Why We Sleep? A manifesto in defence of sleep

In the Western world of the 21st Century, we face a culture of increasing demand and distraction, where we are constantly expected to be connected, with the result that time allocated to sleep is increasingly truncated and neglected. This is the point made by Professor Matthew Walker in the first paragraph of his bestselling book 'Why We Sleep', stating that two-thirds of adults in all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended 8 h of sleep advocated by the WHO and the National Sleep Foundation in the USA. Matthew Walker is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder and Director of the Centre for Human Sleep Science, and more interestingly a self-appointed sleep diplomat. Western society's attitude to sleep was blithely encapsulated in a comment made by a lawyer to her therapist in a popular current TV series. In expressing how time-pressured she was, she asked whether the intervention being discussed could be employed during sleep as 'this was 4 hours in her day that she didn't need'. Indeed, as Professor Walker states, much of Western society's apathy towards sleep can be accounted for by science's failure to explain the evolutionary purpose of sleep or why we need it. This in turn has led to a scenario in which neglecting sleep has become the norm, to the point that the WHO has declared that there is a sleep deficiency epidemic in industrialized countries. If sleep is unnecessary, he argues, why is some form of sleep ubiquitous across all species studied, but also why are humans the only species that regularly (and routinely) chooses to deprive itself of adequate sleep time? (Fig. 1).

from # All Medicine by Alexandros G. Sfakianakis via alkiviadis.1961 on Inoreader https://ift.tt/2jk82Uy