#131 Matthew Walker: The Power of Sleep - Deepstash
#131 Matthew Walker: The Power of Sleep

#131 Matthew Walker: The Power of Sleep

Curated from: The Knowledge Project

Ideas, facts & insights covering these topics:

7 ideas

·

2.59K reads

28

Explore the World's Best Ideas

Join today and uncover 100+ curated journeys from 50+ topics. Unlock access to our mobile app with extensive features.

Intro to Sleep Stages

Intro to Sleep Stages

Matthew Walker’s intro to REM Sleep & Non-Rem Sleep:

20%-25% in REM sleep

20%-30% in deep non-REM sleep

The rest in light non-REM sleep

Seven to nine hours of sleep covers the vast distribution of human sleep need

Genetic short sleepers (6 hours or less) are incredibly rare – you may be resilient but lack of sleep can lead to hypertension, impaired cognitive ability, immune system deficiencies.

The best REM sleep doesn’t enter the cycle until the last couple of hours of the night, you need a minimum amount of sleep to access it

Different stages of sleep have different benefits for your mind and body

32

428 reads

MATHEW WALKER

The snooze button is the perennial expression of the human frustration of chronic lingering sleep debt

MATHEW WALKER

29

436 reads

Sleeping Tips 1/2

Sleeping Tips 1/2

Experiment: If you regularly set an alarm clock, would you wake up at that same relative time without the alarm clock?

If the answer is no, you’re not listening to your body’s needs and are probably running on a sleep deficit.

Don’t force sleep, it’s dangerous to stay awake in bed for long periods of time.

Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning: your brain will begin to bond a negative association with your bed and being awake

“You’d never sit at the dinner table waiting to get hungry, so why would you lie in bed waiting to get sleepy?”

35

380 reads

Sleeping Tips 2/2

The harder you try to sleep, the harder it becomes

  • Don’t count sheep, take yourself on a long mental journey. Take your mind off of itself.
  • Matthew loves racing cars, he guides himself through this activity as he falls asleep

Don’t try to catch up on sleep. If you’ve had a bad night of sleep, do not adjust your personal sleep schedule to compensate.

  • Don’t let one bad night of sleep compound into another
  • If you’re going to nap, make them brief (10-15min) and before 1 pm

Have a wind-down routine before you go to bed, sleeping is not like a light switch

  • This could be stretching, meditating,shower etc

35

363 reads

Coffee, Caffeine & Alcohol

Coffee, Caffeine & Alcohol

Drinking coffee is objectively good, the timing and dosage is the problem

  • Due to common diet deficiencies, the coffee bean often serves as a main provider of antioxidants
  • Caffeine has a half-life of five to six hours
  • If you have a cup of coffee at midday, 50% will be in your system at 6 pm and still 25% at midnight
  • Caffeine in the late day can reduce the amount of deep sleep you get by 20%-40% (stage three & four non-REM)
  • Cut off caffeine consumption 10 hours before bed

Alcohol can activate the fight or flight response system even while you sleeping–causing sleep fragmentation

31

326 reads

Insomnia & How to Sleep Better

Insomnia & How to Sleep Better

  • Sleep-onset insomnia: the inability to fall asleep
  • Sleep-maintenance insomnia: the ability to fall asleep but difficulty staying asleep
  • Nonrestorative sleep: following normal sleep patterns but still feeling insufficiently refreshed
  • Insomnia is about 30% genetically inheritable, but mental distress is one of the greatest drivers of insomnia
  • Hyperarousal: over-active neurobiological and psychological systems contribute to difficulty sleeping
  • Matthew references Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) as a potential long-term treatment for insomnia

31

337 reads

Sleep Tracking

Sleep Tracking

Metrics that Matthew uses for sleep tracking:

  • Sleep efficiency: the percentage of time in bed that you are sleeping. Target is 85%-90%.
  • Sleep latency: how long it takes to fall asleep. Falling asleep too quickly can imply a sleep debt.
  • REM/Non-REM sleep cycles

Orthosomnia: the anxiety of perfecting your sleep routine ends up being counterproductive

  • Sleep tracking can distort your psychology–what if you feel like you slept well, but your tracker says otherwise?
  • Gamifying your sleep can make you lose sight of the intrinsic benefits

28

321 reads

IDEAS CURATED BY

donalgarn

Merchandiser in retail

Donald Garner's ideas are part of this journey:

Lessons From Self Made Billionaires

Learn more about health with this collection

The value of hard work and persistence

How to stay focused on long-term goals

How to learn from failures and setbacks

Related collections

Similar ideas

Read & Learn

20x Faster

without
deepstash

with
deepstash

with

deepstash

Personalized microlearning

100+ Learning Journeys

Access to 200,000+ ideas

Access to the mobile app

Unlimited idea saving

Unlimited history

Unlimited listening to ideas

Downloading & offline access

Supercharge your mind with one idea per day

Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.

Email

I agree to receive email updates