👋🏻, I'm Julia.

Notes

To consolidate learnings from this book, try checking out the following podcast episodes to hear the author, Matthew Walker, interviewed.

• Joe Rogan
• Jordan Harbinger
• Dr. Chatterjee

Introduction to the mechanics of sleep

• Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.
• “If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.”
• ...sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day—Mother Nature’s best effort yet at contra-death.
• Everyone generates a circadian rhythm (circa, meaning “around,” and dian, derivative of diam, meaning “day”). Indeed, every living creature on the planet with a life span of more than several days generates this natural cycle.
• Starting at “12 pm” on the far left, body temperature begins to rise, peaking late in the afternoon. The trajectory then changes. Temperature begins to decline again, dropping below that of the midday start-point as bedtime approaches. Your biological circadian rhythm coordinates a drop in core body temperature as you near typical bedtime, reaching its nadir, or low point, about two hours after sleep onset. However, this temperature rhythm is not dependent upon whether you are actually asleep.
• For some people, their peak of wakefulness arrives early in the day, and their sleepiness trough arrives early at night. These are “morning types,” and make up about 40 percent of the populace. They prefer to wake at or around dawn, are happy to do so, and function optimally at this time of day. Others are “evening types,” and account for approximately 30 percent of the population. They naturally prefer going to bed late and subsequently wake up late the following morning, or even in the afternoon. The remaining 30 percent of people lie somewhere in between morning and evening types, with a slight leaning toward eveningness...
• An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl.
• ...humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples. Appreciating this evolutionary context, the benefits of such genetically programmed variation in sleep/wake timing preferences can be understood.
• ...melatonin helps regulate the timing of when sleep occurs by systemically signaling darkness throughout the organism. But melatonin has little influence on the generation of sleep itself: a mistaken assumption that many people hold.
• One consequence of increasing adenosine in the brain is an increasing desire to sleep. This is known as sleep pressure.
• Caffeine works by successfully battling with adenosine for the privilege of latching on to adenosine welcome sites—or receptors—in the brain. Once caffeine occupies these receptors, however, it does not stimulate them like adenosine, making you sleepy. Rather, caffeine blocks and effectively inactivates the receptors, acting as a masking agent.
• Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours. Aging also alters the speed of caffeine clearance: the older we are, the longer it takes our brain and body to remove caffeine, and thus the more sensitive we become in later life to caffeine’s sleep-disrupting influence.
• After waking up in the morning, could you fall back asleep at ten or eleven a.m.? If the answer is “yes,” you are likely not getting sufficient sleep quantity and/or quality. Can you function optimally without caffeine before noon? If the answer is “no,” then you are most likely self-medicating your state of chronic sleep deprivation.
• Other questions that can draw out signs of insufficient sleep are: If you didn’t set an alarm clock, would you sleep past that time? (If so, you need more sleep than you are giving yourself.) Do you find yourself at your computer screen reading and then rereading (and perhaps rereading again) the same sentence? (This is often a sign of a fatigued, under-slept brain.) Do you sometimes forget what color the last few traffic lights were while driving? (Simple distraction is often the cause, but a lack of sleep is very much another culprit.)

