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Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

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🔗Useful Links

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Toronto Public Library link to the book⁠

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Indigo selling it for C$25 reg price⁠

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Bill Gates’ short critical but positive review ⁠

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📑Book in 3 4 sentences

Adult humans need on average 8 hours of sleep per night and if you’re sleeping less than that, you will underestimate how cognitively impaired you actually are and overlook how detrimental it is to your immediate and long-term physical, mental, and emotional health

If you’re going to drink, do it in the morning so it’s out of your system before sleep because you will lose valuable REM sleep that’s responsible for dreaming, creativity, problem-solving, and solidifying (factual and muscle) memories for better performance the next day

Sleep cannot be unnaturally induced and anything that suggests otherwise is just sedation that will actually do more harm than good, the best thing you can do to improve your sleep is Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and maintaining good sleep hygiene per NIH (

page 22 of PDF⁠

)

We know when to sleep because of our circadian rhythm and adenosine — sleep pressure — which can be delayed due to caffeine, artificial lighting, and regulated bedroom temperature, noting that it takes your body 35 hours to remove caffeine from your system (gets longer with age)

🧑‍🤝‍🧑Who should read it

Anyone who is not consistently getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep

Anyone who is driving drowsy and think that’s okay

Anyone who is quick to sacrifice sleep to do something else (work, party, doom scroll)

Anyone who dictates another’s sleep schedules, i.e. parents, medical professionals, managers

Anyone who is actively trying to improve their physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing

🔃How it changed me

I cut my caffeine intake to almost nil, swapped out my daily coffee-machine-coffee at work or instant-coffee from home with herbal teas >> Follow-up a few months later, I returned to my caffeine habits because I haven’t found any difference in my sleep quality or energy levels the day after and I enjoy beverages that contain caffeine (match latte, teas)

I further reduced my already-low consumption of alcohol

I prioritize getting at least 7-8 hours of opportunity to sleep, such as pushing back wake-up time if I’m crawling into bed later than anticipated

I continue to keep my phone out of the bedroom and opting for reading on the eReader to fall asleep and using the alarm on my Garmin to wake up, I started this in ~June, months before reading the book

📒Annotated Cliff Notes

Impact of Sleep?

Drowsy driving causes more vehicular accidents than alcohol and drugs combined

One night of bad sleep causes more physical and impairments than an equivalent absence of food or exercise

The two factors that determine when you want to sleep and when you want to be awake are:

The circadian rhythm, your internal twenty-four hour clock that creates a cycle of day and night, creates an undulating line when graphed out

The “Sleep Pressure” chemical that builds up the longer you stay awake, the more it accumulates, the more tired you’ll feel

When to Sleep (1/2): Circadian Rhythm

Experiments that discovered the circadian rhythm:

Researcher de Mairan took a plant that expands and retracts its leaves based on time of day and placed it inside a black box devoid of light. He found the plant will still open its leaves during daytime and closed its leaves during nighttime without any signal from the sun — suggesting each living organism keeps their own time and does not depend on the sun’s signals.

Kleitman and Richardson conducted a similar experiment but with humans (themselves) and found that humans have their own endogenous circadian rhythm but their cycles were consistently longer than twenty-four hours.

Man in his 20’s Richardson’s cycles were twenty-six to twenty-eight hours long

Man in his 40’s Keitman’s cycles were a little more than twenty-four hours long

Hence we call it the “CIRCADIAN RHYTHM” where circa = approximately and dian = one day instead of precisely one day

Circadian Rhythm explains how blind people still maintain regular wake/sleep schedules

More research found average human adult’s endogenous circadian clock is 24h 15m

Your suprachiasmatic takes light or sunlight and sends melatonin to reset your circadian rhythm to keep it on a twenty-four-hour cycle

When travelling between time zones, your suprachiasmatic nucleus can only readjust your circadian rhythm by one hour a day

Morning Larks and Night Owls Chronotype

Chronotype

% of pop

Peak Wake

Sleep trough

Morning Lark

40%

5AM (early in the day)

9PM (early in evening)

Night Owl

30%

9 to 10AM (late morn or afternoon)

1 to 2AM (late in night)

There are no rows in this table

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Remaining 30% of the population is in-between

An adult’s chronotype is determine by genetics, if you’re a night owl, then either one or both parents are also night owls

Melatonin

Melatonin helps regulate the timing of when sleep occurs by telling the brain when it’s dark

Melatonin does not generate sleep

In a race analogy, melatonin is the timing official that fires the pistol to start the race. Other regions of the brain are the sprinters themselves that generate sleep

Sunlight blocks the release of melatonin via a gland so we don’t feel sleepy during the day and our bodies and brains know when to wake up because the concentration of melatonin decreases with sunlight.

