I recently finished reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. This book was mentioned by Michael Pollan in his audiobook Caffeine. Pollan made it sound so interesting, I couldn’t resist reading it.
And let me say, it’s VERY interesting. And I’m not just saying that because I already own a sleep tracker. There is so much information in this book that shocked me.
For example, I was not aware that there’s a spike in both heart attacks and car accidents following spring forward (the changing of the clocks ahead an hour for daylight saving time). I was also not aware that drowsy (tired) driving kills more people in the US than drunk driving.
Another interesting fact — 10 consecutive days of sleeping for only 7 hours causes as much brain dysfunction as a full-night of no sleep. Having pulled more than one all-nighter in my life, I can’t imagine walking around like that all the time. Apparently many of us are doing just that, because humans are very bad at recognizing when they are sleep deprived.
The only thing I didn’t like about this book is that throughout, and mostly towards the end, I felt like the author was a little heavy-handed with the language and the attempts to sell me on the dangers of limited or poor quality sleep. I would have preferred a less impassioned statement of the facts.
I really found this to be fascinating and something that more people should read. Parents, too, should read this. He talks about the neurological role of sleep in brain development and the links between certain conditions/diseases and sleep, as well as the impact on education and learning.
P.S. If you’re wondering what a sleep tracker does, here’s a snapshot of some of the data mine collects for me.
The regularity is “unknown” because it’s only been running a few days this year. And NO, I didn’t actually sleep 10h21m. It seems to think I’m sleeping when I’m in bed, reading. I noticed today it has an “extra sensitive” mode, so I might enable that and see if the data comes out a little better.
It also now picks up breathing disturbances and snoring. It says I don’t snore, but that I’ve had “a few” breathing disturbances per night and no snoring. I wonder if it’s picking up the dogs or Dexter?
This, by the way, is an example of a good sleep duration (even when you subtract the 1-1.5 hours I was reading and not sleeping), but very poor quality sleep. I woke up a lot (5 times!!!) and I didn’t get very much deep sleep. I think it’s because of the weather, it was an extremely hot day and about 80º inside when I went to bed.
P.P.S. If you missed me the last few weeks, I’m sorry. With all the horribly tragic things going on in the world, it hasn’t felt right for me to blog about daily life, or trivial things like what I ate or the progress on my current puzzle. So, I’m back again with this because I do think this info on sleep is actually REALLY IMPORTANT (like the author, ha)! I doubt I will be posting daily, however, I’m trying to be more CONSISTENT (that one is for Tobias), so hopefully you’ll be seeing 1-3 posts per week going forward. AND NO I AM NOT GOING TO KEEP COUNTING THE QUARANTINE DAYS MOM!