Contemporary Authors

• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams Scribner (New York, NY), 2017

1. Why we sleep : unlocking the power of sleep and dreams LCCN 2017033123 Type of material Book Personal name Walker, Matthew P., author. Main title Why we sleep : unlocking the power of sleep and dreams / Matthew Walker, PhD. Edition First Scribner hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., [2017] ©2017 Description viii, 360 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9781501144318 (hardcover) 1501144316 (hardcover) 9781501144325 (trade paper) 1501144324 (trade paper) CALL NUMBER QP425 .W44 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley Website - https://psychology.berkeley.edu/people/matthew-p-walker

  Matthew P. Walker

  Professor
  Email Address:
  mpwalker@berkeley.edu
  Office:
  3331 Tolman Hall
  Office Hours:
  By Appointment Only
  Research Area:
  Cognitive Neuroscience
  Laboratory:
  Center for Human Sleep Science
  Website:
  Prof. Matt Walker
  Research Interests:
  Walker's research examines the impact of sleep on human health and disease.
  whatshotResearch Description
  Matthew Walker is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He has received funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets, including CBS 60 Minutes, National Geographic Channel, NOVA Science, NRP and the BBC. For more information, click here.

• Matthew Walker Website - https://www.sleepdiplomat.com/author

  Dr. Walker is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Why We Sleep. It has a singular goal: to reunite humanity with sleep.

  The book provides a complete description of, and prescription for, sleep. It answers critical questions about sleep: how do caffeine and alcohol affect sleep? What really happens during dreaming? Why do our sleep patterns change across a lifetime? How do common sleep pills affect us and can they do long-term damage?

  Charting cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and synthesizing decades of research and clinical practice, Why We Sleep explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood, and energy levels; regulate hormones; prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s, obesity and diabetes; slow the effects of aging; increase longevity; enhance the education and lifespan of our children; and boost the efficiency, success, and productivity of our businesses.

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  The book concludes with a provocative new vision for sleep in the modern world, one that aims to solve the greatest public-health challenge we now face: the global sleep-loss epidemic.

  Why We Sleep was recently selected for the prestigious Sundance Book Festival. It will be translated into more than 25 different languages. Why We Sleep can be found at all major books stores in the US (Scribner) and UK (Penguin Random House), and ordered online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Waterstones.

  As an author, Dr. Walker is represented by the talent agency, WME​.

  Should you be interested in contacting Dr. Walker as a writer, please email WME by clicking here.

  Scientist

  Dr. Walker earned his degree in neuroscience from Nottingham University, UK, and his PhD in neurophysiology from the Medical Research Council, London, UK. He subsequently became a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, USA.

  Currently, he is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He is also the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science.

  Dr. Walker’s research examines the impact of sleep on human health and disease. He has received numerous funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.

  His research examines the impact of sleep on human brain function in healthy and disease populations. To date, he has published over 100 scientific research studies.

• London Observer - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/24/why-lack-of-sleep-health-worst-enemy-matthew-walker-why-we-sleep

  'Sleep should be prescribed': what those late nights out could be costing you
  Sleep
  The Observer
  Leading neuroscientist Matthew Walker on why sleep deprivation is increasing our risk of cancer, heart attack and Alzheimer’s – and what you can do about it

  Rachel Cooke
  Rachel Cooke

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  Sun 24 Sep 2017 08.00 BST Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 23.50 GMT
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  Woman in different sleep positions
  Scientists count anything less than seven hours’ sleep as sleep deprivation. Photograph: Ian Hooton/Science Photo Library/Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF
  Matthew Walker has learned to dread the question “What do you do?” At parties, it signals the end of his evening; thereafter, his new acquaintance will inevitably cling to him like ivy. On an aeroplane, it usually means that while everyone else watches movies or reads a thriller, he will find himself running an hours-long salon for the benefit of passengers and crew alike. “I’ve begun to lie,” he says. “Seriously. I just tell people I’m a dolphin trainer. It’s better for everyone.”

  Walker is a sleep scientist. To be specific, he is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, a research institute whose goal – possibly unachievable – is to understand everything about sleep’s impact on us, from birth to death, in sickness and health. No wonder, then, that people long for his counsel. As the line between work and leisure grows ever more blurred, rare is the person who doesn’t worry about their sleep. But even as we contemplate the shadows beneath our eyes, most of us don’t know the half of it – and perhaps this is the real reason he has stopped telling strangers how he makes his living. When Walker talks about sleep he can’t, in all conscience, limit himself to whispering comforting nothings about camomile tea and warm baths. It’s his conviction that we are in the midst of a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic”, the consequences of which are far graver than any of us could imagine. This situation, he believes, is only likely to change if government gets involved.

