why we sleep, by matthew walker

​Throughout my college career -- at school and during my finance internships -- I have always been intrigued by sleep. It felt as if everyone around me was competing on how little they slept, as if being sleep deprived gave them more clout. This strange behavior always fascinated me because I love sleeping. So when I came across Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep on Bill Gates’ 2019 Winter Reading List , I was super intrigued.

The moral of this story is that sleep is important. Routinely neglecting sleep impacts your ability to learn, your creativity, your problem-solving skills, your mental health, your emotional stability, and can cause all types of complications in your physical strength and immune system. 

It’s important to take some of the claims made by Walker with a grain of salt, which is also reflected in this scathing review by Alexey Guzey. In his mission of getting us to sleep more, Walker has a tendency to exaggerate facts beyond what science has clearly shown. He makes claims about sleep deprivation leading to diseases like cancer and Alzheimers, and suggests that the less you sleep, the shorter your life is. Despite these overstatements, Why We Sleep is still an important book, and is something that I wish more people my age would read. 

Here are some salient points raised by Walker that I have personally experienced:

• With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will acclimate to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels. Basically, you just start operating at a lower level
• Paying back your sleep debt on the weekend isn’t a great solution. Three full nights of recovery sleep are insufficient in restoring performance levels back to normal after a week of short sleeping. Adequate sleep should be prioritized throughout the week, and not just on the weekends
• Short sleep can increase hunger, compromise impulse control, and decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, making it harder to stay in good shape, or lose weight when dieting. I’ve definitely had late nights where I gave in to the cravings of vending machine snacks

Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. For something that we spend ¼ - ⅓ of our lives doing, I certainly think it is worth taking a few hours to learn about the magic of sleep.