We humans are “solar powered”

When to Sleep (2/2): Sleep Pressure

Adenosine

Is a chemical that gives you the desire to sleep, aka sleep pressure

Builds up for every minute you are awake, i.e. the longer you’re awake = the more adenosine is floating in your brain

Helps track of how long you’ve been awake, reaches max after 12-16 hours of wakefulness

Gets cleaned out with sleep

Doesn’t get cleaned out entirely when there’s not enough sleep or bad quality of sleep, like a loan in arrears accumulating compound interest

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Caffeine

You can use caffeine to mute the sleepy effects of adenosine to feel more alert and awake

Caffeine attaches to the same receptors that adenosine uses without activating sleepiness, thus blocking adenosine from communicating to the brain

Caffeine does not impact the amount of adenosine in the body so you will feel the full force of sleepy adenosine when caffeine wears off in a “caffeine crash”

Caffeine has an average half-life of 5 to 7 hours meaning that the amount of caffeine in your body will be halved every 5 to 7 hours (using 5 hours, it’ll take 35 hours to reach <1% of caffeine)

De-caffeinated coffees usually have 15% to 30% of the dose of a regular cup of coffee, but still contains caffeine

As we get older, it takes longer to remove caffeine from our body and brain

Am I getting enough sleep?

An easy rule of thumb is to ask yourself two simple questions:

After waking up in the morning, could you fall back asleep at 10 or 11AM? If yes = insufficient sleep quantity or quality

Can you function optimally without caffeine before noon? If no = you are self-medicating away sleep deprivation

Everyone needs at least 8 or 9 hours in bed

Stages of Sleep

There are two stages of sleep that occurs every 90 minutes:

0. Wakefulness,

reception to experience and learn from the world

Deep NREM, non-rapid eye movement

reflection to store and strengthen raw ingredients of new facts and skills

weeds out unnecessary neural connections and moves recent experiences from the fragile short-term memory to the permanent long-term memory,

difference in the work is like an artist breaking off large chunks of raw material

REM, rapid eye movement

integration to connect raw ingredients with each other and past experiences for innovative insights and problem-solving

is the dreaming stage that strengthens neural connections,

difference in the work is like an artist chiseling the finer details to build a sculpture

While NREM and REM flip-flops in each sleep cycle throughout, the proportion of each changes through the course of the entire sleep

The first half of the night is mostly NREM and not a lot of REM

The second half of the night shifts to mostly REM then little or no NREM

If you wake up early and miss out on the later sleep cycles, you could lose 60 to 90% of your REM sleep even though you’re only cutting down 25% of your total sleep time

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You are completely paralyzed during the dreaming REM sleep, why? So you don’t act out your dream experience

Evolution of Sleep in Animals and Humans

Sleep has been around for at least 500 million years, present in worms during the Cambrian age

Sleep is non-negotiable and so vital that dolphins and birds can put one-half of their brain in sleep while the other maintains life-necessary movement in the aquatic or aerial environment, sleeping with one-half of the brain is called uni-hemispheric sleep

Humans use uni-hemispheric sleep when sleeping in a new environment such as hotel or sleep laboratory, after a few nights, sleep in the new location will resemble sleeping at home

Humans who deliberately fast (or encounter severe famine) will give up sleep in search of food (as also seen in flies during sleep deprivation experiments)

Cultures untouched by electricity are seem to sleep in:

biphasic pattern — long sleep period of 7 to 8 hours at night, then 30 to 60 minute nap in the afternoon

monophasic pattern in the cooler winter months, then biphasic in the hotter summer months with a nap at high noon

Falls asleep 2 to 3 hours after sunset around 9PM and wakes up at or before dawn

Biphasic sleep

is biologically hardwired into humans because we have a dip in alertness in the midafternoon

is our natural state of slumber (long continuous sleep at night + short midafternoon nap)

healthier — Researchers from Harvard’s School of Public Health followed 23,000 Greek adults with no history of heart disease over six-years as they moved from biphasic sleep to monophasic sleep and found a 37% increased risk of heart disease vs those who remained biphasic by napping in the afternoon; people who practice biphasic sleep also live longer

The author posits that the two traits (sociocultural complexities, cognitive intelligence) making homo sapiens unique are possible because of our intense REM sleep and intense REM sleep was only possible when we moved from the tree to the ground

