Matthew Walker has learned to dread the question ?What do you do?? At parties, it signals the end of his evening; thereafter, his new acquaintance will inevitably cling to him like ivy. On an aeroplane, it usually means that while everyone else watches movies or reads a thriller, he will find himself running an hours-long salon for the benefit of passengers and crew alike. ?I?ve begun to lie,? he says. ?Seriously. I just tell people I?m a dolphin trainer. It?s better for everyone.?
Walker is a sleep scientist. To be specific, he is the director of the Center for Human?Sleep?Science at the University of California, Berkeley, a research institute whose goal ? possibly unachievable ? is to understand everything about sleep?s impact on us, from birth to death, in sickness and health. No wonder, then, that people long for his counsel. As the line between work and leisure grows ever more blurred, rare is the person who?doesn?t?worry about their sleep. But even as we contemplate the shadows beneath our eyes, most of us don?t know the half of it ? and perhaps this is the real reason he has stopped telling strangers how he makes his living. When Walker talks about sleep he can?t, in all conscience, limit himself to whispering comforting nothings about camomile tea and warm baths. It?s his conviction that we are in the midst of a ?catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic?, the consequences of which are far graver than any of us could imagine. This situation, he believes, is only likely to change if government gets involved.
Walker has spent the last four and a half years writing?Why We Sleep, a complex but urgent book that examines the effects of this epidemic close up, the idea being that once people know of the powerful links between sleep loss and, among other things, Alzheimer?s disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and poor mental health, they will try harder to get the recommended eight hours a night (sleep deprivation, amazing as this may sound to Donald Trump types, constitutes anything less than seven hours). But, in the end, the individual can achieve only so much. Walker wants major institutions and law-makers to take up his ideas, too. ?No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation,? he says. ?It sinks down into every possible nook and cranny. And yet no one is doing anything about it. Things have to change: in the workplace and our communities, our homes and families. But when did you ever see an NHS poster urging sleep on people? When did a doctor prescribe, not sleeping pills, but sleep itself? It needs to be prioritised, even incentivised. Sleep loss costs the UK economy over ?30bn a year in lost revenue, or 2% of GDP. I could double the NHS budget if only they would institute policies to mandate or powerfully encourage sleep.?
Why, exactly, are we so sleep-deprived? What has happened over the course of the last 75 years? In 1942, less than 8% of the population was trying to survive on six hours or less sleep a night; in 2017, almost one in two people is. The reasons are seemingly obvious. ?First, we electrified the night,? Walker says. ?Light is a profound degrader of our sleep. Second, there is the issue of work: not only the porous borders between when you start and finish, but longer commuter times, too. No one wants to give up time with their family or entertainment, so they give up sleep instead. And anxiety plays a part. We?re a lonelier, more depressed society. Alcohol and caffeine are more widely available. All these are the enemies of sleep.?
But Walker believes, too, that in the developed world sleep is strongly associated with weakness, even shame. ?We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness. We want to seem busy, and one way we express that is by proclaiming how little sleep we?re getting. It?s a badge of honour. 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. They would rather wait 45 minutes for the confessional. They?re convinced that they?re abnormal, and why wouldn?t they be? We chastise people for sleeping what are, after all, only sufficient amounts. We think of them as slothful. 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 [as we grow up]. Humans are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent reason.? In case you?re wondering, the number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population and rounded to a whole number, is zero.
The world of sleep science is still relatively small. But it is growing exponentially, thanks both to demand (the multifarious and growing pressures caused by the epidemic) and to new technology (such as electrical and magnetic brain stimulators), which enables researchers to have what Walker describes as ?VIP access? to the sleeping brain. Walker, who is 44 and was born in Liverpool, has been in the field for more than 20 years, having published his first research paper at the age of just 21. ?I would love to tell you that I was fascinated by conscious states from childhood,? he says. ?But in truth, it was accidental.? He started out studying for a medical degree in Nottingham. But having discovered that doctoring wasn?t for him ? he was more enthralled by questions than by answers ? he switched to neuroscience, and after graduation, began a PhD in neurophysiology supported by the Medical Research Council. It was while working on this that he stumbled into the realm of sleep.
?I was looking at the brainwave patterns of people with different forms of dementia, but I was failing miserably at finding any difference between them,? he recalls now. One night, however, he read a scientific paper that changed everything. It described which parts of the brain were being attacked by these different types of dementia: ?Some were attacking parts of the brain that had to do with controlled sleep, while other types left those sleep centres unaffected. I realised my mistake. I had been measuring the brainwave activity of my patients while they were awake, when I should have been doing so while they were asleep.? Over the next six months, Walker taught himself how to set up a sleep laboratory and, sure enough, the recordings he made in it subsequently spoke loudly of a clear difference between patients. Sleep, it seemed, could be a new early diagnostic litmus test for different subtypes of dementia.
