Why We Sleep: Unlocking The Power Of Sleep And Dreams Quotes
"Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer."
"Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic."
"Too little sleep swells concentrations of a hormone that makes you feel hungry while suppressing a companion hormone that signals food satisfaction."
"The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span."
"Every component of wellness, and countless seams of societal fabric, are being eroded by our costly state of sleep neglect."
"Dreaming provides a unique suite of benefits to all species fortunate enough to experience it, humans included."
"A balanced diet and exercise are of vital importance, yes. But we now see sleep as the preeminent force in this health trinity."
"Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day."
"The most glaring omission in the contemporary health conversation."
"Sleep dispenses a multitude of health-ensuring benefits, yours to pick up in repeat prescription every twenty-four hours, should you choose."
"We flip-flop back and forth between NREM and REM sleep throughout the night every ninety minutes."
"During REM sleep, the memories were being replayed far more slowly: at just half or quarter the speed of that measured when the rats were awake and learning the maze."
"Every hour of REM sleep appears to count, as evidenced by the desperate attempt by a fetus or newborn to regain any REM sleep when it is lost."
"Infants and young kids display polyphasic sleep: many short snippets of sleep through the day and night, punctuated by numerous awakenings."
"As deep NREM sleep performs its final overhaul and refinement of the brain during adolescence, cognitive skills, reasoning, and critical thinking start to improve."
"Deep NREM sleep had aided their transition into early adulthood."
"During mid- and late childhood, Feinberg observed moderate deep-sleep amounts as the last neural growth spurts inside the brain were being completed."
"The relationship between deep-sleep intensity and brain maturation implies a direction of influence: deep sleep may be a driving force of brain maturation, not the other way around."
"The very same effect has now been demonstrated in numerous other mammalian species, suggesting that the effect is probably common across mammals."
"The more nights an individual sleeps in the new location, the more similar the sleep is in each half of the brain."
"It takes deep sleep, and developmental time, to accomplish the neural maturation that plugs this brain 'gap' within the frontal lobe."
"The older a child gets, the fewer, longer, and more stable their sleep bouts become."
"As a consequence, the sixteen-year-old will usually have no interest in sleeping at nine p.m. Instead, peak wakefulness is usually still in play at that hour."
"Asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m."
"Sadly, neither society nor our parental attitudes are well designed to appreciate or accept that teenagers need more sleep than adults."
"We parents would be wise to accept this fact, and to embrace it, encourage it, and praise it, lest we wish our own children to suffer developmental brain abnormalities or force a raised risk of mental illness upon them."
"Sleep before learning refreshes our ability to initially make new memories."
"Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection."
"It is practice, with sleep, that makes perfect."
"Sixty years of scientific research prevent me from accepting anyone who tells me that he or she can 'get by on just four or five hours of sleep a night just fine.'"
"During a microsleep, your brain becomes blind to the outside world for a brief moment."
"The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail."
"For every thirty seconds you’ve been reading this book, there has been a car accident somewhere in the US caused by sleeplessness."
"Drowsy driving alone is worse than driving drunk."
"Approximately 80 percent of truck drivers in the US are overweight, and 50 percent are clinically obese."
"Drowsy-driving deaths are neither chance, nor without cause. They are predictable and the direct result of not obtaining sufficient sleep."
"There are no accidents caused by fatigue, microsleeps, or falling asleep. None whatsoever. They are crashes."
"The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero."
"Inadequate sleep plays havoc with our emotions."
"Insufficient sleep does not push the brain into a negative mood state and hold it there. Rather, the under-slept brain swings excessively to both extremes of emotional valence, positive and negative."
"A lack of sleep more than accomplishes its own, independent attack on the heart."
"The less you sleep, the more you are likely to eat."
"Sleep fights against infection and sickness by deploying all manner of weaponry within your immune arsenal."
"The less sleep an individual was getting in the week before facing the active common cold virus, the more likely it was that they would be infected and catch a cold."
"Those participants who obtained seven to nine hours’ sleep...generated a powerful antibody reaction, reflecting a robust, healthy immune system."
"Even if an individual is allowed two or even three weeks of recovery sleep...they never go on to develop a full immune reaction to the flu shot."
"No matter what immunological circumstance you find yourself in...sleep, and a full night of it, is inviolable."
"Natural killer cells are like the secret service agents of your body, whose job it is to identify dangerous foreign elements and eliminate them."
"A single night of four hours of sleep...swept away 70 percent of the natural killer cells circulating in the immune system."
