Book Review: "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker

You do not know how sleep deprived you are when you are sleep deprived.

- Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

As someone who tends to have more bad sleeps than good ones, I looked into a book entitled 'Why We Sleep' by Matthew Walker to hopefully get some good tips on how to improve my sleep health. I quite possibly got a few that I can implement to some degree. But what I got first was a frightening prospect that my issues with sleep are pretty much going to work entirely out of my favour if they haven't been doing so already. Things like pouring cereal two times into one bowl, accidentally putting on two different socks and even down to packing the wrong stuff in my bag, these might be minor things that result from a lack of sleep - but I have learnt that they can have dire consequences. As someone who enjoys their time awake at night and believes that a few hours less could not do me worse - this is an eye-opening revelation that a few hours less isn't only harmful, it's deadly.

One of the first things I learnt from this book is that sleep is required by all living things and that might sound like something really common, but it is the next thing that really made me think. Humans are the only living things that intentionally deprive themselves of sleep. Even though we are the only creatures who are aware of the biological benefits of sleep, we tend to just deprive ourselves anyway because we have been taught that we can 'catch up' another time and there can be 'sleep debt' that we can pay off some other day when we can sleep better. However, that is not the case and even one or two days without sufficient sleep can be really bloody harmful. People who practice poor sleep routines and don't get the full eight hours of actual good sleep are prone to not live as long as those who do.

In the midst of reading I decided to get myself my third coffee of the day (which is pretty good for me, I've lowered it over the past year and now limit myself). I did not yet realise that I was about to receive a personal attack on my use of caffeine. Caffeine is the only legal and acceptable psychoactive drug and my what a culture it has. I have learnt that it disturbs our 24-hour-clock which regulates how sleepy we feel by basically building a wall in front of it.

However, the chemical that makes us feel tired is continuously producing, it's now just doing it without our knowledge and so, when the caffeine damn breaks, the tiredness floods in via the form of a caffeine crash. With a half-live of 5-7 hours, my mid-afternoon coffee might be doing more damage than I realise - leading to things like bad quality sleep which in turn, leads to internal issues. Will this stop me from drinking coffee? No. Will I now think about how I drink coffee? I want to say yes, but also no. Matthew Walker, you will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

But moving on from caffeine (it felt way too personal), I also learnt a lot about sleep and dreams. One really intriguing fact I learnt is that muscle movement is designed not to happen whilst we are asleep to stop us from acting upon our dreams as we are dreaming them. The absurdity of dreams means that acting them out whilst we are in them could be fatal. It felt a bit weird in this section because it was talking all about how objects move and things feel real in dreams, I was almost compelled to pick apart the movie Inception (2010) for scientific accuracies and inaccuracies. As sleep and dreams regulate the brain and its functions, this is another way that sleep depravation could actually be deadly.

One of the weird things I learnt is that someone who is sleep deprived will never actually realise their full potential until they have had enough sleep because sleep deprivation always holds back some aspect of the person whether that be intellect, personality, creativity etc. There are debts we pay for not sleeping and our wellbeing is the most concerning, but one of the things that is even weirder is it seems to diminish our very identities. Someone who is sleep deprived will always measure themselves as being less sleep deprived than they actually are. Therefore, when someone who believes that they can act on so little sleep is assuring you that they can, you cannot possibly believe them.

From microsleeps being deadly as they cause one car accident every hour in the USA to how to optimise a baby's sleep, from REM sleep to the cancers linked to sleep deprivation and even all the way through to the neuroscience of how our sleep helps our brain regulate itself, Matthew Walker puts together a jigsaw puzzle not just of why we sleep at all, but how fatal it could be for us not to. As a millennial who was sold a culture of caffeine and night-owl routines, there are so many things wrong with our lack of sleep. It is not just that though, Matthew Walker even argues for how schools are actually harming the sleep cycles of teenagers and children, how work does not fit the schedule of most of the people and how they sleep in the western world and how this can all lead to really deadly consequences for all of us. But unfortunately, there is not a lot we can do about it.

A frighteningly scientific book about how we sleep, why we do it and how we might die with having just a few hours less than eight hours a night, this book teeters upon the dystopian reality that has been built to cage us, enslave us and ultimately, kill us off. Well, that might be an extreme analysis but if you read the book then you will know exactly what I am talking about.