Why We Sleep

Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

By: Matthew Walker

Narrated by: Steve West

Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

The first sleep book by a leading scientific expert - Professor Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley's Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab - reveals his groundbreaking exploration of sleep, explaining how we can harness its transformative power to change our lives for the better.

Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when we don't sleep. Compared to the other basic drives in life - eating, drinking, and reproducing - the purpose of sleep remained elusive.

But an explosion of scientific discoveries in the last 20 years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Among so many other things, within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity.

Walker answers important questions about sleep: How do caffeine and alcohol affect sleep? What really happens during REM sleep? Why do our sleep patterns change across a lifetime? How do common sleep aids affect us, and can they do long-term damage? Charting cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs and synthesizing decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood, and energy levels; regulate hormones; prevent cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes; slow the effects of aging; increase longevity; enhance the education and lifespan of our children, and boost the efficiency, success, and productivity of our businesses. Clear-eyed, fascinating, and immensely accessible, Why We Sleep is the crucial account on sleep that will forever change listeners' minds on the subject.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2017 Matthew Walker (P)2017 Simon & Schuster, Inc.

One of my favorite nonfiction reads of 2017

I had been avoiding reading a book on what lack of sleep does to a person because I figured it the news would not be good and I sleep so badly, I just didn't want to know. But I heard the author on NPR and it sounded so interesting, I got it.

The news was worse than I thought! Nevertheless, it was so fascinating, full of such interesting information, I'm glad I read/listened to it. It's one of the few books that I'd say, "Everyone should read this." For those who can manage to get a decent night's sleep but think 5 or 6 hours is enough--this might change their minds.

Wow, should have read this years ago...

It is amazing how Matt Walker takes these new studies and forms them into data we can learn from. Data that is not dry and mind-numbing but interesting and wants you to listen to sections over to really soak in that information. After reading this book and am much more driven to protect my sleep time and keep a schedule. And I must say that my life daily stability is much more even, that my pulls from memory and learning is becoming better even though I am aging and that effect on memories.

So I encourage you, that if you are reading this, to get this book and value yourself enough to take this topic seriously so you protect something that you can not get back.

Five stars from a habitual short sleeper

With my new found knowledge on the importance of sleep, this book may prove to be one of the most valuable purchases I've made. Having experienced many of the issues talked about herein and now understanding the power of sleep, I have already began putting forth an effort to sleep more. I plan to make all necessary adjustments until I can regularly get a full nights sleep. Hopefully in the near future this information becomes more widespread and is taught in all schools. I don't think I would have been so careless with my sleep had I known the benefits from early on. Better late than never though, so I'm very thankful to have found this book now.

Profoundly important insight for our times.

I am recommending this book to all my friends. For the sake of one's health, creativity, mental wellbeing, and for the safety of our society, Matthew Walker's findings need to be widely known, especially by policy makers, and institutional decision makers such as school boards and superintendents and principles. And parents, and doctors, and everyone else, because insufficient sleep impacts EVERYTHING in our society.

Informative. Fascinating. Scary.

I highly recommend this book. I would advise, however, that the reader go into this book ready to view it as just one source of information on the topic. Because if you go into this book taking everything that the author says to heart, you are going to come away thinking that sleep is the answer to all of life's problems, and that you need to change your entire life around to make sleep your top priority. You will most likely also determine that you have already caused irrecoverable damage to your mind and body. Finally, you may become depressed, as you realize that even if you did rearrange your life to make sleep the most important thing, it would still probably not be enough.

With that behind us, let me say that this is a fascinating book. The author relies on countless studies to show the impact that sleep or lack of sleep has on the human existence. I would think that most listeners would get through the book in no time.

The narrator is great and well suited for the science heavy material.

Desperately Needed Knowledge

So much critical information for so many of us that simply do not get enough sleep.

Life improving

Sleep is paramount. It is high time that we remove the stigma of adequate sleep in order to achieve optimal health and performance at the individual and societal levels. The healing power of sleep is vastly underestimated and misunderstood.

Required reading

I thought I understood the basics of sleep. I didn’t. You really need to read this, especially if you don’t get enough sleep. It is not a how to book.

Life-changing Book

If you read this book, take it seriously, and apply what it is saying, it will change your life. It changed mine! Grades have gone up, learning has gone up, it’s awesome!

Wonderful, Insightful, and Life Changing

Don't read this book if you are scared of life altering information.
This book (more of a galactic scholarly mic drop)

If listening to the book, you do miss out on some of the mentioned graph chats, but have no fear. They are described in well detail so that you do not miss anything.