"Denmark recently became the first country to pay worker compensation to women who had developed breast cancer after years of night-shift work."
"Sleeping six hours or less was associated with a 40 percent increased risk of developing cancer."
"The less sleep an individual obtains, the more damaged the capstone telomeres of that individual’s chromosomes."
"A problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."
"The significant relationship between short sleep and short or damaged telomeres is observed even when accounting for other factors."
"At the moment he began to dream, his muscle tone would relax and he would release the ball bearings, which would crash on the metal saucepan below, waking him up."
"Lucid dreaming occurs at the moment when an individual becomes aware that he or she is dreaming."
"You can understand the skepticism. First, the assertion of conscious control over a normally non-volitional process injects a heavy dose of ludicrous into the already preposterous experience we call dreaming."
"Scientists had gained objective, brain-based proof that lucid dreamers can control when and what they dream while they are dreaming."
"Few other areas of medicine offer a more disturbing or astonishing array of disorders than those concerning sleep."
"Sleep onset insomnia is difficulty falling asleep. Sleep maintenance insomnia, or difficulty staying asleep."
"They argue that he was unaware of his actions, and thus not culpable."
"Emotions make us do things, as the name suggests (remove the first letter from the word)."
"An antibiotic called doxycycline, which seems to slow the rate of the rogue protein accumulation in other prion disorders."
"Most of the thermic work is performed by three parts of your body in particular: your hands, your feet, and your head."
"Sleep is not like a credit system or the bank. The brain can never recover all the sleep it has been deprived of."
"The irony that employees miss is that when you are not getting enough sleep, you work less productively and thus need to work longer to accomplish a goal."
"Under-slept employees are not only less productive, less motivated, less creative, less happy, and lazier, but they are also more unethical."
"Forced by the hand of early school start times, this state of chronic sleep deprivation is especially concerning considering that adolescence is the most susceptible phase of life for developing chronic mental illnesses."
"The brain can never recover all the sleep it has been deprived of. We cannot accumulate a debt without penalty, nor can we repay that sleep debt at a later time."
"The next time you see a doctor in a hospital, keep in mind that after twenty-two hours without sleep, human performance is impaired to the same level as that of someone who is legally drunk."
"If you make a composite of these symptoms and then strip away the label of ADHD, these symptoms are nearly identical to those caused by a lack of sleep."
"Without change, we will simply perpetuate a vicious cycle wherein each generation of our children are stumbling through the education system in a half-comatose state."
"Sleep deprivation increases deviant behavior and causes higher rates of lying and dishonesty."
"Most people will trade sleep for a higher salary. A recent study from Cornell University surveyed hundreds of US workers and gave them a choice between either $80,000 a year with more sleep or $140,000 a year with less sleep."
"Those boards must disabuse themselves of the we-suffered-through-sleep-deprivation-and-you-should-too mentality when it comes to training, teaching, and practicing medicine."
"There’s simply no evidence-based argument for persisting with the current sleep-anemic model of medical training."
"More generally, I feel we as a society must work toward dismantling our negative and counterproductive attitude toward sleep."
"The radiation from the Chernobyl disaster was one hundred times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped in World War II."
"Both of these global tragedies were entirely preventable. The same is true for every sleep-loss statistic in this chapter."
"Accepting that our lack of sleep is a slow form of self-euthanasia, what can be done about it?"
"The intrusion of technology into our homes and bedrooms is robbing us of precious sleep."
"Sleep appears to be a natural analgesic, and without it, pain is perceived more acutely by the brain."
"The cost of delivering such sleep education programs would be a tiny fraction of what we currently pay for our unaddressed global sleep deficit."
"We spend a tiny fraction of our transportation safety budget warning people of the dangers of drowsy driving compared with the countless campaigns and awareness efforts regarding accidents linked to drugs or alcohol."
"Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast." - William Shakespeare, Macbeth.
"The ability for infants and young children to become independent nighttime sleepers is the keen focus of many new parents."
"By teenage years, the brain is less malleable, or plastic, than during infancy or early childhood."
"Sleep enhances plasticity in the developing visual cortex."
"The effects of caffeine on sleep and maturational markers in the rat."
"Sleep disturbances among elderly persons: an epidemiologic study of three communities."
"Tips for safe sleep in the elderly: have a side lamp within reach, use dim night-lights, remove obstacles, and keep a telephone by your bed."
"Efficacy of prolonged release melatonin in insomnia patients aged 55–80 years: quality of sleep and next-day alertness outcomes."
"The literal-minded reader should not take this analogy to suggest that I believe the human brain operates as a computer."