Matthew Walker

“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.”

“I have long been puzzled by the entrenched mentality, and often enforced practice, of longer work hours and less sleep. Innumerable policies exist within the workplace regarding smoking, substance abuse, ethical behaviour, and injury and disease prevention.”

“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.”

“Friends say, 'Shall we go out to dinner at 8?' I say, 'I can't, I'm a 10 A.M.-till-6:30 P.M. kind of guy.' I keep that very regular, no matter what.”

“Deep non-REM sleep almost hits the save button on those recently acquired informational pieces so that when you wake up the next morning, you have remembering rather than forgetting.”

“We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness.”

“No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation. It sinks down into every possible nook and cranny. And yet no one is doing anything about it.”

“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.”

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

“Your subjective sense of how well you're doing under conditions of sleep deprivation is a miserable predictor of, objectively, how you actually are doing.”

“Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain. Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it.”

“Some people actually sleep better when the significant other is with them. For other couples, it's the opposite.”

“That short-sleeping that we're now suffering is a consequence of our lifestyle. It's not a consequence of evolutionary habituation.”

“Falling asleep is like landing a plane. It takes time. You've got to sort of gradually descend. I think one of the problems with insufficient sleep is people are not very good at predicting how poorly they are doing when they are under-slept.”

“I give myself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night.”

“We know that efficiency and effectiveness are increased when you're getting sufficient sleep, and it will take you longer to do the same thing on an underslept brain, which means you end up having to stay awake longer. So goes the vicious cycle.”

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

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

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

“I think the first general point to make from epidemiological studies across millions of people is the following - that short sleep predicts a shorter life. It predicts all cause mortality.”