REM sleep in tribes enhance emotional IQ to form intensively social communities

REM sleep fuels creativity allowing us to awake with new solutions to previous problems

Alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep

Old adults aren’t able to generate as much sleep as younger adults because:

they’re less able to recognize the quality of their sleep and less likely to attribute poor health with degraded sleep

have to take more bathroom breaks throughout the night

spend less time actually asleep for the same length of time in bed than younger humans (teenagers have a sleep efficiency of 95%, good sleep quality is at >90%, seniors in their 80’s are at <70-80%)

the lower the sleep efficiency, the higher the mortality risk, worse their physical health, more likely to suffer from depression, have less energy, lower cognitive function, more forgetfulness

aging deteriorates the parts of our brain that ignites healthy deep sleep and sleep deprivation causes further deterioration in a vicious cycle

Even pre-industrial tribespeople of South America and Africa have to sleep 8 hours:

Current-day tribespeople were given activity-devices to track sleep and found they were sleeping an average 6 hours in the summer and 7.2 hours in the winter

Why? Tribespeople were intentionally limiting their sleep to 7 to 8.5 hours each night

The same tribespeople lived to 58 years old, on average

The most common cause of death after surviving infant mortality is infection, were a healthy immune system (from enough sleep) would have otherwise been able to fight it off

Benefits of Sleep

If the benefits of sleep was a pill, everyone would take it to live longer, enhance memory, more creative, look more attractive, slim down, lowers food craving, protect from cancer and dementia, ward off colds, flus, heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, feel happier and less depressed and anxious

Sleep before learning to refresh your ability to make new memories (specifically NREM sleep)

Sleep after learning consolidates the newly acquired information and protects it from forgetting

Sleep Spindles are short powerful bursts of electrical activity during NREM sleep, and the more spindles one gets in sleep, the more they restore/retained their learning when they wake up

Sleeping clears out the short-term memory cache to allow for new learning throughout the next day while moving yesterday’s memories into long-term storage, this occurs even during 20-minute naps as long as there is enough NREM sleep

You can selectively enhance memories that you want to keep by playing cues relating to what you want to remember while sleeping

Practice with sleep makes perfect because…

Your brain in sleep will continue to improve the memories relating to performance of a skill without requiring any actual practice

Short-term memory is transferred into motor memories (vs recalling facts) to help the brain automate routine movement effortlessly

Stage 2 NREM (last 2 hours of an 8-hour night of sleep) is responsible for this overnight motor-skill enhancement

In performance sports…

Sleep in the most potent, powerful (and legal) enhancer

Sleeping less than 8 hours a night will cause you to be physically exhausted quicker, not as strong, lower endurance, increase risk of injury

Sleep accelerates physical recovery from common inflammation, stimulates muscle repair, and restock cellular energy in the form o f glucose and glycogen

Consequences of Sleep Deprivation

Drowsy Driving

Drowsy-driving accidents are due to…

Literally falling asleep at the wheel, only occurs if haven’t slept for 24+ hours

Microsleep, a momentary lapse in concentration even though eyelids may still be partially opened, more common cause of accidents and occurs if chronically sleeping <7 hours/night

Sleep deprivation caused “microsleeps” where David Dinges’ research participants did not respond to cues at all, in addition to a slower reaction time

A 400% increase in the number of microsleeps is caused by:

6 nights sleeping only 4 hours, or

10 nights sleeping only 6 hours, or

all-nighter going 24 hours without sleep

Sleep-impaired people consistently underestimated their performance disability, similar to someone at the bar claiming they’re “good to drive home”

People awake for 19-22 hours are as cognitively impaired as those legally drunk

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Alcohol + sleep deprivation acted had a magnifying impairment on performance, not additive

The brain begins to fail after being awake for 16 hours

Humans need more than 7 hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance

After 10 days of sleeping 7 hours, your brain will be as dysfunctional as going without sleep for 24 hours and you cannot restore performance with three full nights’ (a weekend) of sleep

Drowsy driving accidents account for more vehicle accidents than those caused by drugs and alcohol combined, i.e. drowsy driving is worse than driving drunk

Drunk drivers react slower in breaking or making evasive maneuvers

Drowsy drivers stop reacting altogether while microsleeping, not even attempting to brake or avoid an accident

If you must drive drowsy, find somewhere safe to take a brief 20-30 minute nap, then wait another 20-30 minutes to shake off sleep inertia before driving again