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  Walker has spent the last four and a half years writing Why We Sleep, a complex but urgent book that examines the effects of this epidemic close up, the idea being that once people know of the powerful links between sleep loss and, among other things, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and poor mental health, they will try harder to get the recommended eight hours a night (sleep deprivation, amazing as this may sound to Donald Trump types, constitutes anything less than seven hours). But, in the end, the individual can achieve only so much. Walker wants major institutions and law-makers to take up his ideas, too. “No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation,” he says. “It sinks down into every possible nook and cranny. And yet no one is doing anything about it. Things have to change: in the workplace and our communities, our homes and families. But when did you ever see an NHS poster urging sleep on people? When did a doctor prescribe, not sleeping pills, but sleep itself? It needs to be prioritised, even incentivised. Sleep loss costs the UK economy over £30bn a year in lost revenue, or 2% of GDP. I could double the NHS budget if only they would institute policies to mandate or powerfully encourage sleep.”

  I get on a flight at 10am when people should be at peak alert, and half of the plane has immediately fallen asleep
  Why, exactly, are we so sleep-deprived? What has happened over the course of the last 75 years? In 1942, less than 8% of the population was trying to survive on six hours or less sleep a night; in 2017, almost one in two people is. The reasons are seemingly obvious. “First, we electrified the night,” Walker says. “Light is a profound degrader of our sleep. Second, there is the issue of work: not only the porous borders between when you start and finish, but longer commuter times, too. No one wants to give up time with their family or entertainment, so they give up sleep instead. And anxiety plays a part. We’re a lonelier, more depressed society. Alcohol and caffeine are more widely available. All these are the enemies of sleep.”

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  But Walker believes, too, that in the developed world sleep is strongly associated with weakness, even shame. “We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness. We want to seem busy, and one way we express that is by proclaiming how little sleep we’re getting. It’s a badge of honour. When I give lectures, people will wait behind until there is no one around and then tell me quietly: ‘I seem to be one of those people who need eight or nine hours’ sleep.’ It’s embarrassing to say it in public. They would rather wait 45 minutes for the confessional. They’re convinced that they’re abnormal, and why wouldn’t they be? We chastise people for sleeping what are, after all, only sufficient amounts. We think of them as slothful. No one would look at an infant baby asleep, and say ‘What a lazy baby!’ We know sleeping is non-negotiable for a baby. But that notion is quickly abandoned [as we grow up]. Humans are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent reason.” In case you’re wondering, the number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population and rounded to a whole number, is zero.

  The world of sleep science is still relatively small. But it is growing exponentially, thanks both to demand (the multifarious and growing pressures caused by the epidemic) and to new technology (such as electrical and magnetic brain stimulators), which enables researchers to have what Walker describes as “VIP access” to the sleeping brain. Walker, who is 44 and was born in Liverpool, has been in the field for more than 20 years, having published his first research paper at the age of just 21. “I would love to tell you that I was fascinated by conscious states from childhood,” he says. “But in truth, it was accidental.” He started out studying for a medical degree in Nottingham. But having discovered that doctoring wasn’t for him – he was more enthralled by questions than by answers – he switched to neuroscience, and after graduation, began a PhD in neurophysiology supported by the Medical Research Council. It was while working on this that he stumbled into the realm of sleep.

  Matthew Walker photographed in his sleep lab.
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  Matthew Walker photographed in his sleep lab. Photograph: Saroyan Humphrey for the Observer
  “I was looking at the brainwave patterns of people with different forms of dementia, but I was failing miserably at finding any difference between them,” he recalls now. One night, however, he read a scientific paper that changed everything. It described which parts of the brain were being attacked by these different types of dementia: “Some were attacking parts of the brain that had to do with controlled sleep, while other types left those sleep centres unaffected. I realised my mistake. I had been measuring the brainwave activity of my patients while they were awake, when I should have been doing so while they were asleep.” Over the next six months, Walker taught himself how to set up a sleep laboratory and, sure enough, the recordings he made in it subsequently spoke loudly of a clear difference between patients. Sleep, it seemed, could be a new early diagnostic litmus test for different subtypes of dementia.

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  After this, sleep became his obsession. “Only then did I ask: what is this thing called sleep, and what does it do? I was always curious, annoyingly so, but when I started to read about sleep, I would look up and hours would have gone by. No one could answer the simple question: why do we sleep? That seemed to me to be the greatest scientific mystery. I was going to attack it, and I was going to do that in two years. But I was naive. I didn’t realise that some of the greatest scientific minds had been trying to do the same thing for their entire careers. That was two decades ago, and I’m still cracking away.” After gaining his doctorate, he moved to the US. Formerly a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, he is now professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California.

  Does his obsession extend to the bedroom? Does he take his own advice when it comes to sleep? “Yes. I give myself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night, and I keep very regular hours: if there is one thing I tell people, it’s to go to bed and to wake up at the same time every day, no matter what. I take my sleep incredibly seriously because I have seen the evidence. Once you know that after just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep, your natural killer cells – the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day – drop by 70%, or that a lack of sleep is linked to cancer of the bowel, prostate and breast, or even just that the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen, how could you do anything else?”

  There is, however, a sting in the tale. Should his eyelids fail to close, Walker admits that he can be a touch “Woody Allen-neurotic”. When, for instance, he came to London over the summer, he found himself jet-lagged and wide awake in his hotel room at two o’clock in the morning. His problem then, as always in these situations, was that he knew too much. His brain began to race. “I thought: my orexin isn’t being turned off, the sensory gate of my thalamus is wedged open, my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex won’t shut down, and my melatonin surge won’t happen for another seven hours.” What did he do? In the end, it seems, even world experts in sleep act just like the rest of us when struck by the curse of insomnia. He turned on a light and read for a while.