After this, sleep became his obsession. ?Only then did I ask: what is this thing called sleep, and what does it do? I was always curious, annoyingly so, but when I started to read about sleep, I would look up and hours would have gone by. No one could answer the simple question: why do we sleep? That seemed to me to be the greatest scientific mystery. I was going to attack it, and I was going to do that in two years. But I was naive. I didn?t realise that some of the greatest scientific minds had been trying to do the same thing for their entire careers. That was two decades ago, and I?m still cracking away.? After gaining his doctorate, he moved to the US. Formerly a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, he is now professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California.
Does his obsession extend to the bedroom? Does he take his own advice when it comes to sleep? ?Yes. I give myself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night, and I keep very regular hours: if there is one thing I tell people, it?s to go to bed and to wake up at the same time every day, no matter what. I take my sleep incredibly seriously because I have seen the evidence. Once you know that after just one night of only four or five hours? sleep, your natural killer cells ? the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day ? drop by 70%, or that a lack of sleep is linked to cancer of the bowel, prostate and breast, or even just that the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen, how could you do anything else??
There is, however, a sting in the tale. Should his eyelids fail to close, Walker admits that he can be a touch ?Woody Allen-neurotic?. When, for instance, he came to London over the summer, he found himself jet-lagged and wide awake in his hotel room at two o?clock in the morning. His problem then, as always in these situations, was that he knew too much. His brain began to race. ?I thought: my orexin isn?t being turned off, the sensory gate of my thalamus is wedged open, my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex won?t shut down, and my melatonin surge won?t happen for another seven hours.? What did he do? In the end, it seems, even world experts in sleep act just like the rest of us when struck by the curse of insomnia. He turned on a light and read for a while.
Will?Why We Sleep?have the impact its author hopes? I?m not sure: the science bits, it must be said, require some concentration. But what I can tell you is that it had a powerful effect on me. After reading it, I was absolutely determined to go to bed earlier ? a regime to which I am sticking determinedly. In a way, I was prepared for this. I first encountered Walker some months ago, when he spoke at an event at Somerset House in London, and he struck me then as both passionate and convincing (our later interview takes place via Skype from the basement of his ?sleep centre?, a spot which, with its bedrooms off a long corridor, apparently resembles the ward of a private hospital). But in another way, it was unexpected. I am mostly immune to health advice. Inside my head, there is always a voice that says ?just enjoy life while it lasts?.
The evidence Walker presents, however, is enough to send anyone early to bed. It?s no kind of choice at all. Without sleep, there is low energy and disease. With sleep, there is vitality and health. More than 20 large scale epidemiological studies all report the same clear relationship: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. To take just one example, adults aged 45 years or older who sleep less than six hours a night are 200% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven or eight hours a night (part of the reason for this has to do with blood pressure: even just one night of modest sleep reduction will speed the rate of a person?s heart, hour upon hour, and significantly increase their blood pressure).
A lack of sleep also appears to hijack the body?s effective control of blood sugar, the cells of the sleep-deprived appearing, in experiments, to become less responsive to insulin, and thus to cause a prediabetic state of hyperglycaemia. When your sleep becomes short, moreover, you are susceptible to weight gain. Among the reasons for this are the fact that inadequate sleep decreases levels of the satiety-signalling hormone, leptin, and increases levels of the hunger-signalling hormone, ghrelin. ?I?m not going to say that the obesity crisis is caused by the sleep-loss epidemic alone,? says Walker. ?It?s not. However, processed food and sedentary lifestyles do not adequately explain its rise. Something is missing. It?s now clear that sleep is that third ingredient.? Tiredness, of course, also affects motivation.
Sleep has a powerful effect on the immune system, which is why, when we have flu, our first instinct is to go to bed: our body is trying to sleep itself well. Reduce sleep even for a single night, and your resilience is drastically reduced. If you are tired, you are more likely to catch a cold. The well-rested also respond better to the flu vaccine. As Walker has already said, more gravely, studies show that short sleep can affect our cancer-fighting immune cells. A number of epidemiological studies have reported that night-time shift work and the disruption to circadian sleep and rhythms that it causes increase the odds of developing cancers including breast, prostate, endometrium and colon.
Getting too little sleep across the adult lifespan will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer?s disease. The reasons for this are difficult to summarise, but in essence it has to do with the amyloid deposits (a toxin protein) that accumulate in the brains of those suffering from the disease, killing the surrounding cells. During deep sleep, such deposits are effectively cleaned from the brain. What occurs in an Alzheimer?s patient is a kind of vicious circle. Without sufficient sleep, these plaques build up, especially in the brain?s deep-sleep-generating regions, attacking and degrading them. The loss of deep sleep caused by this assault therefore lessens our ability to remove them from the brain at night. More amyloid, less deep sleep; less deep sleep, more amyloid, and so on. (In his book, Walker notes ?unscientifically? that he has always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both of whom were vocal about how little sleep they needed, both went on to develop the disease; it is, moreover, a myth that older adults need less sleep.) Away from dementia, sleep aids our ability to make new memories, and restores our capacity for learning.
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