These Why We Sleep notes began with a personal difficulty: getting myself to bed. I wanted to understand sleep more deeply, just as reading with a real question helps me approach other things I struggle with.
Why We Sleep notes: the questions I started with
While I’m doing pretty well with many challenges that life serves us – sleep clearly isn’t one I’m doing well.
For some reason, I always had bad sleeping patterns. Once I sleep, I sleep very well and through – but to come to the point of sleeping, that’s the challenge.
What I learned about myself, is that once I get deeply involved with a topic, I start taking action.
Therefore – it’s time to study sleep and learn from the best.
Why we sleep is a book by Matthew Walker – after reading the first chapter, I was shocked about the impact of good respectively bad sleep habits.
Let me share my summary/learnings so far:
- Sleep is more important than diet or exercise
- It changes the way we live our life entirely
- Recommended are 7-9 hours per day
What I took from the book
Sleeping less than 6 hours a day:
- weakens your immune system
- increases risk to get cancer
- is a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, heart failure
- contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, depression, anxiety and suicides
- feeling more hungry
The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span
- Insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic
- Doctors should prescribe sleep instead of sleeping pills
- One person dies every hour (US) due to fatigue-related error
- Sleep is complex and health-relevant, it benefits both our brain and body
What sleep Sleep does:
- improves our ability to learn, memorize & make logical decisions
- improves our psychological health
- improves our immunity
- helps to prevent infections
- reforms the body’s metabolic state
- regulates our appetite
- helps us control the body weight
- Maintains a flourishing microbiome withoin our gut
- lowers blood pressure
- helps us keep hearts in fine condition
Dreams are a neurochemical bath, it combines painful memories in a virtual reality space, where the brain melds past and present knowledge and inspires creativity.
Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brand and body health each day
- Internal 24h-Clock / Scientific name is ‘suprachiasmatic nucleus’ and what it does:
- We have an internal 24h clock located deep within our brain
- The clock crates a cyclin, a circadian rhythm
- Twenty-four-hour biollogical clock
- Day and night, the sun-light has an effect on it, but it works also without sun exposure
- it’s the central conductor of life’s biological rhythmic symphony
- it regulates the core body temperature
Every person has a different rhythm – so mine is not yours.
To get all-in, watch also this Podcast:
