83 Quotes by Matthew Walker

Midnight is the time when we think, 'Well, we should probably send our last email; let me just check Facebook one more time.'

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.

The amount of sleep - the total amount of sleep that you get - starts to decrease the older that we get. I think one of the myths out there is that we simply need less sleep as we age, and that's not true, in fact.

No one wants to give up time with their family or entertainment, so they give up sleep instead.

Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.

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.

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.

As you try to tweak your sleep one way or the other, you might be, you might be doing great - you might do better at remembering details of an event, but you might end up being poorer at abstracting the gist or the rules associated with it.

Your subjective sense of how well you're doing under conditions of sleep deprivation is a miserable predictor of, objectively, how you actually are doing.