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" If we didn't need eight hours of sleep and could survive on six, Mother Nature would have done away with 25 percent of our sleep time millions of years ago. Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do. "

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" You should not actually stay in bed for very long awake, because your brain is this remarkably associative device, and it quickly learns that the bed is about being awake. So you should go to another room - a room that's dim. Just read a book - no screens, no phones - and, only when you're sleepy, return to the bed. "

Matthew Walker

Phones

Brain

Book

" It's simply that older adults don't seem to be able to generate sleep efficiently, and that's why they're not getting it. "

" Do you tend to sleep in during the weekends? That usually signals that you're trying to sleep off a debt you've accumulated during the week. "

" I have long been puzzled by the entrenched mentality, and often enforced practice, of longer work hours and less sleep. Innumerable policies exist within the workplace regarding smoking, substance abuse, ethical behaviour, and injury and disease prevention. "

" Falling asleep is like landing a plane. It takes time. You've got to sort of gradually descend. I think one of the problems with insufficient sleep is people are not very good at predicting how poorly they are doing when they are under-slept. "

" Midnight is the time when we think, 'Well, we should probably send our last email; let me just check Facebook one more time.' "

Matthew Walker

Last

Midnight

" Light is a profound degrader of our sleep. "

" I think many people walk through their lives in an under-slept state not realizing it. It's become this new natural baseline. "

" We now know that we imprint information during the day. We sort of - that seed is planted there within the brain during the day. In other words, we learn information. But we also know that that vision that was planted in the brain still remains in the sound of silence, in this - in the dark of night. "

" The amount of sleep - the total amount of sleep that you get - starts to decrease the older that we get. I think one of the myths out there is that we simply need less sleep as we age, and that's not true, in fact. "

" Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need. "

" Sleep-deprived individuals also generate fewer and less accurate solutions to problems. "

" If you look at how humans tend to want to sleep, it seems to be either, you know, sort of a monophasic way or at least a biphasic way, where there's, perhaps, a long bout during the night and then maybe a siesta-like pattern during the day. "

" Below seven hours of sleep, there are objective impairments in the body. Eight hours are recommended. "

" Some people actually sleep better when the significant other is with them. For other couples, it's the opposite. "

" I give myself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night. "

" I think we perhaps are, with sleep, where we were with smoking about 50 years ago, in that we had all of the science, and it was right there for the public discussion, but it's not yet adequately sort of percolated out into policy or even just public wisdom. "

" What is dreaming, and what happens, and are there any real benefits to dreaming? Well, to take a step back, I think it's important to note that dreaming essentially is a time when we all become flagrantly psychotic. "

" No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation. It sinks down into every possible nook and cranny. And yet no one is doing anything about it. "

" Regularity is a key: going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time no matter what. But I think, also, it's not just about quantity - that's what we've been discovering. It's also about quality. "

" We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness. "

" Dream sleep provides a fascinating neurochemical soothing balm. It is during dream sleep and only during dream sleep when our brain shuts off a stress-related neurochemical called noradrenalin. "

" The time of night when you sleep makes a significant difference in terms of the structure and quality of your sleep. "

" Friends say, 'Shall we go out to dinner at 8?' I say, 'I can't, I'm a 10 A.M.-till-6:30 P.M. kind of guy.' I keep that very regular, no matter what. "

Matthew Walker

Kind

Friends

" Stay away from screens, especially those LED screens. Those blue-light emitting devices fool your brain into thinking that it's still daytime, even though it's night-time and you want to get to sleep. "

" It's during dream sleep where we start to actually take the sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional experiences that we've been having. And sleep almost divorces that emotional, bitter rind from the memory experiences that we've had during the day. "

" My name is Matthew Walker, I am a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and I am the author of the book 'Why We Sleep.' "

" Your subjective sense of how well you're doing under conditions of sleep deprivation is a miserable predictor of, objectively, how you actually are doing. "

" As you try to tweak your sleep one way or the other, you might be, you might be doing great - you might do better at remembering details of an event, but you might end up being poorer at abstracting the gist or the rules associated with it. "

" That short-sleeping that we're now suffering is a consequence of our lifestyle. It's not a consequence of evolutionary habituation. "