NREM and REM sleep

• ...dramatic deceleration of neural time may be the reason we believe our dream life lasts far longer than our alarm clocks otherwise assert.
• We have learned that the two stages of sleep—NREM and REM—play out in a recurring, push-pull battle for brain domination across the night. The cerebral war between the two is won and lost every ninety minutes, ruled first by NREM sleep, followed by the comeback of REM sleep.
• A key function of deep NREM sleep, which predominates early in the night, is to do the work of weeding out and removing unnecessary neural connections. In contrast, the dreaming stage of REM sleep, which prevails later in the night, plays a role in strengthening those connections.
• Sleep may elegantly manage and solve our memory storage crisis, with the general excavatory force of NREM sleep dominating early, after which the etching hand of REM sleep blends, interconnects, and adds details. Since life’s experience is ever changing, demanding that our memory catalog be updated ad infinitum, our autobiographical sculpture of stored experience is never complete. As a result, the brain always requires a new bout of sleep and its varied stages each night so as to auto-update our memory networks based on the events of the prior day.
• A sleep spindle—a punchy burst of brainwave activity that often festoons the tail end of each individual slow wave. Sleep spindles occur during both the deep and the lighter stages of NREM sleep, even before the slow, powerful brainwaves of deep sleep start to rise up and dominate. One of their many functions is to operate like nocturnal soldiers who protect sleep by shielding the brain from external noises. The more powerful and frequent an individual’s sleep spindles, the more resilient they are to external noises that would otherwise awaken the sleeper.
• As we fall asleep, the thalamus—the sensory gate, seated deep in the middle of the brain—blocks the transfer of perceptual signals (sound, sight, touch, etc.) up to the top of the brain, or the cortex. By severing perceptual ties with the outside world, not only do we lose our sense of consciousness (explaining why we do not dream in deep NREM sleep, nor do we keep explicit track of time), this also allows the cortex to “relax” into its default mode of functioning. That default mode is what we call deep slow-wave sleep. It is an active, deliberate, but highly synchronous state of brain activity.
• As your brain shifts from the fast-frequency activity of waking to the slower, more measured pattern of deep NREM sleep, the very same long-range communication advantage becomes possible. The steady, slow, synchronous waves that sweep across the brain during deep sleep open up communication possibilities between distant regions of the brain, allowing them to collaboratively send and receive their different repositories of stored experience. In this regard, you can think of each individual slow wave of NREM sleep as a courier, able to carry packets of information between different anatomical brain centers. One benefit of these traveling deep-sleep brainwaves is a file-transfer process.
• When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities).
• Why did evolution decide to outlaw muscle activity during REM sleep? Because by eliminating muscle activity you are prevented from acting out your dream experience.

The evolution of sleep

• The very simplest forms of unicellular organisms that survive for periods exceeding twenty-four hours, such as bacteria, have active and passive phases that correspond to the light-dark cycle of our planet. It is a pattern that we now believe to be the precursor of our own circadian rhythm, and with it, wake and sleep.
• Sleep is of ancient origin. It appeared with the very earliest forms of planetary life. Like other rudimentary features, such as DNA, sleep has remained a common bond uniting every creature in the animal kingdom.
• For now, our most accurate estimate of why different species need different sleep amounts involves a complex hybrid of factors, such as dietary type (omnivore, herbivore, carnivore), predator/prey balance within a habitat, the presence and nature of a social network, metabolic rate, and nervous system complexity.
• Only birds and mammals, which appeared later in the evolutionary timeline of the animal kingdom, have full-blown REM sleep.
• Regardless of the amount of recovery opportunity, the brain never comes close to getting back all the sleep it has lost. This is true for total sleep time, just as it is for NREM sleep and for REM sleep. That humans (and all other species) can never “sleep back” that which we have previously lost is one of the most important take-homes.
• But if you bring that person into a sleep laboratory, or take them to a hotel—both of which are unfamiliar sleep environments—one half of the brain sleeps a little lighter than the other, as if it’s standing guard with just a tad more vigilance due to the potentially less safe context that the conscious brain has registered while awake. The more nights an individual sleeps in the new location, the more similar the sleep is in each half of the brain. It is perhaps the reason why so many of us sleep so poorly the first night in a hotel room.
• Nourishment will, for a time, push aside the need for sleep, though it cannot be sustained for long. Starve a fly and it will stay awake longer, demonstrating a pattern of food-seeking behavior. The same is true for humans. Individuals who are deliberately fasting will sleep less as the brain is tricked into thinking that food has suddenly become scarce.
• The practice of biphasic sleep is not cultural in origin, however. It is deeply biological. All humans, irrespective of culture or geographical location, have a genetically hardwired dip in alertness that occurs in the mid-afternoon hours.
• Those that abandoned regular siestas went on to suffer a 37 percent increased risk of death from heart disease across the six-year period, relative to those who maintained regular daytime naps. The effect was especially strong in workingmen, where the ensuing mortality risk of not napping increased by well over 60 percent.
• From these clues, I offer a theorem: the tree-to-ground re-engineering of sleep was a key trigger that rocketed Homo sapiens to the top of evolution’s lofty pyramid. At least two features define human beings relative to other primates. I posit that both have been beneficially and causally shaped by the hand of sleep, and specifically our intense degree of REM sleep relative to all other mammals: (1) our degree of sociocultural complexity, and (2) our cognitive intelligence. REM sleep, and the act of dreaming itself, lubricates both of these human traits.
• Our shift from tree to ground sleeping instigated an ever more bountiful amount of relative REM sleep compared with other primates, and from this bounty emerged a steep increase in cognitive creativity, emotional intelligence, and thus social complexity. This, alongside our increasingly dense, interconnected brains, led to improved daily (and nightly) survival strategies. In turn, the harder we worked those increasingly developed emotional and creative circuits of the brain during the day, the greater was our need to service and recalibrate these ever-demanding neural systems at night with more REM sleep. As this positive feedback loop took hold in exponential fashion, we formed, organized, maintained, and deliberatively shaped ever larger social groups. The rapidly increasing creative abilities could thus be spread more efficiently and rapidly, and even improved by that ever-increasing amount of hominid REM-sleep that enhances emotional and social sophistication. REM-sleep dreaming therefore represents a tenable new contributing factor, among others, that led to our astonishingly rapid evolutionary rise to power, for better and worse—a new (sleep-fueled), globally dominant social superclass.

