I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
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In response to a post I wrote about my experience reading Why We Sleep—I was about a third of the way through, at the time—a reader asked me to blog about the rest of the book, so she could learn Walker’s practical advice without having to read the book.
I don’t think that’s possible.
Summarizing the book so narrowly would simply fail—not because the book includes no practical recommendations (it does, though not as many as I had expected), but because the recommendations don’t mean much without the context that Walker places them within.
Technically, I didn’t really learn that much about falling or staying asleep, partly because I’ve been following the sleep discussion for awhile. Ariana Huffington has been drumming this beat for years, for example; I’ve seen her short TED talk, and heard her interviewed about her book. And lots of personal development gurus have had something to say about sleep (though not that many years back, it was most often to suggest that you can always make time for the things you really want to do—just shave off an hour or two of sleep… as if their readers were all lazy-asses wasting their most productive hours in bed).
But it is also partly because the information has been out there even for those who haven’t been following the conversation closely. Walker doesn’t offer many suggestions that aren’t already commonly known; aside from a point or two in passing, he mainly draws attention to twelve recommendations from the National Institute of Health—hardly new stuff.
That probably sounds like I’m criticizing him, but I’m not. Just because we know something, doesn’t mean we follow it, that we don’t need to hear it again. As Derek Sivers put it, “If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”
Walker’s book is important because it provides context to understanding these recommendations, giving them a weight that they might not otherwise have.
To take one example: a lot of ink has been spilt discussing the ways that “blue light”—the higher spectrum light from TV, phone, or tablet screens—disrupts our sleep. And there’s lots of advice out there: keep gadgets out of the bedroom (that’s from the NIH); turn off screens a couple hours before going to sleep (that’s from Walker); use a blue light filter application (that’s from tech journalists).
But blue light has never seemed that relevant to me. I’ve never noticed that much of a difference in my ability to get to sleep on nights when I spend the end of my night reading actual books or falling down the YouTube rabbit hole. So why should I bother following this apparently useless advice?
Walker’s book creates a much broader context for any of his recommendations, a web of ideas which includes several threads:
- how sleep works—the types of sleep we experience, and the functions of each of these in cognition, memory, emotion, psychology, physiology, immunology, and so on
- how sleep happens—the precise physiological and neurological mechanisms that lead to, or demand, sleep
- how sleep developed—the millions of years of evolutionary pressures that led to the types and functions of sleep (pretty much every organism experiences some sort of sleep, so it isn’t a late-developing adaptation)
- how sleep is affected by modern life—the myriad ways that our lifestyles are out of sync with the signals that our bodies expect, given our evolution
- how inadequate sleep affects us—suppressing our immune system, or our ability to self-regulate emotionally, or our ability to learn, or our memory (related, but not identical to learning), and so on. The list is long and scary, and goes all the way to flat-out psychosis.
Armed with that context, I can decide whether or not I need to worry about the “blue light” problem. Does it matter to me that blue light reduces melatonin production? Or might that reduction be overridden by the natural “sleep pressure” that builds because my YouTube rabbit-holery keeps me up much later? What other influences are there—artificial light in general, home temperature, circadian rhythm, bourbon—that might be having an even bigger effect?
My point is that a list of things to do to improve sleep—even the list from the NIH, which Walker includes as an appendix and affirms as “superb advice”—doesn’t necessarily help. At least, it wouldn’t help me. Understanding how sleep works helps me to target the strategies—or even make up my own—that seem mostly likely to work for me.
The other value of Walker’s book: even with my previous interest in the issues of sleep, I was blown away by the range of problems that inadequate sleep creates, for the individual as well as for society. And I was shocked by how little lost sleep qualifies as sleep deprivation. An hour less than optimum per day adds up fast.
Of course, that’s hard. There are times in our lives when we pretty much have no choice but to enter the realm of sleep deprivation. Parents, especially of infants (though I also find this to be true as a parent of teenagers), don’t always have the luxury of seven to nine hours of sleep each night. Older people (like me) often struggle to get to sleep—or, just as importantly, to stay asleep. But that—again—is why I find an understanding the constellation of issues around sleep to be helpful. I’ve been able to make changes that are already making a difference; even if I’ll never again get to optimal, it’s nice to at least get to better.
There’s also the issue of privilege. The ability to practice good “sleep hygiene” depends in many ways on affluence. To his credit, Walker doesn’t shy away from this. He raises sleep-related social issues throughout the book, but the last few chapters focus specifically on ways that society is structured to interfere with our ability to sleep. He notes, for example, the double-bind that many people, especially those in poverty, find themselves in: working night shifts, often as second jobs, living in a state of what can only be described as sleep deprivation—a state that only worsens their situation, given the toll that sleep deprivation takes on all areas of our lives (cognitively, emotionally, psychologically, physiologically, immunologically, and so on).
If any of this interests you at all, I recommend you read the book. The few connections that I’ve drawn here are minimal, compared to the sprawling network of interconnected ideas.
One last word: I mentioned this in my previous post, and I’m glad to say that it held, with very rare exception, throughout the rest of the book: Walker is an engaging writer. It’s great to have a science-based book for a popular audience that doesn’t dumb things down to unbearable tedium. He may not quite be Oliver Sacks, but he’s in the ballpark.
P.S. A few random thoughts that I’m too lazy to fit into the post above:
- Of the twelve recommendations from the NIH, Walker says that the first one—getting to bed and waking up at the same time every day (weekday, weekend, or holiday)—is the most important, even though doing so relies, at least at first, on one of the villains of modern life: the alarm clock.
- Insomnia exists, but it’s rare. The book’s sprawling context might help identify things—activities, practices, environment—that are causing problems sleeping. (And if you do indeed have insomnia: he recommends you get thee to a sleep specialist. There is help for insomnia.)
- Sometimes we make assumptions about what we need to do. A person who works long hours but wants to create art might believe she needs to sleep less to make time to do so. But it might be worth exploring the effects of inadequate sleep. Would adequate sleep allow better focus, cutting down either the time needed to work, or the time needed to create? (Sometimes the answer is no, of course. But questions like that are worth asking.)
- Sleeping pills don’t work. They sedate, but sedation is not sleep.