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  Will Why We Sleep have the impact its author hopes? I’m not sure: the science bits, it must be said, require some concentration. But what I can tell you is that it had a powerful effect on me. After reading it, I was absolutely determined to go to bed earlier – a regime to which I am sticking determinedly. In a way, I was prepared for this. I first encountered Walker some months ago, when he spoke at an event at Somerset House in London, and he struck me then as both passionate and convincing (our later interview takes place via Skype from the basement of his “sleep centre”, a spot which, with its bedrooms off a long corridor, apparently resembles the ward of a private hospital). But in another way, it was unexpected. I am mostly immune to health advice. Inside my head, there is always a voice that says “just enjoy life while it lasts”.

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  The evidence Walker presents, however, is enough to send anyone early to bed. It’s no kind of choice at all. Without sleep, there is low energy and disease. With sleep, there is vitality and health. More than 20 large scale epidemiological studies all report the same clear relationship: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. To take just one example, adults aged 45 years or older who sleep less than six hours a night are 200% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven or eight hours a night (part of the reason for this has to do with blood pressure: even just one night of modest sleep reduction will speed the rate of a person’s heart, hour upon hour, and significantly increase their blood pressure).

  A lack of sleep also appears to hijack the body’s effective control of blood sugar, the cells of the sleep-deprived appearing, in experiments, to become less responsive to insulin, and thus to cause a prediabetic state of hyperglycaemia. When your sleep becomes short, moreover, you are susceptible to weight gain. Among the reasons for this are the fact that inadequate sleep decreases levels of the satiety-signalling hormone, leptin, and increases levels of the hunger-signalling hormone, ghrelin. “I’m not going to say that the obesity crisis is caused by the sleep-loss epidemic alone,” says Walker. “It’s not. However, processed food and sedentary lifestyles do not adequately explain its rise. Something is missing. It’s now clear that sleep is that third ingredient.” Tiredness, of course, also affects motivation.

  Sleep has a powerful effect on the immune system, which is why, when we have flu, our first instinct is to go to bed: our body is trying to sleep itself well. Reduce sleep even for a single night, and your resilience is drastically reduced. If you are tired, you are more likely to catch a cold. The well-rested also respond better to the flu vaccine. As Walker has already said, more gravely, studies show that short sleep can affect our cancer-fighting immune cells. A number of epidemiological studies have reported that night-time shift work and the disruption to circadian sleep and rhythms that it causes increase the odds of developing cancers including breast, prostate, endometrium and colon.

  Getting too little sleep across the adult lifespan will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. The reasons for this are difficult to summarise, but in essence it has to do with the amyloid deposits (a toxin protein) that accumulate in the brains of those suffering from the disease, killing the surrounding cells. During deep sleep, such deposits are effectively cleaned from the brain. What occurs in an Alzheimer’s patient is a kind of vicious circle. Without sufficient sleep, these plaques build up, especially in the brain’s deep-sleep-generating regions, attacking and degrading them. The loss of deep sleep caused by this assault therefore lessens our ability to remove them from the brain at night. More amyloid, less deep sleep; less deep sleep, more amyloid, and so on. (In his book, Walker notes “unscientifically” that he has always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both of whom were vocal about how little sleep they needed, both went on to develop the disease; it is, moreover, a myth that older adults need less sleep.) Away from dementia, sleep aids our ability to make new memories, and restores our capacity for learning.

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  And then there is sleep’s effect on mental health. When your mother told you that everything would look better in the morning, she was wise. Walker’s book includes a long section on dreams (which, says Walker, contrary to Dr Freud, cannot be analysed). Here he details the various ways in which the dream state connects to creativity. He also suggests that dreaming is a soothing balm. If we sleep to remember (see above), then we also sleep to forget. Deep sleep – the part when we begin to dream – is a therapeutic state during which we cast off the emotional charge of our experiences, making them easier to bear. Sleep, or a lack of it, also affects our mood more generally. Brain scans carried out by Walker revealed a 60% amplification in the reactivity of the amygdala – a key spot for triggering anger and rage – in those who were sleep-deprived. In children, sleeplessness has been linked to aggression and bullying; in adolescents, to suicidal thoughts. Insufficient sleep is also associated with relapse in addiction disorders. A prevailing view in psychiatry is that mental disorders cause sleep disruption. But Walker believes it is, in fact, a two-way street. Regulated sleep can improve the health of, for instance, those with bipolar disorder.

  I’ve mentioned deep sleep in this (too brief) summary several times. What is it, exactly? We sleep in 90-minute cycles, and it’s only towards the end of each one of these that we go into deep sleep. Each cycle comprises two kinds of sleep. First, there is NREM sleep (non-rapid eye movement sleep); this is then followed by REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. When Walker talks about these cycles, which still have their mysteries, his voice changes. He sounds bewitched, almost dazed.