Sleep throughout a human life-cycle

• REM sleep acts as an electrical fertilizer during this critical phase of early life. Dazzling bursts of electrical activity during REM sleep stimulate the lush growth of neural pathways all over the developing brain, and then furnish each with a healthy bouquet of connecting ends, or synaptic terminals.
• The time of life when REM sleep is greatest is the same stage when the brain is undergoing the greatest construction (same for all mammals).
• Alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of.
• Sadly, we do not yet fully understand what the long-term effects are of fetal or neonate REM-sleep disruption, alcohol-triggered or otherwise. Only that blocking or reducing REM sleep in newborn animals hinders and distorts brain development, leading to an adult that is socially abnormal.
• The downgrading of the REM-sleep portion, and the upswing in NREM-sleep dominance, continues, throughout early and mid-childhood. That balance will finally stabilize to an 80/20 NREM/REM sleep split by the late teen years, and remain so throughout early and mid-adulthood.
• REM sleep plays an essential role in this proliferation process, helping to populate brain neighborhoods with neural connectivity, and then activate those pathways with a healthy dose of informational bandwidth. But since this first round of brain wiring is purposefully overzealous, a second round of remodeling must take place. It does so during late childhood and adolescence. Here, the architectural goal is not to scale up, but to scale back for the goal of efficiency and effectiveness.
• Sleep researcher Irwin Feinberg discovered something fascinating about how this operation of downscaling takes place within the adolescent brain. His findings help justify an opinion you may also hold: adolescents have a less rational version of an adult brain, one that takes more risks and has relatively poor decision-making skills.
• Feinberg proposed that the rise and fall of deep-sleep intensity were helping lead the maturational journey through the precarious heights of adolescence, followed by safe onward passage into adulthood. Recent findings have supported his theory. As deep NREM sleep performs its final overhaul and refinement of the brain during adolescence, cognitive skills, reasoning, and critical thinking start to improve, and do so in a proportional manner with that NREM sleep change.
• Findings helped explain why rationality is one of the last things to flourish in teenagers, as it is the last brain territory to receive sleep’s maturational treatment.
• During puberty, the timing of the suprachiasmatic nucleus is shifted progressively forward: a change that is common across all adolescents, irrespective of culture or geography.
• Central to the goal of adolescent development is the transition from parental dependence to independence, all the while learning to navigate the complexities of peer-group relationships and interactions. One way in which Mother Nature has perhaps helped adolescents unbuckle themselves from their parents is to march their circadian rhythms forward in time, past that of their adult mothers and fathers. This ingenious biological solution selectively shifts teenagers to a later phase when they can, for several hours, operate independently—and do so as a peer-group collective.
• That older adults simply need less sleep is a myth. Older adults appear to need just as much sleep as they do in midlife, but are simply less able to generate that (still necessary) sleep.
• Core impairments of sleep that occur with aging are: (1) reduced quantity/quality, (2) reduced sleep efficiency, and (3) disrupted timing of sleep.
• As you enter your fourth decade of life, there is a palpable reduction in the electrical quantity and quality of that deep NREM sleep. You obtain fewer hours of deep sleep, and those deep NREM brainwaves become smaller, less powerful, and fewer in number. Passing into your mid- and late forties, age will have stripped you of 60 to 70 percent of the deep sleep you were enjoying as a young teenager. By the time you reach seventy years old, you will have lost 80 to 90 percent of your youthful deep sleep.
• It means that elderly individuals fail to connect their deterioration in health with their deterioration in sleep, despite causal links between the two having been known to scientists for many decades.
• The second hallmark of altered sleep as we age, and one that older adults are more conscious of, is fragmentation. The older we get, the more frequently we wake up throughout the night.
• The third sleep change with advanced age is that of circadian timing. In sharp contrast to adolescents, seniors commonly experience a regression in sleep timing, leading to earlier and earlier bedtimes. The cause is an earlier evening release and peak of melatonin as we get older, instructing an earlier start time for sleep.
• The areas of the brain that suffer the most dramatic deterioration with aging are, unfortunately, the very same deep-sleep-generating regions—the middle-frontal regions seated above the bridge of the nose. The more severe the deterioration that an older adult suffers within this specific mid-frontal region of their brain, the more dramatic their loss of deep NREM sleep.