There is a very rare number of people who can survive on six hours of sleep naturally (wake up without alarms) with minimal impairment and makes up less than one percent of the population

Cognitive Performance, Drug Use, and Alzheimer’s

Without sleep, our brain reverts to its primitive thinking of uncontrolled inappropriate emotional reactions and unable to put events into a broader context

With plentiful sleep, we have a balance of emotional control (amygdala) and cognitive control (prefrontal cortex)

Without sleep, the strong coupling between them is lost

Insufficient sleep during childhood significantly predicts early onset of drug and alcohol use in the same child during adolescent even when controlling for other high-risk traits such as anxiety, attention deficits, and parental history of drug use

Sleep deprivation caused research participants to retain 40% less new information into memory than those well-slept; a difference of passing or failing an exam

You don’t consolidate memories of learning new materials if you don’t sleep the first night after learning

Alzheimers’ key lifestyle factor in determining whether you’ll adopt it is the lack of sleep you get

Why? Alzheimer’s disease is a buildup of a toxic protein called amyloid, which are poisonous to neurons and kills surrounding brain cells

Without sufficient sleep, Alzheimer-causing amyloid plaques build up in the brain, attaching the regions responsible for deep NREM sleep which lessens the brain’s ability to remove amyloid resulting in less deep sleep and more amyloid

Tentative support emerged suggesting improving one’s sleep can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s by 5 to 10 years

Physical Health

Sleep is the foundation of good health such that diet and exercise is less effective without sleep

Lack of sleep causes heart disease, obesity, dementia, diabetes, and cancer

The relationship between short sleep and heart failure is strong even after controlling for smoking, physical activity, and body mass

Lack of sleep puts the body in an overactive sympathetic nervous system where the body is constantly in a state of fight-or-flight

An nervous system will trigger excess cortisol (stress hormone) that cultivates “bad bacteria” in your microbiome, preventing meaningful absorption of food nutrients and cause gastrointestinal problems

Deep NPREM sleep is a natural night-time blood pressure management that reduces hypertension and stroke

In daylight savings time when the clock moves backward, hospital records show a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day

The less you sleep, the more you are likely to eat

Research participants who limited their sleep to 4 hours/night for six nights were 40% less effective at absorbing glucose, putting them at pre-diabetic levels

One of the major contributors to Type 2 Diabetes in developed countries is chronic sleep deprivation

Sleep-deprived research participants weren’t feeling satisfied by food when they lacked sleep because of less concentration in the “I’m full” satiation hormone leptin and more of the “I’m still hungry” hunger-starting hormone ghrelin

A sleep-deprived body will cry famine in the midst of plenty

A sleep-deprived research participant ate 300 more calories each day compared to those getting a full night of sleep when given the same level of physical activity and food access

Extrapolating 300 calories per day every day will equate to 10 to 15 pounds of weight gain per year every year

Sleep loss increases the level of endocannabinoids, stimulating appetite and desire to snack like how marijuana use causes “the munchies”

When attempting to lose weight, those sleeping 5.5 hours lost >20% more muscle than fat per pound when compared to those who slept 8.5 hours each night

Sleep deprivation lowers testosterone and “ages” a man by 10 to 15 years in terms of testosterone virility

Men with low testosterone often feel tired and fatigued throughout the day, find it hard to concentrate and focus

Testosterone maintains bone density and strength

In a study of female nurses, women who worked irregular nighttime hours and shift work were 80% more likely to suffer from fertility issues and suffer from a miscarriage

Vaccines are also less effective in sleep-deprived individuals, producing less than 50% of the antibody immune reaction than those well-slept

There was 70% less cancer-fighting natural killer cells in the immune system of someone who spent one night sleeping 4 hours than someone who slept for 7 hours

Sleeping less than 6 hours is associated with a 40% increased risk of developing cancer

Sleep deprivation decreases M1 macrophages that fight cancer while increasing M2 macrophages that causes cancer

World Health Organization classified nighttime shift work as a “probably carcinogen” >> In 2007, a body within WHO — International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) —classified shift work with circadian disruption as a probable human carcinogen.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2954516/⁠

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Lack of sleep will age you — Telomeres, the aglet (tip of shoelace) of genes, is more damaged in sleep-deprived people which prematurely ages someone biologically more than their chronological age

In a gruesome study of rats and death by sleep deprivation:

Rats died after 15 days of no sleep (just as long as food deprivation), on average

Rats died just as fast when deprived of REM-sleep as they did of total sleep deprivation