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  “During NREM sleep, your brain goes into this incredible synchronised pattern of rhythmic chanting,” he says. “There’s a remarkable unity across the surface of the brain, like a deep, slow mantra. Researchers were once fooled that this state was similar to a coma. But nothing could be further from the truth. Vast amounts of memory processing is going on. To produce these brainwaves, hundreds of thousands of cells all sing together, and then go silent, and on and on. Meanwhile, your body settles into this lovely low state of energy, the best blood-pressure medicine you could ever hope for. REM sleep, on the other hand, is sometimes known as paradoxical sleep, because the brain patterns are identical to when you’re awake. It’s an incredibly active brain state. Your heart and nervous system go through spurts of activity: we’re still not exactly sure why.”

  Does the 90-minute cycle mean that so-called power naps are worthless? “They can take the edge off basic sleepiness. But you need 90 minutes to get to deep sleep, and one cycle isn’t enough to do all the work. You need four or five cycles to get all the benefit.” Is it possible to have too much sleep? This is unclear. “There is no good evidence at the moment. But I do think 14 hours is too much. Too much water can kill you, and too much food, and I think ultimately the same will prove to be true for sleep.” How is it possible to tell if a person is sleep-deprived? Walker thinks we should trust our instincts. Those who would sleep on if their alarm clock was turned off are simply not getting enough. Ditto those who need caffeine in the afternoon to stay awake. “I see it all the time,” he says. “I get on a flight at 10am when people should be at peak alert, and I look around, and half of the plane has immediately fallen asleep.”

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  So what can the individual do? First, they should avoid pulling “all-nighters”, at their desks or on the dancefloor. After being awake for 19 hours, you’re as cognitively impaired as someone who is drunk. Second, they should start thinking about sleep as a kind of work, like going to the gym (with the key difference that it is both free and, if you’re me, enjoyable). “People use alarms to wake up,” Walker says. “So why don’t we have a bedtime alarm to tell us we’ve got half an hour, that we should start cycling down?” We should start thinking of midnight more in terms of its original meaning: as the middle of the night. Schools should consider later starts for students; such delays correlate with improved IQs. Companies should think about rewarding sleep. Productivity will rise, and motivation, creativity and even levels of honesty will be improved. Sleep can be measured using tracking devices, and some far-sighted companies in the US already give employees time off if they clock enough of it. Sleeping pills, by the way, are to be avoided. Among other things, they can have a deleterious effect on memory.

  Those who are focused on so-called “clean” sleep are determined to outlaw mobiles and computers from the bedroom – and quite right, too, given the effect of LED-emitting devices on melatonin, the sleep-inducing hormone. Ultimately, though, Walker believes that technology will be sleep’s saviour. “There is going to be a revolution in the quantified self in industrial nations,” he says. “We will know everything about our bodies from one day to the next in high fidelity. That will be a seismic shift, and we will then start to develop methods by which we can amplify different components of human sleep, and do that from the bedside. Sleep will come to be seen as a preventive medicine.”

  What questions does Walker still most want to answer? For a while, he is quiet. “It’s so difficult,” he says, with a sigh. “There are so many. I would still like to know where we go, psychologically and physiologically, when we dream. Dreaming is the second state of human consciousness, and we have only scratched the surface so far. But I would also like to find out when sleep emerged. I like to posit a ridiculous theory, which is: perhaps sleep did not evolve. Perhaps it was the thing from which wakefulness emerged.” He laughs. “If I could have some kind of medical Tardis and go back in time to look at that, well, I would sleep better at night.”

  • Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker is published by Allen Lane (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

  Sleep in numbers
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  ■ Two-thirds of adults in developed nations fail to obtain the nightly eight hours of sleep recommended by the World Health Organisation.

  ■ An adult sleeping only 6.75 hours a night would be predicted to live only to their early 60s without medical intervention.

  ■ A 2013 study reported that men who slept too little had a sperm count 29% lower than those who regularly get a full and restful night’s sleep.

  ■ If you drive a car when you have had less than five hours’ sleep, you are 4.3 times more likely to be involved in a crash. If you drive having had four hours, you are 11.5 times more likely to be involved in an accident.

  ■ A hot bath aids sleep not because it makes you warm, but because your dilated blood vessels radiate inner heat, and your core body temperature drops. To successfully initiate sleep, your core temperature needs to drop about 1C.

  ■ The time taken to reach physical exhaustion by athletes who obtain anything less than eight hours of sleep, and especially less than six hours, drops by 10-30%.

  ■ There are now more than 100 diagnosed sleep disorders, of which insomnia is the most common.

  ■ Morning types, who prefer to awake at or around dawn, make up about 40% of the population. Evening types, who prefer to go to bed late and wake up late, account for about 30%. The remaining 30% lie somewhere in between.

• EveningStandard - https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/matthew-walker-meet-the-man-who-can-make-you-better-in-bed-a3799381.html

  Matthew Walker: meet the man who can make you better in bed
  The clocks have changed and the capital is restless — but neuroscientist Matthew Walker has found the solution

  KATIE LAW
  Monday 26 March 2018 15:30
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  Peace at last: neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker
  Peace at last: neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker Matt Writtle
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  Matthew Walker is probably one of the most influential people on the planet. The professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California in Berkeley has spent the past two decades studying sleep. Now he’s written a book about it.

