Quotes from Matthew Walker

It's not that we simply get old, and memory starts to go, and sleep starts to deteriorate. But those two things actually are significantly interrelated.

I just tell people I'm a dolphin trainer. It's better for everyone.

If we didn't need eight hours of sleep and could survive on six, Mother Nature would have done away with 25 percent of our sleep time millions of years ago. Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do.

I think we perhaps are, with sleep, where we were with smoking about 50 years ago, in that we had all of the science, and it was right there for the public discussion, but it's not yet adequately sort of percolated out into policy or even just public wisdom.

It's during dream sleep where we start to actually take the sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional experiences that we've been having. And sleep almost divorces that emotional, bitter rind from the memory experiences that we've had during the day.

Sleep is Mother Nature's best effort yet to counter death.

If sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.

By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure.

Back in the 1940s, people were sleeping on average just a little bit over eight hours a night, and now, in the modern age, we're down to around 6.7, 6.8 hours a night.

No one would look at an infant baby asleep, and say 'What a lazy baby!' We know sleeping is non-negotiable for a baby. But that notion is quickly abandoned.

When did a doctor prescribe, not sleeping pills, but sleep itself? It needs to be prioritised, even incentivised.

The gross demonstration of caffeine is that it prevents you from falling asleep. The slightly more nefarious aspect of caffeine is that maybe you can fall asleep, but we know that the depth of deep sleep you're getting if caffeine is still in your system is severely less.

Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call 'the sedatives.' And what you're doing is just knocking your brain out. You're not putting it into natural sleep.

We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness.

Midnight is the time when we think, 'Well, we should probably send our last email; let me just check Facebook one more time.'

Based on the science, you can make somewhat clear statements: The number of people who can survive on six hours of sleep without impairment is zero.

As you try to tweak your sleep one way or the other, you might be, you might be doing great - you might do better at remembering details of an event, but you might end up being poorer at abstracting the gist or the rules associated with it.

Dream sleep provides a fascinating neurochemical soothing balm. It is during dream sleep and only during dream sleep when our brain shuts off a stress-related neurochemical called noradrenalin.

The amount of sleep - the total amount of sleep that you get - starts to decrease the older that we get. I think one of the myths out there is that we simply need less sleep as we age, and that's not true, in fact.

People dramatically underestimate how much sleep is linked to all the diseases killing us. We know a lack of sleep is linked to numerous forms of cancer - bowel, prostate, breast cancer.

It's not clear whether the brain actually is designed to have nightmares or whether this is actually the process going awry.

You should not actually stay in bed for very long awake, because your brain is this remarkably associative device, and it quickly learns that the bed is about being awake. So you should go to another room - a room that's dim. Just read a book - no screens, no phones - and, only when you're sleepy, return to the bed.

Below seven hours of sleep, there are objective impairments in the body. Eight hours are recommended.

Many business leaders still believe that time on-task equates to productivity. Even in the industrial era of rote factory work, this was untrue. It is a misguided fallacy, and an expensive one, too. Every key facet required for business success will fail when sleep becomes short within an organisation.