Quotes from Matthew Walker

Sleep is the Swiss army knife of health. When sleep is deficient, there is sickness and disease. And when sleep is abundant, there is vitality and health.

Individuals fail to recognise how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health.

If you look at how humans tend to want to sleep, it seems to be either, you know, sort of a monophasic way or at least a biphasic way, where there's, perhaps, a long bout during the night and then maybe a siesta-like pattern during the day.

Deep non-REM sleep almost hits the save button on those recently acquired informational pieces so that when you wake up the next morning, you have remembering rather than forgetting.

Regularity is a key: going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time no matter what. But I think, also, it's not just about quantity - that's what we've been discovering. It's also about quality.

Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain. Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it.

My name is Matthew Walker, I am a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and I am the author of the book 'Why We Sleep.'

I think sleep is probably the neglected stepsister in the health conversation today. I think we've done a good job regarding physical activity and diet, but sleep has remained out there in the cold, and that's surprising to me.

That short-sleeping that we're now suffering is a consequence of our lifestyle. It's not a consequence of evolutionary habituation.

Falling asleep is like landing a plane. It takes time. You've got to sort of gradually descend. I think one of the problems with insufficient sleep is people are not very good at predicting how poorly they are doing when they are under-slept.

Do you tend to sleep in during the weekends? That usually signals that you're trying to sleep off a debt you've accumulated during the week.

Light is a profound degrader of our sleep.

What is dreaming, and what happens, and are there any real benefits to dreaming? Well, to take a step back, I think it's important to note that dreaming essentially is a time when we all become flagrantly psychotic.

When I give lectures, people will wait behind until there is no one around and then tell me quietly, 'I seem to be one of those people who need eight or nine hours' sleep.' It's embarrassing to say it in public.

It's simply that older adults don't seem to be able to generate sleep efficiently, and that's why they're not getting it.

Stay away from screens, especially those LED screens. Those blue-light emitting devices fool your brain into thinking that it's still daytime, even though it's night-time and you want to get to sleep.

I think many people walk through their lives in an under-slept state not realizing it. It's become this new natural baseline.

You're trying to sleep off a debt that you've lumbered your brain and body with during the week, and wouldn't it be lovely if sleep worked like that? Sadly, it doesn't. Sleep is not like the bank, so you can't accumulate a debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time.

I have long been puzzled by the entrenched mentality, and often enforced practice, of longer work hours and less sleep. Innumerable policies exist within the workplace regarding smoking, substance abuse, ethical behaviour, and injury and disease prevention.

Friends say, 'Shall we go out to dinner at 8?' I say, 'I can't, I'm a 10 A.M.-till-6:30 P.M. kind of guy.' I keep that very regular, no matter what.

Some people actually sleep better when the significant other is with them. For other couples, it's the opposite.

We now know that we imprint information during the day. We sort of - that seed is planted there within the brain during the day. In other words, we learn information. But we also know that that vision that was planted in the brain still remains in the sound of silence, in this - in the dark of night.

Creativity is, after all, lauded as the engine of business innovation.

Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.