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.
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.
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.
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.
It's during dream sleep where we start to actually take the sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional experiences that we've been having. And sleep almost divorces that emotional, bitter rind from the memory experiences that we've had during the day.
I just tell people I'm a dolphin trainer. It's better for everyone.
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.
It's simply that older adults don't seem to be able to generate sleep efficiently, and that's why they're not getting it.
If we didn't need eight hours of sleep and could survive on six, Mother Nature would have done away with 25 percent of our sleep time millions of years ago. Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do.
We now know that we imprint information during the day. We sort of - that seed is planted there within the brain during the day. In other words, we learn information. But we also know that that vision that was planted in the brain still remains in the sound of silence, in this - in the dark of night.
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.
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.
Back in the 1940s, people were sleeping on average just a little bit over eight hours a night, and now, in the modern age, we're down to around 6.7, 6.8 hours a night.
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.
We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness.
When I give lectures, people will wait behind until there is no one around and then tell me quietly, 'I seem to be one of those people who need eight or nine hours' sleep.' It's embarrassing to say it in public.
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.
When did a doctor prescribe, not sleeping pills, but sleep itself? It needs to be prioritised, even incentivised.
What is dreaming, and what happens, and are there any real benefits to dreaming? Well, to take a step back, I think it's important to note that dreaming essentially is a time when we all become flagrantly psychotic.
Below seven hours of sleep, there are objective impairments in the body. Eight hours are recommended.