  Why We Sleep, which came out last September, is a gripping account of why we sleep, why we dream, what happens to our brains when we are not awake and — crucially — how long-term sleep deprivation is killing us. Yes, killing us.

  Given that two-thirds of the adult population in the developed world consistently fail to get enough kip — enough being seven to eight hours a night — Walker’s work couldn’t be more timely.

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  In fact, the book became a bestseller the moment it came out, which in turn led Penguin to take the unusual step of releasing a paper-back edition after only four months.

  Why We Sleep has been at the top of Amazon’s bestseller list ever since, even knocking Yuval Harari’s Sapiens off the top slot last week. We are all obsessed by this apparently elusive commodity.

  Why do we dream? - Read Matthew Walker's exclusive essay for the Evening Standard

  Walker’s research, conducted on volunteers in a futuristic-sounding sleep lab — all beds and electrodes and scanners — in the bowels of the university building, proves conclusively that sleep deprivation contributes to depression, anxiety, obesity, memory loss, Alzheimer’s, cancer, stroke, infertility, heart attacks, an impaired immune system and more.

  It lowers testosterone levels in men, causes fatal car accidents and contributes to ADHD in adolescents, who are often prescribed Ritalin when what they really need is sleep.

  Worse still is the epidemic abuse of prescription sleeping pills, which far from inducing natural sleep are addictive sedatives that have devastating side effects and significantly raise mortality risk. Ultimately, however, Dr Sleep’s prescription is positive and blissfully simple: prioritise getting a good night’s sleep over everything else. That’s it.

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  Why do we dream? Matthew Walker explores the theories
  He has flown over to London on a lightning-quick publicity tour and is so in demand from the media that his publicist has had to put him on a limobike to get him through the London traffic on time. Bright-eyed and dapper in a grey tweed waistcoat, with a surprising shock of frosted blonde hair, Liverpudlian born Walker, 44, admits that he is a self-confessed sleep fascist. “I give myself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night,” he says, and concedes that his social life suffers.

  “Friends say, ‘shall we go out to dinner at 8’? I say ‘I can’t, I’m a 10am till 6.30pm kind of guy.’ I keep that very regular, no matter what,” he says, rapidly chowing down a box of salmon sashimi while we talk. “I’m trying to stay off the carbs”.

  He meditates up to four times a week using the Headspace app to relieve stress, which is the leading cause of insomnia, and to which “I’m just as susceptible as everyone else”; he cycles and goes to the gym daily; he avoids caffeine after midday and alcohol after 6pm.

  He lives with his long-term partner, a musician, “she’s the cool part of the equation in the arts, I’m the nerdy scientist,” he says, and they sleep happily in separate bedrooms, having negotiated a “sleep divorce” a year into their relationship.

  “The quality of the physical relationship that you have is actually increased when you undergo that sleep divorce, if the sleeping equation isn’t working.”

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  He admits modestly to being overwhelmed by the book’s success, because he didn’t know if he could write well — he can — yet acknowledges that the combination of our collective chronic fatigue and the explosive interest in neuroscience has created the perfect storm for “such a remarkable topic”.

  Not only remarkable but one that could really change your life.

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  Get a Sleep Divorce

  Snoring or thrashing about in bed can be a deal breaker so get a sleep divorce, says Walker. Thirty per cent of the population, when asked anonymously, will admit to not going to bed at the same time, or sleeping in the same bedroom as their partner.

  There’s a stigma attached because it implies that you don’t have a good sex life. But if you look at the data, says Walker, the opposite is true, so long as you have a bedroom goodnight routine.

  Find time to have a cuddle and do the same in the morning. The quality of your physical relationship will actually improve.

  How to Survive the Move to BST

  From a medical perspective, we should do away with British Summer Time entirely. On the last Sunday in March, when the clocks change, there is a marked spike in road traffic accidents and heart attacks, as a direct result of getting one hour less sleep. It’s hard to drag yourself back an entire hour in terms of bedtime. Instead, split the difference by going to bed and waking up 30 minutes earlier and later.

  Sleep Trackers and Orthosomnia

  Should we wear sleep trackers? Brands vary in their accuracy, says Walker, but the tech industry, including intelligent home systems that regulate light and temperature, will be revolutionised in the next few years and we’ll be tracking almost all of our physiology, including sleep, says Walker. But beware orthosomnia, a condition in which the tracker wearer becomes so obsessed that he or she isn’t getting the right kind of sleep, they get insomnia. Luckily it’s rare and trackers can help build a long-term picture of sleep patterns, says Walker.

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  Social loafing

  Current work culture dictates that longer working hours result in higher productivity. Wrong, retorts Walker, who’s on a mission to smash themyth. His data show that under-slept employees select fewer challenging problems, come up with the leastcreative solutions and will ride on the coat tails of others – known as social loafing. They are also more likely to lie.

  Under-slept bosses are rated less charismatic, even when their employees don’t know how much sleep they have had.

