without sleep for twenty-four hours straight.
After four hours of sleep for six nights, participants’ performance was just as bad as those who had not slept for twenty-four hours straight—that is, a 400 percent increase in the number of microsleeps. By day 11 on this diet of four hours of sleep a night, participants’ performance had degraded even further, matching that of someone who had pulled two back-to-back all-nighters, going without sleep for forty-eight hours.
even after three nights of ad lib recovery sleep, performance did not return to that observed at the original baseline assessment when those same individuals had been getting a full eight hours of sleep regularly. Nor did any group recover all the sleep hours they had lost in the days prior.
After being awake for nineteen hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk.
the REM-sleep gift of facilitating accurate recognition and comprehension allows us to make more intelligent decisions and actions as a consequence. More specifically, the cool-headed ability to regulate our emotions each day—a key to what we call emotional IQ—depends on getting sufficient REM sleep night after night.

Learning

Sleep before learning refreshes our ability to initially make new memories.
Those who were awake throughout the day became progressively worse at learning, even though their ability to concentrate remained stable (determined by separate attention and response time tests). In contrast, those who napped did markedly better, and actually improved in their capacity to memorize facts. The difference between the two groups at six p.m. was not small: a 20 percent learning advantage for those who slept.
the more sleep spindles [a burst of brainwave activity often at the end of each individual slow wave of deep sleep] an individual has at night, the greater the restoration of overnight learning ability come the next morning.
For fact-based, textbook-like memory, the result was clear. It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep.
there was a 40 percent deficit in the ability of the sleep-deprived group to cram new facts into the brain (i.e., to make new memories), relative to the group that obtained a full night of sleep.
if you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter.
In terms of memory, then, sleep is not like the bank. You cannot accumulate a debt and hope to pay it off at a later point in time. Sleep for memory consolidation is an all-or-nothing event.

Sleep mechanics

Temperature is just one of many twenty-four-hour rhythms that the suprachiasmatic nucleus governs. Wakefulness and sleep are another. Wakefulness and sleep are therefore under the control of the circadian rhythm, and not the other way around.
Since your brain desires most of its REM sleep in the last part of the night, which is to say the late-morning hours, you will lose 60 to 90 percent of all your REM sleep, even though you are losing 25 percent of your total sleep time.
regardless of the amount of recovery opportunity, the brain never comes close to getting back all the sleep it has lost. This is true for total sleep time, just as it is for NREM sleep and for REM sleep. That humans (and all other species) can never “sleep back” that which we have previously lost is one of the most important take-homes of this book,
if you bring that person into a sleep laboratory, or take them to a hotel—both of which are unfamiliar sleep environments—one half of the brain sleeps a little lighter than the other, as if it’s standing guard with just a tad more vigilance due to the potentially less safe context that the conscious brain has registered while awake.
key function of deep NREM sleep, which predominates early in the night, is to do the work of weeding out and removing unnecessary neural connections. […] the dreaming stage of REM sleep, which prevails later in the night, plays a role in strengthening those connections.
A danger resides in this sleep profile wherein NREM dominates early in the night, followed by an REM sleep dominance later in the morning,
Due to sleep fragmentation, older individuals will suffer a reduction in sleep efficiency, defined as the percent of time you were asleep while in bed. If you spent eight hours in bed, and slept for all eight of those hours, your sleep efficiency would be 100 percent. If you slept just four of those eight hours, your sleep efficiency would be 50 percent. As healthy teenagers, we enjoyed a sleep efficiency of about 95 percent. As a reference anchor, most sleep doctors consider good-quality sleep to involve a sleep efficiency of 90 percent or above. By the time we reach our eighties, sleep efficiency has often dropped below 70 or 80 percent
If a pilot can only obtain a short nap opportunity (40–120 minutes) within a thirty-six-hour period, when should it occur so as to minimize cognitive fatigue and attention lapses: at the start of the first evening, in the middle of the night, or late the following morning? It first appeared to be counterintuitive, but Dinges and Rosekind made a clever, biology-based prediction. They believed that by inserting a nap at the front end of an incoming bout of sleep deprivation, you could insert a buffer, albeit temporary and partial, that would protect the brain from suffering catastrophic lapses in concentration. They were right.