Sleep and memory

• The hippocampus helps apprehend these passing experiences and binds their details together. A long, finger-shaped structure tucked deep on either side of your brain, the hippocampus offers a short-term reservoir, or temporary information store, for accumulating new memories. Unfortunately, the hippocampus has a limited storage capacity, almost like a camera roll or, to use a more modern-day analogy, a USB memory stick.
• Those who napped did markedly better, and actually improved in their capacity to memorize facts. The difference between the two groups at six p.m. was not small: a 20 percent learning advantage for those who slept.
• ...observed a strikingly reliable loop of electrical current pulsing throughout the brain that repeated every 100 to 200 milliseconds. The pulses kept weaving a path back and forth between the hippocampus, with its short-term, limited storage space, and the far larger, long-term storage site of the cortex (analogous to a large-memory hard drive).fn2 In that moment, we had just become privy to an electrical transaction occurring in the quiet secrecy of sleep: one that was shifting fact-based memories from the temporary storage depot (the hippocampus) to a long-term secure vault (the cortex).
• The more sleep spindles an individual has at night, the greater the restoration of overnight learning ability come the next morning.
• The concentration of NREM-sleep spindles is especially rich in the late-morning hours, sandwiched between long periods of REM sleep. Sleep six hours or less and you are shortchanging the brain of a learning restoration benefit that is normally performed by sleep spindles.
• The second benefit of sleep for memory comes after learning, one that effectively clicks the “save” button on those newly created files. In doing so, sleep protects newly acquired information, affording immunity against forgetting: an operation called consolidation.
• For fact-based, textbook-like memory, the result was clear. It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep.
• The cycle repeats each day and night, clearing out the cache of short-term memory for the new imprinting of facts, while accumulating an ever-updated catalog of past memories. Sleep is constantly modifying the information architecture of the brain at night. Even daytime naps as short as twenty minutes can offer a memory consolidation advantage, so long as they contain enough NREM sleep.
• Applying stimulation during REM sleep, or during wakefulness across the day, did not offer similar memory advantages. Only stimulation during NREM sleep, in synchronous time with the brain’s own slow mantra rhythm, leveraged a memory improvement.
• Sleep powerfully, yet very selectively, boosted the retention of those words previously tagged for “remembering,” yet actively avoided the strengthening of those memories tagged for “forgetting.”
• The type of sleep responsible for the overnight motor-skill enhancement, carrying with it societal and medical lessons. The increases in speed and accuracy, underpinned by efficient automaticity, were directly related to the amount of stage 2 NREM, especially in the last two hours of an eight-hour night of sleep (e.g., from five to seven a.m., should you have fallen asleep at eleven p.m.). Indeed, it was the number of those wonderful sleep spindles in the last two hours of the late morning—the time of night with the richest spindle bursts of brainwave activity—that were linked with the offline memory boost.
• Ten days of six hours of sleep a night was all it took to become as impaired in performance as going without sleep for twenty-four hours straight. And like the total sleep deprivation group, the accruing performance impairment in the four-hour and six-hour sleep groups showed no signs of leveling out.

Sleep deprivation

• YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW SLEEP-DEPRIVED YOU ARE WHEN YOU ARE SLEEP-DEPRIVED.
• With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will actually acclimate to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels. That low-level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline.
• After being awake for nineteen hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk.
• After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours.
• A structure located in the left and right sides of the brain, called the amygdala—a key hot spot for triggering strong emotions such as anger and rage, and linked to the fight-or-flight response—showed well over a 60 percent amplification in emotional reactivity in the participants who were sleep-deprived.
• With a full night of plentiful sleep, we have a balanced mix between our emotional gas pedal (amygdala) and brake (prefrontal cortex). Without sleep, however, the strong coupling between these two brain regions is lost.
• Insufficient sleep does not, therefore, push the brain into a negative mood state and hold it there. Rather, the under-slept brain swings excessively to both extremes of emotional valence, positive and negative.
• If you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter. In terms of memory, then, sleep is not like the bank. You cannot accumulate a debt and hope to pay it off at a later point.
• In what can be described as a nighttime power cleanse, the purifying work of the glymphatic system is accomplished by cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain.
• One piece of toxic debris evacuated by the glymphatic system during sleep is amyloid protein—the poisonous element associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Other dangerous metabolic waste elements that have links to Alzheimer’s disease are also removed by the cleaning process during sleep, including a protein called tau, as well as stress molecules produced by neurons when they combust energy and oxygen during the day.
• Adults forty-five years or older who sleep fewer than six hours a night are 200 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven to eight hours a night. This finding impresses how important it is to prioritize sleep in midlife.
• After participants had been restricted to four to five hours of sleep for a week, the cells of these tired individuals had become far less receptive to insulin. In this sleep-deprived state, the cells were stubbornly resisting the message from insulin and refusing to open up their surface channels.
• Inadequate sleep decreased concentrations of the satiety-signaling hormone leptin and increased levels of the hunger-instigating hormone ghrelin.
• Sleep loss increases levels of circulating endocannabinoids, which, as you may have guessed from the name, are chemicals produced by the body that are very similar to the drug cannabis. Like marijuana use, these chemicals stimulate appetite and increase your desire.
• When you are not getting enough sleep, the body becomes especially stingy about giving up fat. Instead, muscle mass is depleted while fat is retained.
• There was a clear, linear relationship with infection rate. The less sleep an individual was getting in the week before facing the active common cold virus, the more likely it was that they would be infected and catch a cold.
• However, inflammation has a dark side. Left switched on without a natural return to peaceful quiescence, a nonspecific state of chronic inflammation causes manifold health problems, including those relevant to cancer. Cancers are known to use the inflammation response to their advantage. For example, some cancer cells will lure inflammatory factors into the tumor mass to help initiate the growth of blood vessels that feed it with more nutrients and oxygen.
• The less sleep an individual obtains, or the worse the quality of sleep, the more damaged the capstone telomeres of that individual’s chromosomes.

Dreams

• Dreams are not, therefore, a wholesale replay of our waking lives.
• Between 35 and 55 percent of emotional themes and concerns that participants were having while they were awake during the day powerfully and unambiguously resurfaced in the dreams they were having at night.
• Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called noradrenaline are completely shut off within your brain when you enter this dreaming sleep state. In fact, REM sleep is the only time during the twenty-four-hour period when your brain is completely devoid of this anxiety-triggering molecule. Noradrenaline, also known as norepinephrine, is the brain equivalent to a body chemical you already know and have felt the effects of: adrenaline (epinephrine).
• The process of REM-sleep dreaming accomplishes two critical goals: (1) sleeping to remember the details of those valuable, salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them into autobiographical perspective, yet (2) sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that had previously been wrapped around those memories.
• Confirming the importance of the dream state, the better the quality of REM sleep from one individual to the next across that rested night, the more precise the tuning within the emotional decoding networks of the brain the next day. Through this platinum-grade nocturnal service, better REM-sleep quality at night provided superior comprehension of the social world the next day.
• Solutions seemed more effortless when the brain was being bathed by the afterglow of dream sleep. Based on response times, solutions arrived more instantaneously following an REM sleep awakening, relative to the slower, deliberative solutions that came when that same individual was exiting NREM sleep or when they were awake during the day. The lingering vapors of REM sleep were providing a more fluid, divergent, “open-minded” state of information processing.
• As we enter REM sleep and dreaming takes hold, an inspired form of memory mixology begins to occur. No longer are we constrained to see the most typical and plainly obvious connections between memory units. On the contrary, the brain becomes actively biased toward seeking out the most distant, nonobvious links between sets of information.
• It is sleep that builds connections between distantly related informational elements that are not obvious in the light of the waking day. Our participants went to bed with disparate pieces of the jigsaw and woke up with the puzzle complete. It is the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts) and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). Or, said more simply, learning versus comprehension. REM sleep allows your brain to move beyond the former and truly grasp the latter.

Insomnia

• Being sleep deprived is not insomnia. In the field of medicine, sleep deprivation is considered as (i) having the adequate ability to sleep; yet (ii) giving oneself an inadequate opportunity to sleep—that is, sleep-deprived individuals can sleep, if only they would take the appropriate time to do so. Insomnia is the opposite: (i) suffering from an inadequate ability to generate sleep, despite (ii) allowing oneself the adequate opportunity to get sleep. People suffering from insomnia therefore cannot produce sufficient sleep quantity/quality, even though they give themselves enough time to do so (seven to nine hours).
• The raised metabolic rate triggered by fight-or-flight nervous system activity, which is common in insomnia patients, results in a higher core body temperature. We must drop core body temperature by a few degrees to initiate sleep, which becomes more difficult in insomnia patients suffering a raised metabolic rate and higher operating internal temperature, including in the brain.
• Higher levels of the alertness-promoting hormone cortisol, and sister neurochemicals adrenaline and noradrenaline. All three of these chemicals raise heart rate.
• Simply put, the insomnia patients could not disengage from a pattern of altering, worrisome, ruminative brain activity.
• Patients with insomnia have a lower quality of sleep, reflected in shallower, less powerful electrical brainwaves during deep NREM. They also have more fragmented REM sleep, peppered by brief awakenings that they are not always aware of, yet still cause a degraded quality of dream sleep. All of which means that insomnia patients wake up not feeling refreshed.

Causes of poor sleep

• One of the few universal ways of forcing animals of all kinds to sleep less than normal amounts is to limit food, applying a degree of starvation. When food becomes scarce, sleep becomes scarce, as animals try to stay awake longer to forage. Part of the reason that these hunter-gatherer tribes are not obese is because they are constantly searching for food, which is never abundant for long stretches.
• Five key factors have powerfully changed how much and how well we sleep: (1) constant electric light as well as LED light, (2) regularized temperature, (3) caffeine (discussed in chapter 2), (4) alcohol, and (5) a legacy of punching time cards.
• The feeblest of bedside lamps pumps out anywhere from 20 to 80 lux. A subtly lit living room, where most people reside in the hours before bed, will hum at around 200 lux. Despite being just 1 to 2 percent of the strength of daylight, this ambient level of incandescent home lighting can have 50 percent of the melatonin-suppressing influence within the brain.
• Does reading on the iPad actually change sleep quantity/quality above and beyond the timing of melatonin? It does, in three concerning ways. First, individuals lost significant amounts of REM sleep following iPad reading. Second, the research subjects felt less rested and sleepier throughout the day following iPad use at night. Third was a lingering aftereffect, with participants suffering a ninety-minute lag in their evening rising melatonin levels for several days after iPad use ceased—almost like a digital hangover effect.
• Alcohol sedates you out of wakefulness, but it does not induce natural sleep. The electrical brainwave state you enter via alcohol is not that of natural sleep; rather, it is akin to a light form of anesthesia.
• Alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of. When the body metabolizes alcohol it produces by-product chemicals called aldehydes and ketones. The aldehydes in particular will block the brain’s ability to generate REM sleep.
• The overnight work of REM sleep, which normally assimilates complex memory knowledge, had been interfered with by the alcohol. More surprising, perhaps, was the realization that the brain is not done processing that knowledge after the first night of sleep. Memories remain perilously vulnerable to any disruption of sleep (including that from alcohol) even up to three nights after learning, despite two full nights of natural sleep prior.

How to improve sleep

• Your nocturnal melatonin levels are therefore controlled not only by the loss of daylight at dusk, but also the drop in temperature that coincides with the setting sun. Environmental light and temperature therefore synergistically, though independently, dictate nightly melatonin levels and sculpt the ideal timing of sleep.
• The need to dump heat from our extremities is also the reason that you may occasionally stick your hands and feet out from underneath the bedcovers at night due to your core becoming too hot, usually without your knowing.
• A bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3°C) is ideal for the sleep of most people, assuming standard bedding and clothing.
• When you get out of the bath, those dilated blood vessels on the surface quickly help radiate out inner heat, and your core body temperature plummets. Consequently, you fall asleep more quickly because your core is colder. Hot baths prior to bed can also induce 10 to 15 percent more deep NREM sleep in healthy adults.
• __Waking up at the same time of day, every day, no matter if it is the week or weekend is a good recommendation for maintaining a stable sleep schedule if you are having difficulty with sleep. Indeed, it is one of the most consistent and effective ways of helping people with insomnia get better sleep (even if it involves the use of an alarm clock).
• Ambien-induced sleep, however, not only failed to match these benefits (despite the animals sleeping just as long), but caused a 50 percent weakening (unwiring) of the brain-cell connections originally formed during learning. In doing so, Ambien-laced sleep became a memory eraser, rather than engraver.
• Natural sleep is one of the most powerful boosters of the immune system, helping ward off infection. Why, then, do individuals who are taking sleeping pills that purportedly “improve” sleep suffer higher rates of various infections, when the opposite is predicted? It is possible that medication-induced sleep does not provide the same restorative immune benefits as natural sleep.
• There is a bidirectional relationship, with a significant trend toward increasingly better sleep with increasing levels of physical activity, and a strong influence of sleep on daytime physical activity. Participants also feel more alert and energetic as a result of the sleep improvement, and signs of depression proportionally decrease.
• Try not to exercise right before bed. Body temperature can remain high for an hour or two after physical exertion. Should this occur too close to bedtime, it can be difficult to drop your core temperature sufficiently to initiate sleep due to the exercise-driven increase in metabolic rate.
• Eating a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet for two days decreases the amount of deep NREM sleep at night, but increases the amount of REM sleep dreaming, relative to a two-day diet low in carbohydrates and high in fat.

Why society should care about sleep

• When you are not getting enough sleep, you work less productively and thus need to work longer to accomplish a goal. This means you often must work longer and later into the evening, arrive home later, go to bed later, and need to wake up earlier, creating a negative feedback loop.
• Participants do not perceive themselves as applying less effort to the work challenge, or being less effective, when they were sleep-deprived, despite both being true.
• In the days after a supervisor had slept poorly, the employees themselves, even if well rested, became less engaged in their jobs throughout that day as a consequence. It was a chain-reaction effect, one in which the lack of sleep in that one superordinate person in a business structure was transmitted on like a virus, infecting even well-rested employees with work disengagement and reduced productivity.
• Forced by the hand of early school start times, this state of chronic sleep deprivation is especially concerning considering that adolescence is the most susceptible phase of life for developing chronic mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and suicidality.
• It is the lack of REM sleep—that critical stage occurring in the final hours of sleep that we strip from our children and teenagers by way of early school start times—that creates the difference between a stable and unstable mental state.
• An added reason for making sleep a top priority in the education and lives of our children concerns the link between sleep deficiency and the epidemic of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Children with this diagnosis are irritable, moodier, more distractible and unfocused in learning during the day, and have a significantly increased prevalence of depression and suicidal ideation. If you make a composite of these symptoms (unable to maintain focus and attention, deficient learning, behaviorally difficult, with mental health instability), and then strip away the label of ADHD, these symptoms are nearly identical to those caused by a lack of sleep.