Matthew Walker

“It's not clear whether the brain actually is designed to have nightmares or whether this is actually the process going awry.”

“Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.”

“The gross demonstration of caffeine is that it prevents you from falling asleep. The slightly more nefarious aspect of caffeine is that maybe you can fall asleep, but we know that the depth of deep sleep you're getting if caffeine is still in your system is severely less.”

“Midnight is the time when we think, 'Well, we should probably send our last email; let me just check Facebook one more time.'”

“Sleep is the Swiss army knife of health. When sleep is deficient, there is sickness and disease. And when sleep is abundant, there is vitality and health.”

“I think we perhaps are, with sleep, where we were with smoking about 50 years ago, in that we had all of the science, and it was right there for the public discussion, but it's not yet adequately sort of percolated out into policy or even just public wisdom.”

“The time of night when you sleep makes a significant difference in terms of the structure and quality of your sleep.”

“I think sleep is probably the neglected stepsister in the health conversation today. I think we've done a good job regarding physical activity and diet, but sleep has remained out there in the cold, and that's surprising to me.”

“As you try to tweak your sleep one way or the other, you might be, you might be doing great - you might do better at remembering details of an event, but you might end up being poorer at abstracting the gist or the rules associated with it.”

“Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call 'the sedatives.' And what you're doing is just knocking your brain out. You're not putting it into natural sleep.”

“If you look at how humans tend to want to sleep, it seems to be either, you know, sort of a monophasic way or at least a biphasic way, where there's, perhaps, a long bout during the night and then maybe a siesta-like pattern during the day.”

“You're trying to sleep off a debt that you've lumbered your brain and body with during the week, and wouldn't it be lovely if sleep worked like that? Sadly, it doesn't. Sleep is not like the bank, so you can't accumulate a debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time.”

“If sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.”

“Sleep-deprived individuals also generate fewer and less accurate solutions to problems.”

“Light is a profound degrader of our sleep.”

“The fact that we don't have that biologic pressure to have highly polyphasic sleep, I think, probably tells us something in terms of, truly, whether it's useful or not.”

“Regularity is a key: going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time no matter what. But I think, also, it's not just about quantity - that's what we've been discovering. It's also about quality.”

“I think many people walk through their lives in an under-slept state not realizing it. It's become this new natural baseline.”