  Sleep hygiene and the economy

  Sleep deprivation is estimated to cost the UK economy up to £40 billion a year. Walker advises companies on how to have better “sleep hygiene”. Goldman Sachs and Procter and Gamble have introduced sleep hygiene courses. Nike and Google, two highly profit-driven companies, are among those to adopt more circadian rhythm-friendly staff schedules, differentiating between larks and owls, and allowing employees to set their own shift pattern. Just imagine the savings for the NHS and ultimately the entire UK economy

  Don’t Fall Prey to Social Jet Lag

  Getting up and going to bed early every weekday, followed by a weekend of staying up late and sleeping in, is, says Walker, a bad idea, otherwise known as social jet lag. You are “torturing your biology”, he says, because you are doing the equivalent of flying in and out of different European time zones every week. To improve sleep health, stick to the same times seven days a week.

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  Best silk pillowcases to prevent wrinkles and bedhead
  How to Avoid Real Jet Lag

  Travelling west to east is harder than vice-versa. Get into the new time zone by adjusting going to bed/getting up times by 15 minutes each day in the few days leading up to travel. Avoid alcohol and caffeine on flights and only sleep at the start of your trip, eating meals at the same time as your new time zone. Melatonin can re-set your body clock, as can getting sunlight in the morning without wearing sunglasses.

  Don’t Boast About How Little Sleep You Get

  It’s not cool and anyone who claims to be getting only four to five hours a night sleep is making irrational decisions. After 20 hours of being awake, your faculties are as impaired as that of a drunk driver, so yes, you can make decisions but you’ll be cognitively impaired. Trump is the perfect example. Matthew Walker has written an essay exclusively for the Standard.

  Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker (Penguin, £9.99)

  8 steps for the night of your dreams

  Go to bed and get up at the same time every day, seven days a week.

  Keep your bedroom cool. No more than 18 degrees C.

  Don’t drink caffeine after midday, or alcohol after 6pm.

  Don’t lie in bed awake. Get up and do something else until you feel sleepy again.

  A hot-water bottle placed at your feet will draw body heat downwards and cool core body temperature.

  Use blackout curtains or blinds.

  Keep lighting low for the two hours leading up to lights out.

  Turn computers, smartphones and tablets off an hour before lights out.

• From Publisher -

  Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, the Director of its Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, and a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard University. He has published over 100 scientific studies and has appeared on 60 Minutes, Nova, BBC News, and NPR’s Science Friday. Why We Sleep is his first book.

Sweet dreams are made of this

William Leith

Spectator. 335.9871 (Nov. 4, 2017): p51.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk

Full Text:

Why We Sleep

by Matthew Walker

Allen Lane, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 360

I've read several books about sleep recently, and their authors all tell me the same three things. The first is that, in the modern world, it's hard to get enough sleep. The second is that sleep is very important. Every night, we pass out. Every morning, we regain consciousness, half aware that time has passed. For a moment, we might have the impression we've just been flying through the air, or that we're about to be executed. The whole thing is totally weird. That's the third thing.

Before I get into the weirdness, I'll say something about the importance of sleep. Authors tend to think that what they're writing about is important. But sleep authors are a breed apart. They're like sleep salesmen. And I've never come across a sleep salesman quite as dedicated as Matthew Walker. An Englishman, he is the director of the sleep and neuroimaging laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. 'I am in love with sleep,' he tells us. 'I am in love with everything sleep is and does.'

So: what is sleep? Well, it's not 'the absence of wakefulness'. It's the presence of something, a different state--one that heals you, increases your lifespan, helps you to look slim and toned, makes you brighter and more charming, more attractive, sharper, better at maths and spelling, better at driving. I could go on for ages. Walker tells you, over and over, of the benefits of sleep. Reading late at night, I turned the pages, fascinated, hour after hour. I kept wanting to go to sleep. But not because the book is dull. It's like reading about the joy of swimming, and wanting to jump into a lake.

It's not just that sleep is good. It's that not sleeping--or even not sleeping for the full eight hours--can be terrible. I knew that five or six hours wasn't great. Walker tells us just how bad it can be. What's the worst sickness you can think of? Well, not sleeping enough might give you that very sickness. Sleeping too little, for instance, ruins your immune system. Walker cites an experiment in which people had a virus sprayed up their noses; people who got a good night's rest were much less likely to be laid low.

Not sleeping enough, Walker tells us, can lead to many conditions: 'Alzheimer's disease, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, suicide, stroke and chronic pain.' Also: 'cancer, diabetes, infertility ... ' But he doesn't just list these horrors. He explains, at length, how sleep wards them off. For instance, if you imagine your brain as a city, it has a sort of sewage network. When you use your brain to think, your brain cells emanate waste matter. When you sleep, your brain gets a 'power cleanse'--some of the cells shrink, allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flush out the debris. Some of this debris is the type of protein that causes Alzheimer's disease. 'Parenthetically, and unscientifically,' says Walker, he can think of two famous sleep-dodgers. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Maybe their sewage systems backed up.

Every animal sleeps. Insects sleep. Dinosaurs slept. Dolphins sleep by switching off half their brains, and then the other half, but never both at once. Sleep, we keep thinking, is not about doing nothing. It's like taking your car for a service. Every part of you is spruced up. And dreams are extremely important. Dreams enable you to make creative connections. Incidentally, you dream more as the night goes on. So if you only have six hours, your creativity will suffer.

