Scribner Book Company Why We Sleep: Unlocking The Power Of Sleep And Dreams

Sleep is a subject we always disregard we just know we have to sleep 7-8 hours but this book is very interesting to understand the meaning and how to have a good quality of sleep. Recommended

A scientific social book that tackles the importance of sleep from quite new perspectives. You can take a home massage from every paper you read and will change your life if you apply it content

We all know that sleep is important, in this book the ‘Why’ question gets thoroughly and methodically answered in layman’s words. Love it, it’s my favorite book of the year so far!

I've been to several bookstores and this was out of stock. Fortunate enough to find one here. The best book I've read so far. Thank you.

It is a very informative book.

Excellent book that really details sleep and tells you just how important it is. It's written in a very easy to read structure and makes it accessible to even those who don't have a technical background. For such an important function of life, we really don't know know much about sleep but Matthew Walker does a fantastic job describing the details.

Im a type of person that really cares about paper quality and book smells. This is not a paperback but a mass market paperback, which was not mentioned in the description. The 2 stars are in no way related to the book or the author, but the quality of papers and a too big print.

Everything is fine except the front cover is cheap like paper, with no gloss on it. Returned

I can't say anything about the book yet, I'm sure it's good... But I was upset by the condition it arrived in. It's sticky and scratched. It looks as if it's already been read, and it's unpleasant to hold. The price was ok, otherwise I would return it straight away

Lettura estremamente interessante ed educativa: esaustiva, dettagliata, con decine di studi scientifici a supporto degli argomenti trattati. Descritto così sembra quasi si tratti di un libro universitario, ma non lo è affatto! L'autore, professore di Neuroscienza e Psicologia e direttore di un laboratorio di ricerca su sonno e neuroimaging, è riuscito a mettere a terra l'argomento in maniera da rendere la lettura interessante, piacevole, e soprattutto di facile comprensione. Sicuramente consigliato a chi, come me, è sempre stato incuriosito dal sonno e voglia saperne di più. Tra gli argomenti più interessanti in mia opinione: cos'è il sonno e dove ha origine, a che cosa serve, come cambia nel corso della vita, quali possono essere gli innumerevoli effetti del dormire poco (ad esempio su apprendimento ed emotività), a cosa servono i sogni, e come sia possibile migliorare il proprio sonno senza ricorrere a farmaci.

I first heard about this study on BBC Radio 5live, when Phil Williams interviewed the author. I was so impressed by his approach & the way he described how the study was first designed & then developed & expanded that I read the book feeling, for the first time, that I was reading genuine findings & not someone’s unproven opinions. So without scepticism I felt able to completely embrace it as fact & I found it absolutely eye-opening! There are some incredible points that leapt out at me, such as: until this study scientists didn’t understand WHY we need to sleep - hence the title! With all the science we have available you would have thought we’d have known this long ago but it took this ‘proper’ investment to reach that knowledge & understanding. And another is WHEN; without this information the human race has set some ridiculous parameters around when we should sleep & decided they should apply to everyone. Worse, we’ve decided along the way that anyone who won’t or can’t live up to them is lazy or uncaring. We have designed our modern society around a set of non-scientific, irrelevant & sometimes even harmful ‘rules’, such as ‘working 9-5’ & ‘early start & early finish school times’. We believe all babies & small children should go to bed early. We go to great lengths to stop children napping, to get the sleep they need (possibly because they’ve had to get up some time before they were ready!), so that we can put them to bed early & enable parents to have an evening without them! The book shows us clearly that some babies & children won’t be able to go to sleep early (& stay asleep!) no matter how hard their parents try! One of the critical learning points is the necessity of sleep to our overall health, wellbeing & even life expectancy! I’ll never forget this & obviously we should be adopting it - as we are a first world society - now that we finally understand it! It’s ludicrous to ignore this knowledge just because we’ve got it wrong previously! I think anyone reading this book will end up with much better developed sleep strategies for themselves & their families. It’s really well written & interesting. Unsurprisingly it’s quite ‘meaty’ content & I found I tended to read a bit & then have to stop & have a think about it! But the key learning points are certainly sticking with me. I definitely think everyone can learn something from reading this book & I definitely recommend it!

