Category: Matthew Walker

Sleep is way more important to our health and well-being than most people think, but this shouldn’t be surprising given the devastating effect of a bad night’s sleep on how we feel the next day and the remarkably beneficial effect of a good night’s sleep.

You need 8 and a half hours in bed in order to provide an 8-hour sleep opportunity. If you have to be up by 8:00AM, for example, you should ideally be in bed by 11:30PM. You can’t exactly control the time that you sleep, but you can control your bedtime.

One of the functions of sleep, especially deep sleep, is to clear the brain of toxins, some of which have been implicated in Alzheimer’s. Insufficient sleep has been linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s. This is another great reason to prioritize sleep.

Diseases don’t just happen for no reason. Diet and lifestyle factors largely determine whether we’re sick or well, and perhaps the most important lifestyle factor of them all in determining the state of our health is the quantity and quality of our sleep.

If you’re being awakened from a sound sleep by an alarm clock each day and if you would sleep quite a bit longer without an alarm, that’s a pretty good sign that your brain and your body are not done with sleep at that point and you’re not getting enough.

If you’re getting 6 hours or less of sleep each night, that’s way less than the amount required for optimal brain and body health. Only a tiny fraction of the population can thrive on this amount without any impairment. Most need on average about 8 hours.

If health is your priority, it is essential to make sleep your priority as well because sleep has an even greater influence on health and well-being than diet and exercise. People need on average about 8 hours of regular sleep at the proper time of night.

People are extremely unhealthy and plagued with all manner of needless diseases because of the bad diet that is typically eaten, but sleep deprivation is also a major factor undermining the health of millions. We need to pay close attention to sleep also.

Some people tend to go to bed a little later and get up a little later, but all humans are naturally predisposed to sleep at night and be active in the daytime. This is our natural circadian rhythm, and it’s best that we sleep in harmony with this rhythm.

It’s true that diet, exercise, and sleep are the three main pillars upon which our health rests, but sleep may very well turn out to be the most important of the three. A 24-hour sleep deprivation is much more harmful than 24 hours of no food or exercise.