Children and ageing

children need more sleep than their older siblings or parents, but also that the circadian rhythm of a young child runs on an earlier schedule. Children therefore become sleepy earlier and wake up earlier than their adult parents.
Adolescent teenagers […] have a different circadian rhythm from their young siblings. During puberty, the timing of the suprachiasmatic nucleus is shifted progressively forward: a change that is common across all adolescents, irrespective of culture or geography. So far forward, in fact, it passes even the timing of their adult parents.
Central to the goal of adolescent development is the transition from parental dependence to independence, all the while learning to navigate the complexities of peer-group relationships and interactions […] One way in which Mother Nature has perhaps helped adolescents unbuckle themselves from their parents is to march their circadian rhythms forward in time, past that of their adult mothers and fathers. This ingenious biological solution selectively shifts teenagers to a later phase when they can, for several hours, operate independently—and do so as a peer-group collective.
Studies of adolescents have identified a link between sleep disruption and suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, and, tragically, suicide completion in the days after.
Insufficient sleep has also been linked to aggression, bullying, and behavioral problems in children across a range of ages.
no matter what the age, the longer a child slept, the more intellectually gifted they were.
individuals who were sleeping longer obtained better grades across the board.
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.
By ten years of age, the twin with the longer sleep pattern was superior in their intellectual and educational abilities, with higher scores on standardized tests of reading and comprehension, and a more expansive vocabulary than the twin who was obtaining less sleep.
increasing sleep by way of delayed school start times wonderfully increases class attendance, reduces behavioral and psychological problems, and decreases substance and alcohol use.
NICUs that have implemented dim-lighting conditions during the day and near-blackout conditions at night. Under these conditions, infant sleep stability, time, and quality all improved. Consequentially, 50 to 60 percent improvements in neonate weight gain and significantly higher oxygen saturation levels in blood were observed, relative to those preterms who did not have their sleep prioritized and thus regularized. Better still, these well-slept preterm babies were also discharged from the hospital five weeks earlier!

Improving sleep

if you can only adhere to one [tip] each and every day, make it: going to bed and waking up at the same time of day no matter what. It is perhaps the single most effective way of helping improve your sleep, even though it involves the use of an alarm clock.
A bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3°C) is ideal for the sleep of most people, assuming standard bedding and clothing.
Selectively warming the feet and hands by just a small amount (1°F, or about 0.5°C) caused a local swell of blood to these regions, thereby charming heat out of the body’s core, where it had been trapped. The result of all this ingenuity: sleep took hold of the participants in a significantly shorter time, allowing them to fall asleep 20 percent faster than was usual,
You do not fall asleep faster because you are toasty and warm to the core. Instead, the hot bath invites blood to the surface of your skin, giving you that flushed appearance. When you get out of the bath, those dilated blood vessels on the surface quickly help radiate out inner heat, and your core body temperature plummets. Consequently, you fall asleep more quickly because your core is colder. Hot baths prior to bed can also induce 10 to 15 percent more deep NREM sleep
Waking up at the same time of day, every day, no matter if it is the week or weekend is a good recommendation for maintaining a stable sleep schedule if you are having difficulty with sleep. Indeed, it is one of the most consistent and effective ways of helping people with insomnia get better sleep.
The obvious methods involve reducing caffeine and alcohol intake, removing screen technology from the bedroom, and having a cool bedroom. In addition, patients must (1) establish a regular bedtime and wake-up time, even on weekends, (2) go to bed only when sleepy and avoid sleeping on the couch early/mid-evenings, (3) never lie awake in bed for a significant time period; rather, get out of bed and do something quiet and relaxing until the urge to sleep returns, (4) avoid daytime napping if you are having difficulty sleeping at night, (5) reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts and worries by learning to mentally decelerate before bed, and (6) remove visible clockfaces from view in the bedroom, preventing clock-watching anxiety at night.
One of the more paradoxical CBT-I methods used to help insomniacs sleep is to restrict their time spent in bed, perhaps even to just six hours of sleep or less to begin with. By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure—a greater abundance of adenosine.
progressively increased levels of physical activity in healthy males results in a corresponding progressive increase in the amount of deep NREM sleep they obtain on subsequent nights.
In younger, healthy adults, exercise frequently increases total sleep time, especially deep NREM sleep. It also deepens the quality of sleep, resulting in more powerful electrical brainwave activity. Similar, if not larger, improvements in sleep time and efficiency are to be found in midlife and older adults,
a clear bidirectional relationship, however, with a significant trend toward increasingly better sleep with increasing levels of physical activity, and a strong influence of sleep on daytime physical activity.
try not to exercise right before bed. Body temperature can remain high for an hour or two after physical exertion.
You should avoid going to bed too full or too hungry, and shy away from diets that are excessively biased toward carbohydrates (greater than 70 percent of all energy intake), especially sugar.

Twelve Tips for Healthy Sleep

Stick to a sleep schedule.
Exercise is great, but not too late in the day.
Avoid caffeine
Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed.
Avoid large meals and beverages late at night.
If possible, avoid medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep.
Don’t take naps after 3 p.m.
Relax before bed.
Take a hot bath before bed.
Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom.
Have the right sunlight exposure.
Don’t lie in bed awake.