There is a new pandemic in town, and this time it's not COVID. Seriously. I can't stop talking about stuff I've been reading in this book with people around me. Sleep is as universal as concepts get - and yet, it's crazy how little we know about something we spend 1/3 of our lives doing. Here's a little something about me. I've had a peculiar sleep schedule for the past couple years, staying awake almost all the way through the night. And sleeping an average of 6 hours. Now, if you'd ask someone, they would point to the former as the unnatural pattern. Early to bed and early to rise is the mantra, is it not? And 6 hours doesn't seem TOO bad for a night of sleep, right? Turns out, both of the things couldn't be more wrong. By sleeping any less than 8 hours a day, I was potentially shaving 10 years off my life, of what would have would have been a relatively unhealthier one anyway. That's how much impact sleep has. While I would still highly recommend reading the book, since cliff notes don't do the message justice - I saw how sleep deficiency was linked to Cancer, Alzheimer's, Diabetes, Cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure, mood swings, depression, anxiety, retention, and just a general sense of well being, to name a few things. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING is going to convince me to sacrifice sleep anymore. Secondly, I learned how sleeping later in the night isn't exactly something which is as terrible as so many people had been trying to convince me of. We keep seeing examples thrown around of CEOs waking up at 5AM in the morning, since the first ones to get up are the first ones to get started on doing great things in the world. But that, too, only has partial truth to it. Some of us are natural early birds and some night owls. And forcing one to comply with another can have a huge impact on how they perform at their workplace, school, or just in general. And I'm just gonna let you guess which of the two suffer here from the general rules widely accepted by society. Another interesting revelation to me, which had been out there in plain sight anyway, was how circadian rhythms are affected depending on age. Someone still in their formative years will have theirs shifted a little ahead, hence folks in their teens and early 20s go to sleep late and tend to wake up late. Unless, of course, they're forced out of bed, and asked to go about their schooling or job at a time the world functions in. And on the other hand, older people have their rhythms shift back, making them wake up as early as 4 AM, leading to drowsiness by late evening. If there's anything all the above shows us, it's that society should be much more forthcoming to people with their own individual sleep schedules, and encourage them to get all the sleep they need. And that brings me to what usually is encouraged. It's no news how getting less sleep is almost a fact people flaunt to show how hard they've been working, and I certainly have been guilty of it more times than one. What I am thankful to learn, now, is that the work you do when sleep deprived is not only less productive, but most likely counterintuitive. And it's only made worse by the cycle of consuming caffeine everyday, which leads to worse sleep, which leads to more caffeine, and the cycle continues. Please ask your doctor how long they've slept if they are to perform a surgery, as they're almost twice as likely to make a fatal mistake if they're not well-rested. Please ask your driver how much sleep they got. Because sleep deprivation has a HIGHER chance of causing a car accident, than even alcohol consumption, depending on the extent of both, of course. Why; you ask? Because alcohol makes you spaced out, or drowsy, or lose control. But lack of sleep will literally turn you off for a couple of seconds every now and then, into little microsleeps where you will lose complete control of what's happening. And those seconds are more than enough to put you into a death-assuring situation. Reading SO much about how lack of sleep can be life-ruining can certainly be very taxing to go through, for over 300 pages too, but this book also taught me a lot more about the brain through these tidbits. About research that revealed much more than simply sleep. About people. And knowing all this equips you, the reader, to protect yourself and the people around you from the sleep deprivation epidemic. This is a must-read book, even if you get 8 hours of sleep, and especially if you don't.

This book compiles a lot of scientific findings about sleep. Sleep is essential for our mental and physical health. A lack of sleep can cause many serious problems. I have changed my recognition of sleep entirely. I want to recommend everyone who engages in health care.