When you dream, the connection is cut between your brain and your muscles, so you're temporarily paralysed. This stops you from thrashing around. Meanwhile, your eyes roll around in their sockets. If you suffer from PTSD, your brain might be trying to process the bad memories; if it fails, it might try again the next night. Hence recurring nightmares, which might ruin your sleep. Walker tells us about his research into recurring nightmares; it's fascinating.

As is the whole of this book. Is there a better book about sleep? I doubt it. He tells us about hundreds of other things--'microsleeps', falling asleep at the wheel, the way light and screens trick our body clocks, so we stay awake too long. And the less we sleep, the shorter our lives are. Yes, I thought, as I finished this book, sleep is hugely underrated. Then I looked at the clock. Could that really be the time?

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

Leith, William. "Sweet dreams are made of this." Spectator, 4 Nov. 2017, p. 51. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524609279/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bfb6ae70. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A524609279

Walker, Matthew: WHY WE SLEEP

Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2017):

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Full Text:

Walker, Matthew WHY WE SLEEP Scribner (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 10, 3 ISBN: 978-1-5011-4431-8

Revelations about sleep that illustrate its vital importance to our brains, our bodies, and our lives.The director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Walker has spent decades researching sleep and has served as a consultant to sports teams, financial institutions, and TV producers. In other words, he is an expert, but more importantly, he knows how to explain it all clearly to general readers. He begins by showing what sleep is and what it isn't, how other creatures sleep, and how it changes across a lifetime. In Part 2, he examines the numerous benefits of sleep and how it affects mental and physical health, such as the ability to learn and the fitness of the gut and the cardiovascular and immune systems. So important is sleep to our well-being that Walker counsels that the shorter one's sleep, the shorter one's life span. In Part 3, which peers into the brains of people dreaming, Walker provides examples of the sometimes-astonishing creativity and problem-solving power of dreams. This section also tackles the phenomenon of lucid dreams--i.e., dreams controlled by the dreamer. In Part 4, the author takes up sleep disorders and the harmful effects of sleep deprivation, not just to the individual, but to society. Walker counsels against sleeping pills and offers nondrug therapies that he has found to be effective. In the concluding chapter, "A New Vision for Sleep in the 21st Century," the author outlines his proposals for enhancing sleep quantity and quality: individual use of new technology, sleep education in schools, sleep reform in the workplace, public campaigns to heighten awareness of the hazards of drowsy driving, and, more elusive, societal change in sleep awareness. Readers, he cordially advises, may read the parts in any order they prefer and close their eyes and take a nap if they feel like it. Though readers seeking dream interpretation will be disappointed, Walker provides a well-organized, highly accessible, up-to-date report on sleep and its crucial role in a healthy life.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

"Walker, Matthew: WHY WE SLEEP." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192028/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=53ff476c. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192028

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

Publishers Weekly. 264.34 (Aug. 21, 2017): p107.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Full Text:

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

Matthew Walker. Simon & Schuster, $27 (340p) ISBN 978-1-5011-4431-8

Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, begins his first book by reminding readers that until quite recently, the routine that most of us go through nightly was a mystery. Adopting a conversational style that belies his research background, Walker conveys his insights into the process of sleep with enthralling clarity. He recounts how once, after giving a lecture, he was approached by a pianist, who made the seemingly incidental remark that, after a good night's sleep he can "just play" even demanding pieces, leading Walker to recognize how closely related learning is to rest. He also sheds new light on well-covered areas, revealing that Freud had developed a more biologically founded approach to dreams before formulating his famous theory. The biggest takeaway is not that lack of sleep can literally kill, but that most of us, without being in mortal danger, are still not getting nearly enough. Anyone who reads this book will (though perhaps only after a good night's sleep) learn a great deal about one of life's most basic, but also most profound, needs. Agent: Tina Bennett, William Morris Endeavor. (Oct.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

"Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams." Publishers Weekly, 21 Aug. 2017, p. 107. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501717375/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8744f978. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A501717375

Leith, William. "Sweet dreams are made of this." Spectator, 4 Nov. 2017, p. 51. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524609279/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bfb6ae70. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Walker, Matthew: WHY WE SLEEP." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192028/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=53ff476c. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams." Publishers Weekly, 21 Aug. 2017, p. 107. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501717375/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8744f978. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/21/why-we-sleep-by-matthew-walker-review
  Word count: 1401

  Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker review – how more sleep can save your life
  A neuroscientist has found a revolutionary way of being cleverer, more attractive, slimmer, happier, healthier and of warding off cancer – a good night’s shut-eye

  Mark O'Connell

  @mrkocnnll
  Thu 21 Sep 2017 07.30 BST Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 12.37 GMT
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  a woman sleeping
  Nightmare … sleep is a panacea for a bewildering array of conditions. Photograph: Barbara Jovanovic/EyeEm
  Awake at 4.30am the other morning, having been roused from sleep by my four-year-old son climbing into bed with my wife and me (a more or less nightly occurrence), I found myself sitting up and reading about the effects of insufficient sleep. It has been making me stupider, fatter, unhappier, poorer, sicker, worse at sex, as well as more likely to get cancer, Alzheimer’s and to die in a car crash. At the same time, my lack of sleep has been slowly but inexorably shrinking a) my chances of living into my mid 60s, b) my testicles.