Rats survived a little longer (45 days) when deprived of NREM sleep

Where food deprivation can be easily linked as cause of death, sleep as the cause of death is quite muddy. The rats that died from sleep deprivation …

Could no longer regulate their core body temperature, regressing towards ambient room temperature

Ate more but lost body mass because their metabolic system was trying unsuccessfully to raise core body temperature

Could not fend off basic infections since their immune system was so impaired, developing sores on their skin and wounds on their paws and tails

Eventually died of septicemia, a toxic systemic (whole organism) bacterial infection starting from the gut that ravaged the entire body until death by travelling through the bloodstream, which an otherwise healthy immune system would have prevented

Dreaming

Scientists can predict with confidence the form of someone’s dream — whether it would be visual, emotional, motoric, etc.

Researchers can tell you are dreaming of a car but not which car by seeing how the brain reacts to certain images in the MRI awake and in sleep

Researchers found of the emotional dreams, 35 to 55% of them were what participants experienced during the day while awake

What are the benefits of dreaming?

Nurses our emotional and mental health

Allows us to problem solve and think creatively

Mental and Emotional Benefits of Dreaming

REM sleep (state where you dream) is the only time your brain does not have any anxiety-triggering molecules, noradrenaline

REM sleep dreaming separates the bitter emotional baggage from the factual recollection of events so we can recall facts without being crippled by painful experiences so that we don’t relive the same emotional charge every time we remember

Test subjects without sleep had emotional brain reactions just as strong and negative as when they experienced the feelings initially while those who slept showed a decrease in their emotional response to seeing the same images again

You need to dream of the very thing you want to get over because those who didn’t dream oft he painful experience still cannot get past the event

A sleep-deprived brain has a harder time decoding facial expressions and incorrectly reads the situation, mistakenly believing defaulting into a fear bias and friendly-looking faces are menacing and more threatening than a well-slept brain;

The reverse is true in that better REM-sleep quality provided superior social comprehension the following day

Creative and Problem Solving Benefits of Dreaming

Mendeleev figured out how to organize the elements in the Table of Elements as a result of dreaming, he dreamt “a table where all the elements fell into place as required”; Paul McCartney’s famous songs “Yesterday” and “Let It Be” both came to him in sleep

Puzzle-solving abilities improved by 15 to 35% when participants awake from REM sleep vs those who stayed awake even though the same amount of time lapsed

REM sleep was finding connections between distantly related concepts, entirely ignoring obvious logical associations

There is truth to the saying “sleep on it” or in Swahili kulala juu ya tatizo

Participants who dreamt of the maze were 10 times better at solving a maze than those who didn’t dream about the maze but slept just as much

Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dreaming has been proven by research, and funnily enough, male individuals have shown they can bring themselves to timed organisms through lucid dreaming that is verifiable by physiological measures

Impediments to Sleeping

The five key factors that changed how much and how well we sleep are:

Constant electric light incl. LED

Regularized temperature

Caffeine (covered in section about adenosine)

Alcohol

Punching time cards (covered in Stages of Sleep)

Constant Electric Light

Artificial light delays our brain’s trigger to start getting ready for sleep, which would naturally take place around 8-10PM from what we observe in hunter-gatherer tribes

Artificial light tricks our brains into thinking the night is day, delaying the release of melatonin

How much life is too much light? Even a small dim bedside lamp of 8 to 10 lux can delay the release of nighttime melatonin (1 lux = 1 lumen per m^2)

Our eye and suprachiasmatic (circadian rhythm watchman) is sensitive to the same short wavelength light found in blue LED lights; hence evening blue LED is twice as harmful as warm, yellow incandescent lightbulbs even holding for same lux intensities

What is impact of reading on an iPad before sleep? Lose significant amount of REM sleep, feel less rested and sleepier the next day,90 minute lag in evening melatonin levels even days after ceasing iPad use

How to create better evening lighting environment for sleep? Avoid powerful overhead lights, dim light in the evening, install blue LED-light de-saturation like flux/night-mode

Regularized Temperature

To successfully fall asleep, your core temperature needs to drop by 1°C

It is easier to fall asleep in a room that is too cold than too hold

Bedroom temperature of 18.3°C (or 65°F) is ideal for most people assuming standard bedding and clothing

Taking a hot bath in the evening before bed helps us cool down quicker because the hot bath brings blood to the surface of the skin which helps radiate out inner heat, inducing 10 to 15% more deep NREM sleep

Alcohol

Alcohol is considered a sedative because it prevents neurons from firing electrical impulses

