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For many of us, midnight is usually the time when we consider checking our email one last time – and we know what often happens in the protracted thereafter. What he calls our “cultural sleep norms” are under assault on multiple fronts: Walker’s worldview may not be as bleak as that of the Romanian essayist, but he does paint an intolerably grim portrait of a society in which an increasingly large proportion of us are getting a decreasing amount of sleep. “The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep,” wrote EM Cioran, the patron saint of night owls whose weary visage kept floating into my mind as I read Why We Sleep. Greater ill health caused by a lack of sleep therefore befalls owls, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer, heart attack and stroke.”įorty winks under the fig trees at Sydney’s Observatory Hill. Owls are often forced, he writes, “to burn the proverbial candle at both ends. Each group operates along different circadian lines, and there is pretty much nothing owls can do to become larks – which is tough luck, because work and school scheduling overwhelmingly favour early risers. In terms of our natural sleeping tendencies, people can be divided into two broad groups, or “chronotypes”: morning larks and night owls. One of the book’s real strengths is how clearly it elucidates the extent of the damage wrought by our collective ignorance of the importance and complexity of sleep’s role in our lives, and the difficulty encountered by many of us in getting any. Being kneed in the spine by a four-year-old in the dead of night turns out to be the least of it by the time I’d finished Walker’s book, the whole of modernity lay revealed to me as a vast, many tentacled conspiracy against sleep. Well, yes, I for one am keenly interested in this wonder drug the problem, though, is getting your hands on the stuff. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes.
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It protects you from cancer and dementia. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It enhances your memory, makes you more attractive. Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. In one playful passage, he describes it as though he were marketing a new pharmaceutical: In fact, he presents sleep as a panacea for a bewildering array of conditions that would otherwise cause the slow deterioration of body and mind. Walker’s title is misleading – as he himself states in the early pages, it suggests that there might be only one reason why we sleep. If you're sleeping for less than seven hours a night you’re doing yourself a disservice as grave as that of smoking The marginalia in my review copy, scrawled in the wavering hand of a man receiving dark intimations of his own terrible fate – “OMFG” “This is extremely bad!” – might seem less appropriate to an affably written popular science book than to some kind of arcane Lovecraftian grimoire.
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If it weren’t too unsettling to permit sleep in the first place, it would be the stuff of nightmares. It’s not a book you should even be thinking about in bed, let alone reading. Why We Sleep by the neuroscientist Matthew Walker – my ill-chosen small-hours reading material – is filled with startling information about the effects of suboptimal shut-eye levels. At the same time, my lack of sleep has been slowly but inexorably shrinking a) my chances of living into my mid 60s, b) my testicles. It has been making me stupider, fatter, unhappier, poorer, sicker, worse at sex, as well as more likely to get cancer, Alzheimer’s and to die in a car crash. A wake at 4.30am the other morning, having been roused from sleep by my four-year-old son climbing into bed with my wife and me (a more or less nightly occurrence), I found myself sitting up and reading about the effects of insufficient sleep.