  Why We Sleep by the neuroscientist Matthew Walker – my ill-chosen small-hours reading material – is filled with startling information about the effects of suboptimal shut-eye levels. It’s not a book you should even be thinking about in bed, let alone reading. If it weren’t too unsettling to permit sleep in the first place, it would be the stuff of nightmares. The marginalia in my review copy, scrawled in the wavering hand of a man receiving dark intimations of his own terrible fate – “OMFG”; “This is extremely bad!” – might seem less appropriate to an affably written popular science book than to some kind of arcane Lovecraftian grimoire.

  If you're sleeping for less than seven hours a night you’re doing yourself a disservice as grave as that of smoking
  Walker’s title is misleading – as he himself states in the early pages, it suggests that there might be only one reason why we sleep. In fact, he presents sleep as a panacea for a bewildering array of conditions that would otherwise cause the slow deterioration of body and mind. In one playful passage, he describes it as though he were marketing a new pharmaceutical:

  Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory, makes you more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested?

  Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books our weekly email
  Read more
  Well, yes, I for one am keenly interested in this wonder drug; the problem, though, is getting your hands on the stuff. Being kneed in the spine by a four-year-old in the dead of night turns out to be the least of it; by the time I’d finished Walker’s book, the whole of modernity lay revealed to me as a vast, many tentacled conspiracy against sleep. One of the book’s real strengths is how clearly it elucidates the extent of the damage wrought by our collective ignorance of the importance and complexity of sleep’s role in our lives, and the difficulty encountered by many of us in getting any.

  In terms of our natural sleeping tendencies, people can be divided into two broad groups, or “chronotypes”: morning larks and night owls. Each group operates along different circadian lines, and there is pretty much nothing owls can do to become larks – which is tough luck, because work and school scheduling overwhelmingly favour early risers. Owls are often forced, he writes, “to burn the proverbial candle at both ends. Greater ill health caused by a lack of sleep therefore befalls owls, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer, heart attack and stroke.”

  Forty winks under fig trees at Sydney’s Observatory Hill. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters
  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Forty winks under the fig trees at Sydney’s Observatory Hill. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters
  “The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep,” wrote EM Cioran, the patron saint of night owls whose weary visage kept floating into my mind as I read Why We Sleep. Walker’s worldview may not be as bleak as that of the Romanian essayist, but he does paint an intolerably grim portrait of a society in which an increasingly large proportion of us are getting a decreasing amount of sleep. What he calls our “cultural sleep norms” are under assault on multiple fronts:

  Midnight is no longer ‘mid night’. For many of us, midnight is usually the time when we consider checking our email one last time – and we know what often happens in the protracted thereafter. Compounding the problem, we do not then sleep any longer into the morning hours to accommodate these later sleep-onset times. We cannot. Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.

  Basically, if you’re regularly clocking in at under seven hours a night, you’re doing yourself a disservice as grave as that of regularly smoking or drinking to excess. And as someone who tends to chalk up six hours as a solid victory, and who feels – or at least felt before reading this book – that he can get by on five, I was especially disturbed by the revelation that sleep-deprived people often don’t recognise themselves as such.

  That low level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline. Individuals fail to recognise how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health. A link between the former and the latter is rarely made in their mind.

  What's the one change that's worked for you to tackle sleep problems?
  Read more
  The book bears a sobering and vital message, too, about the centrality of sleep to the proper development of young minds. Early school starting times – particularly in the US, where, barbarically, almost half of public high schools start before 7.20am – are disastrous for the mental health of teenagers. There is serious evidence, Walker suggests, for viewing lack of sleep as a factor in the onset of depression and schizophrenia.

  Despite the direness of his warning, Walker’s tone is mostly chipper and likable in the standard pop-sci style, and he is excellent at explaining complex neurological phenomena for a general readership. He does occasionally get bogged down in ill-advised wordplay (here he is on marine mammals and REM sleep, for example: “Seals in the ocean will sample but a soupçon of the stuff”). There is also a deeply weird passage that attempts, via “The Sound of Silence”, to explain sleep’s benefits to memory, but which really only demonstrates how badly a paragraph can fall victim to what I assume are the reprint restrictions on Simon and Garfunkel lyrics. “Perhaps you know the song and lyrics,” beseeches Walker. “Simon and Garfunkel describe meeting their old friend, darkness (sleep). They speak of relaying the day’s events to the sleeping brain at night in the form of a vision, softly creeping – a gentle information upload, if you will.”

  But I suppose it’s churlish to take issue with the prose of a person who is trying to save you from an existence of exhaustion and misery, terminating in early death – a bit like grumbling about insufficient legroom in a life raft. Because that’s what this book is. It’s probably a little too soon to tell you that Why We Sleep saved my life, but I can tell you that it’s been an eye-opener.

  • Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine is published by Granta. Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (Allen Lane, £20). To order a copy for £17, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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