Alcohol helps people become more social by sedating the prefrontal cortex that controls our impulses and restrains our behaviour, as a result, “loosening up” and become more extroverted

With time, alcohol sedates other parts of the brain and you’ll start to feel sluggish and sleepy

Sedation does not induce natural sleep, it is a light form of anesthesia

Alcohol-induced sleep is fragmented with many awakenings throughout the night but individuals don’t remember them the following morning

Alcohol is one of the most powerful REM sleep suppressors that we know of

If you consume alcohol on the third day of learning, you can still wash away what you learned as alcohol blocks your REM sleep at night

If you’re going to drink, do it in the morning so it’s out of your system before sleep

Sleeping Pills

No sleeping medication on the market has ever been able to induce natural sleep

In a study of 4,500 individuals, there was no statistical difference in the time it took to fall asleep and how soundly they slept between those who took placebo vs sleeping pills

Animals were given Ambien after learning and were found to have 50% less brain-cell connections than when originally formed during learning (while natural sleep solidified those memory connections) ∴ Ambien-induced sleep is a memory eraser

Physician Dr. Daniel Kripke at University of California, San Diego found that people using prescription sleep medications are significantly more likely to develop cancer and die than those who do not (and he has a whole site about this!

darksideofsleepingpills.com⁠

)

One cause of higher mortality is the higher than normal rates of infection, which natural sleep will help prevent because sleep improves the immune system

Want to treat insomnia? Use Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

Treatment with CBT

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) is the most effective method and consists of working with a therapist over several weeks to break bad sleep habits and address anxieties inhibiting sleep

establish a regular bedtime and wake-up time, even on weekends (most effective)

reduce caffeine intake

reduce alcohol intake

remove screen technology from bedroom

have a cool bedroom

go to bed only when sleepy, avoid sleeping on couch on evenings

never lie awake, do something quiet and relaxing until urge to sleep returns

avoid daytime napping if you can’t sleep at night

reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts/worries by learning to mentally decelerate

remove visible clockfaces from the bedroom to reduce clock-watching anxiety

reduce time spent sleeping so there is greater adenosine/sleep pressure to fall asleep the next night then gradually work up to eight hours of sleep

CBT is more effective than sleeping pills in falling asleep faster, longer, and of better quality

CBT must be used as the first line treatment for chronic insomnia, before sleeping pills

Don’t exercise right before bed because body temperature can remain high for 1-2 hours after physical activity which messes with your ability to fall sleep; exercise at least 2-3 hours before

Severe caloric restriction to 800/day for a month makes it harder to fall asleep, and decreases the amount of deep NREM

Avoid going to bed too full or too hungry, and avoid diets that are excessively high in carbohydrates esp. sugar (high = >70% of daily caloric intake)

Sleeping in Schools and the Work Place

Dr. Christopher Barns of Washington University found employees who slept ≤6 hours are significantly more deviant and likely to lie; sleeping less = more likely to fake receipts and reimbursement claims

Poor quality of sleep accurate predicts whether employees report in their managers poor self-control and more abusive behaviours

Economists Matthew Gibson and Jeffrey Shrader found a correlation where an hour of extra sleep is associated with 4 to 5% higher wages

Efficacy of naps? NASA found their astronauts can improve task performance by 35% and overall alertness by 50% with naps as short as 26 minutes

Sleep deprivation is a interrogation torture technique that leaves no trace of the torture

A study of 5,000 Japanese schoolchildren found those who slept longer had better grades and had better IQ

Louisville School of Medicine Dr. Ronald Wilson studied twins and found the twin who habitually slept longer had superior intellect, educational abilities, higher scores on standardized tests in reading and comprehension, and had a more expansive vocabulary

Shifting class start time from 7:25AM to 8:30AM improved average SAT test scores for top-performing students in Edina, Minnesota from an already respectable 605 to 761, and reduced fatal traffic accidents by 60% (double that of accident rates by the leading technology advancement the anti-lock brake ABS)

Why keep the start times the way they are? Because of school bus schedules and bus onions, plus parents want to get kids to school to get to work on time

The symptoms of childhood ADHD are nearly identical to the symptoms of sleep deprivation in children: unable to focus, deficient learning, difficult behaviour, mental instability

Medical errors are the 3rd leading cause of death among Americans after heart attacks and cancer (both of which is worsened by lack of sleep as well)

You are more sensitive to all kinds of pain if you have less or fragmented sleep while sleep acts as a natural analgesic so hospitals should be able to reduce narcotic doses if patients sleep more

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