"Accepting that our lack of sleep is a slow form of self-euthanasia, what can be done about it?"

2.75

When I first read this book I was obsessed with it. I even did an entire design project about sleep for college inspired by this book. I took many of his claims at face value without looking into them.

He"s right that sleep is important, but the author exagerates a lot of claims and makes the correlation-equals-causation mistake. Some studies and data are misrepresented of oversimplified in a way that is irresponsible in my opinion.

Also, for how big he thinks the problem is, some of the solutions he proposes (better phone apps) are a bit laughable. If its a systemic problem we need systemic solutions.

Really interesting read on the effects of sleep and possible consequences of lack of or poor sleep. Thoroughly researched in many different and surprising aspects. We all should learn more about the importance of adequate sleep!

I listened to this nonfiction book about the importance of sleep.
A client recommended it and I am glad she did, since I wouldn't have picked it up on my own. I definitely learned a lot. The biggest takeaway: go to bed early and get a good night's sleep! (Duh.)

NREM sleep for learning. NREM unqiue to higher animals,
REM sleep common in all animals. Emotional regulation. Removing the emotional edge of memories and allowing coping to happen. Without REM sleep death occurs as if there was total sleep deprivation, which happens at 3 weeks.
Dreaming about events with the negative emotions associated with real life experiences helps release the emotional power of those experiences, and allows healing.

Adults need 8-9 hours of sleep. Especially in the early mornings.

Hard to rate this one. There was a ton of really great information in this book. So many fascinating sleep studies. I enjoyed a lot of the content. But ... and it's a big but .... I could not stand the author at all. For so many reasons. He didn't know his audience .... either your audience wants to read detailed reports of sleep studies and neuroscience or they need each of the senses listed out with the associated organ, but definitely not both. He gave his readers VERY little credit sometimes, going so far as to define non-sleep-related words for us. And I found some of his conclusions about the meaning of certain studies to be contradictory. And scientifically, I took issue with some of his conclusions based on the study design, at least as far as he had described it. In all, I'm glad that I read it because it was really informative, but really wish that he'd teamed up with an actual science writer instead of tackling this on his own.