This Week, I'm Reading...

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew Walker

My family and some friends are probably getting sick of me talking about Why We Sleep, but I keep learning stuff that I want them to know! I have always been a stickler for sleep. I wasn’t one of those moms of young kids who signs up for everything and makes it work by sleeping four or five hours a night. I was pretty convinced that sleep is not dispensable, and Matthew Walker is confirming that way more emphatically than even I had expected. Walker is a sleep researcher, so he’s sharing what we do and don’t know about sleep in terms of specific research, all in easy-to-understand—and fascinating—detail. Here are just a few things I’ve learned so far that surprised me:

• “Morning people” and “night owls” is a thing—and it’s hereditary. You can’t change which one you are, though your preferred sleep schedule does shift a bit through different life stages. I appreciated that Walker adds that night owls (like me) suffer social consequences in our culture because work and school times are set for the benefit of morning people. But we are not lazy! Our circadian clocks are literally set that way.

• Many people’s circadian clocks run slightly longer than 24 hours. That’ll mess you up! But light can help reset this.

• Two different pressures determine when we’re ready to fall asleep. One is our cycling circadian clock. The other is a constantly rising level of the hormone adenosine over the course of the waking day. The point where the circadian rhythm is lowest and adenosine is highest is the point at which we will feel the greatest pressure to sleep.

• Research indicates that melatonin is helpful for jet lag but not so much for everyday sleep.

• Not getting enough sleep has been proven to increase your risk of almost every bad thing you can think of: cancer, depression, dementia, etc., etc.

• One study showed that a gently rocking bed (like a cradle) deepened sleep for adults!

I’m not even halfway through Why We Sleep yet, but I was listening on audio (which, yeah, made me a little sleepy) and my loan ran out, so I’m looking forward to getting it back, learning more, and torturing everyone around me with more fun facts about sleep. Hopefully I’ll be able to share some useful information with the troubled sleepers, too.

Finally for today, apologies for missing my usual Wednesday evening post time! I was on jury duty yesterday (not selected, thankfully), and that threw off the rhythm of my week. More on that in Sunday’s post…

What are you reading this week? Let us know in the comments section below!