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" 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. "

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" I think sleep is probably the neglected stepsister in the health conversation today. I think we've done a good job regarding physical activity and diet, but sleep has remained out there in the cold, and that's surprising to me. "

Matthew Walker

Good

Sleep

Job

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Matthew Walker

Wait

Sleep

" Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call 'the sedatives.' And what you're doing is just knocking your brain out. You're not putting it into natural sleep. "

" It's not clear whether the brain actually is designed to have nightmares or whether this is actually the process going awry. "

" If sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made. "

" No one wants to give up time with their family or entertainment, so they give up sleep instead. "

Matthew Walker

Time

Sleep

" 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. "

" Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain. Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it. "

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

" Back in the 1940s, people were sleeping on average just a little bit over eight hours a night, and now, in the modern age, we're down to around 6.7, 6.8 hours a night. "

" I just tell people I'm a dolphin trainer. It's better for everyone. "

" 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. "

" You're trying to sleep off a debt that you've lumbered your brain and body with during the week, and wouldn't it be lovely if sleep worked like that? Sadly, it doesn't. Sleep is not like the bank, so you can't accumulate a debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time. "

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

" The fact that we don't have that biologic pressure to have highly polyphasic sleep, I think, probably tells us something in terms of, truly, whether it's useful or not. "

Matthew Walker

Useful

Fact

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think the first general point to make from epidemiological studies across millions of people is the following - that short sleep predicts a shorter life. It predicts all cause mortality. "

" We know that efficiency and effectiveness are increased when you're getting sufficient sleep, and it will take you longer to do the same thing on an underslept brain, which means you end up having to stay awake longer. So goes the vicious cycle. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Light is a profound degrader of our sleep. "

" It's not that we simply get old, and memory starts to go, and sleep starts to deteriorate. But those two things actually are significantly interrelated. "

Matthew Walker

Sleep

Memory

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "