Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
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Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Matthew Walker (Author), Steve West (Narrator), Simon & Schuster Audio (Publisher)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 31,053 ratings
#1 Best Seller in Physical Illness & Disease
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The first sleep book by a leading scientific expert - Professor Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley's Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab - reveals his groundbreaking exploration of sleep, explaining how we can harness its transformative power to change our lives for the better.

Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when we don't sleep. Compared to the other basic drives in life - eating, drinking, and reproducing - the purpose of sleep remained elusive.

But an explosion of scientific discoveries in the last 20 years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Among so many other things, within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity.

Walker answers important questions about sleep: How do caffeine and alcohol affect sleep? What really happens during REM sleep? Why do our sleep patterns change across a lifetime? How do common sleep aids affect us, and can they do long-term damage? Charting cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs and synthesizing decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood, and energy levels; regulate hormones; prevent cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes; slow the effects of aging; increase longevity; enhance the education and lifespan of our children, and boost the efficiency, success, and productivity of our businesses. Clear-eyed, fascinating, and immensely accessible, Why We Sleep is the crucial account on sleep that will forever change listeners' minds on the subject.

Previous page
  1. Listening Length
    13 hours and 52 minutes
  2. Author
    Matthew Walker
  3. Narrator
    Steve West
  4. Audible release date
    October 3, 2017
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Simon & Schuster Audio
  7. ASIN
    B0752XRB5F
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 13 hours and 52 minutes
Author Matthew Walker
Narrator Steve West
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date October 03, 2017
Publisher Simon & Schuster Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B0752XRB5F
Best Sellers Rank #488 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#1 in Sleep Disorders
#1 in Physical Illness & Disease
#3 in Anatomy & Physiology (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
31,053 global ratings
Very in depth
5 Stars
Very in depth
This books gets very technical and in depth on a lot of topics. If that stuff bores you this book might not be for you.If you want a summary of a lot of the topics of this book, the author was on the Joe Rogan experience. I first found out about this book because of that podcast and I felt like this book was similar to that podcast, but just more in depth showing actual studies and charts to back his claims.
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Top reviews from the United States

Stephen T Simms
5.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading for a healthy life
Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2024
Verified Purchase
Get the most accurate information about how important it is to get sleep from the Sleep Scientist. I was impressed with the author, Matthew Walker, and his eloquent writing talent. My English teachers would be impressed with the quality of the diction and vocabulary. A thoroughly education and enjoyable read. Now, get some good sleep! This book will show you how important it is.
3 people found this helpful
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2024
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Everyone Should read this book! It helps you understand all the components of your life that sleep Touches & the necessity of "good quality" sleep. Very enjoyable & informative.
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A. Menon
4.0 out of 5 stars Informative overview of the necessity of sleep
Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2019
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Why We Sleep is an overview of the author's research into the purpose of sleep as well as the consequences of a lack of it. It discusses a lot of issues and the author gives his views on the evolutionary benefits and distinctiveness of humans, so it really is quite comprehensive. Most people today, myself included, just are somehow unable to get a healthy amount of uninterrupted sleep and the author does a good job of explaining the consequences of that to the individual through multiple cognitive lenses. He also considers the consequence to the country as a whole through its loss of productive capacity due to overworking.

The book is split into four, largely independent sections. The author begins by discussing how sleep occurs, including some of the neuroscience and the chemical cycles associated with our sleep schedule. The reader learns about the marginal differences between certain physiological cycles and the 24 hour day. In addition the causes of jetlag are explored as well as the required adjustment for changing time zones. The author discusses a bunch of experiments done where we were able to learn about our cicadian cycles and some of the differences in sleep requirements any cycle times by age. The author also highlights his novel view on how REM sleep was associated with human ability to light a fire which allowed them to sleep on the ground rather than be in an unstable position in a tree and this evolutionary advancement was essential for modern development. Perhaps, probably not, but the author truly is impassioned about the subject with strong views. The author then gets into why we need sleep and discusses with abundant experimental evidence, the benefits of sleep to cognitive abilities and the necessity of it for healthy living. Some remarkable pathologies are discussed, for example there was an individual who lost the ability to go to sleep and their body slowly lost its ability to function and the disease proved quickly fatal. The author highlights that the Guinness Book of World Records struck the longest period without sleep as a category due to its terrible health consequences and the author spends time on the consequences of lack of sleep to driving abilities highlighting the large number of fatalities that follow. The author also discusses the benefits of sleep to overall body health and gives substantial experimental evidence to the regenerative benefits of sleep to natural ailments. The author does highlight that sleep will not just cure cancer but simultaneously implicitly argues that it might. So the author, with evidence, strongly argues that sleep has the ability to help one regenerate far more than the general scientific community currently advocates. The author gets into dreaming and how sleep breaks up. He discusses how each form of sleep is required and they have different functional benefits. Furthermore the body needs for NREM and REM sleep differ in immediate priority but not in absolute priority and these results are discussed with experimental evidence for how the body catches up on sleep after being deprived. The author discusses multiple memory experiments that depend on prior sleep conditions and highlights the substantially better performance statistics of students who have had enough sleep prior to trying to learn facts. The author then discusses the consequences of sleeping pills, which are considered significant and detrimental. The author also clarifies the difference between sedation and sleep and makes it very clear that sedation is not sleep and does not serve as a remedy and can be counterproductive. Alcohol's detrimental effects are considered by their impact on sleep for example. The author goes through several common sleeping tablets and makes it clear he does not believe any are substitutes and argues they can become dependencies that create major long term problems. The author then discusses how much better the world could be if we all paid more attention to sleep and how overall productivity of the society could be enhanced. This sort of analysis is interesting but also in need of being the most skeptical of in terms of being a realistic analysis.

Why We Sleep is informative and entertaining. It is exaggerated at times and so aspects of the credibility of the book can be highlighted. The author argues multiple times how even one night of sub optimal sleep has distinct impacts on ability and how an all nighter can be catastrophic, only to bring up an example in which an individual goes without sleep for multiple days to then sleep and make a major scientific discovery. The point of the example was to display the benefits of sleep but it erodes the earlier argument that any lack of sleep puts the individual at a massive handicap. Thus the author argues too forcefully for the unrealistic, that we need 8 hours a day without exception, while highlighting that he himself often cant sleep properly once a week. Despite the at times marginally inconsistent tone, the book is a good reminder of the importance of sleep, a good reference for the scientific benefits of sleep and important tutorial on the health requirements for sleep.
27 people found this helpful
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LenZen
5.0 out of 5 stars A Wake-Up Call for Better Sleep
Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2023
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"I was once fond of saying, 'Sleep is the third pillar of good health, alongside diet and exercise.' I have changed my tune. Sleep is more than a pillar; it is the foundation on which the other two health bastions sit. Take away the bedrock of sleep, or weaken it just a little, and careful eating or physical exercise become less than effective, as we shall see."

― from “Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams”

Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" is one of the two most important books I have read in my life1. Having done a little stock trading along with having survived several tech industry "death marches," things which are quite antithetical to good sleep, I had little idea just how destructive to your health lack of sleep is. A few years back, however, I began to hear that lack of sleep was correlated with diseases such as Alzheimer's, but this did not strike me as convincing since correlation is not causation. Indeed, a little later, I heard about this book at work but was somewhat ambivalent. It's just going to tell me that doctors think sleep is essential but are vague as to why were my thoughts.

Luckily I noticed an episode of Sam Harris's podcast "Making Sense" in which he interviewed Walker. Since Sam Harris is a figure whose judgment I highly respect, and I know he is very discerning about whom he invites on as guests, I decided there was probably more of value to say about sleep than I initially thought.

Correlation and Causation

Walker's book makes a compelling case that sleep is the bedrock of good health. He convincingly demonstrates that lack of good sleep can lead to downward spirals in health with the development of health conditions that make it hard to sleep, leading to more serious health conditions due to lack of sleep, making it even harder to sleep… and so on into a vicious cycle. Walker is careful to lay out in detail when the causal mechanisms are well understood, as in the case of Alzheimer's and cancer, and when lack of sleep is currently a suspect, although the exact causal mechanism has yet to be established. By the end of the book, I realized, however, that sleep is so foundational that even a mere correlation to some bad health condition is enough to make lack of good sleep a prime suspect worth considering as a cause.

Organization and Style

According to Walker, "Why We Sleep" is organized so that later chapters can be read without a strict need to read earlier ones first. Thus, if you use sleeping pills and want to know why you should not, he says it is okay to and, indeed, encourages you to jump to that section right away. That being said, I found the writing style so engaging (with a few minor instances of excessive detail) and the content so important that I read it straight through. Having read it this way, my sense was that the book frontloads its most important content: It explains in detail, with specifics such as the chemicals involved, why you feel more tired at certain parts of the day than others. To give you the motivation to get good sleep, the deleterious effects of lack of sleep also come near the beginning of the book.

The Enormous and Far-Ranging Effects of Poor Sleep

The effects of lack of sleep go beyond just affecting your physical health, however, and Walker shows just how destructive lack of sleep will be on your ability to learn new things. One of the most remarkable findings is that you need to get good sleep after learning new information. You cannot even get a single night of suboptimal sleep the first night, or some information will be lost permanently.

Conversely, if you get that first night of good sleep after learning something new, sleep on subsequent nights will continue to solidify what you have learned: all while you sleep! This is just one case where Walker details how, unfortunately, missed sleep cannot be well compensated for by more sleep later: Permanent losses are involved.

Dreams

Some of the most fascinating information in the book is on the role of dreams. Here we learn of their therapeutic qualities, including some of the underlying biochemistry involved. Discoveries here have led to a better understanding of PTSD, including better treatment methods. Walker also describes how dreams foster creativity by establishing connections between distantly related pieces of information stored in the brain. Here Walker includes a particularly fascinating anecdote of how Edison enhanced his creativity by waking himself from naps and immediately recording his thoughts.

Empathy For Different Circadian Rhythms

Throughout the book, Walker emphasizes how what we have learned about sleep has implications for how we should view people who may not have what seem like "normal" sleep patterns more empathetically. In particular, he emphasizes that teenagers want to get up and go to bed later, not due to laziness but because they run on a different circadian rhythm. It is something that is biologically hardwired into them. A consequence is that forcing school start times incompatible with this has devastating effects on how well they learn compared to well they could. Similar facts are true of people who are naturally "night owls" and run on different circadian rhythms than the rest of us.

Minor Flaws

Walker's book has only a few minor flaws:

1. Although he provides an excellent explanation of why most sleeping pills should be avoided, he does not mention whether this includes melatonin.

2. His discussion of the nationwide dollar impacts of poor sleep could be better presented. The unfortunate truth is that given the numbers we have heard spent on wars and, especially, financial bailouts and stimulus, rattling off numbers that are “merely” in the hundreds of millions or even low billions hits us in a place we are now numb.

3. Although Walker's discussion of creativity in the dream state and the state when just waking from dreams is a fascinating part of the book, I would have liked to see some discussion of how objectively accurate intuitions are during these moments. Anecdotally, I used to joke that my best ideas came to me during this time or not at all. Sometimes, however, the thoughts just turned out to be overconfident upon more profound reflection. Is that true for just me, or is it true for people, generally speaking?

Conclusion

Overall, Walker's "Why We Sleep" is a must-read for anyone who sleeps: in other words, everyone. This book will not only absolve you of any guilt associated with prioritizing sleep, but it will also arm you with the knowledge to make the best choices for your physical and mental health. Walker guides you through the critical benefits of sleep, from its integral role in memory and creativity to its power to process and put to rest the day's experiences: especially the more troubling ones.

While the damaging effects of lack of sleep seem exponential, Walker argues that some of the most significant benefits come in the final two hours. Thus getting eight full hours of sleep is crucial. After reading this book, you will not want to miss a full night's sleep again.

To help you achieve a full night's sleep regularly, Walker provides 12 concrete steps in an appendix. Some of these suggestions are initially counterintuitive. For example, Walker maintains that a cooler room temperature of around 65F is best for optimal sleep. Already, I've been putting this and his other advice to the test, and the results seem promising.
90 people found this helpful
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Farzad
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommend
Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2024
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The best book that I have ever read. It is clear, well-organized, to the point, easy to read AND it contains a lot of very important facts about human nature as it relates to sleep. My mind is blown even though I am only 30 pages along. There are so many things that general public is unaware of regarding sleep and their health. Just the concept of "Night Owl, Morning Lark" by itself is very fascinating. I don't think most people think of the Night Owl as being more than folkloric but it is a critical aspect of how we are designed to be. Going counter to that is going counter to your nature. And then there is the circadian rhythm, our internal clocks, jet lag, etc.

I am looking forward to reading the entire book.
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Mauricio Antonio Tamer
5.0 out of 5 stars Everybody shall read it
Reviewed in Brazil on January 17, 2024
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Life changing book. You will learn why to sleep, including a very consistent and technical answer. After reading this book, for sure, you will learn how to improve many areas of your life.
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Diego
5.0 out of 5 stars Me cambió la vida este libro
Reviewed in Mexico on September 29, 2023
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Amo este libro. Me lo recomendó una amiga porque yo tenía muy malos hábitos de sueño. Desde el capítulo uno me cambió la vida. Se lo recomendaría a cualquier persona, sin importar sus hábitos de sueño. La lectura es un poco pesada porque de pronto es muy técnico, entonces no lo recomiendo para niños y jóvenes, sobre todo si no están habituados a leer
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Jonathan Lauzon
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, very informative!
Reviewed in Canada on November 21, 2023
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I learned a lot of things about sleep, this book is great and Matthew knows his so much subject as he is one of the best sleep expert scientist in the world.

I even subscribed to the Masterclass platform in part to watch his video Masterclass, which is essentially a condensed version of the book but to hear him talk with passion about his subject was very complementary to the book. He is very well articulated and speaks clearly.

Conclusion: Everyone should read this book. Sleep is so underrated in our society.
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James Barrett
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 3, 2024
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Fantastic read and I learnt a lot about sleep, even though I know tons already (or so I thought).. I have REM sleep behaviour disorder and also get insomnia, so I’ve been researching and been in and out of sleep clinics for the past 20 years. This book has taught me so much. If you have any sleep disorders you must read this. Also, easy to read as I’m not a reader at all.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read!
Reviewed in Spain on April 21, 2024
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Top, top, top!!
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