AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH! Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested?

Matthew Walker proffers this promise in his bestselling book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. For years I had sought to get by on the minimum amount of sleep. I remember when I was in the Navy on deployment and we would be flying day and night – I felt like I was constantly tired. A crusty old salt used to say, “You can sleep when you’re dead.” The minimal amount of sleep was seen as a badge of honor. This book has completely changed my attitude about sleep. Rather than viewing sleep as a necessary evil, I’ve come to see sleep as fulfilling the promises in the paragraph at the beginning of this blog post.

The amazing breakthrough at the beginning of this post “is not describing some miracle new tincture or a cure-all wonder drug, but rather the proven benefits of a full night of sleep. The evidence supporting these claims has been documented in more than 17,000 well-scrutinized scientific reports to date. As for the prescription cost, well, there isn’t one. It’s free. Yet all too often, we shun the nightly invitation to receive our full dose of this all-natural remedy—with terrible consequences.”

Walker points out the crucial importance of sleep, “I was once fond of saying, ‘Sleep is the third pillar of good health, alongside diet and exercise.’ I have changed my tune. Sleep is more than a pillar; it is the foundation on which the other two health bastions sit. Take away the bedrock of sleep, or weaken it just a little, and careful eating or physical exercise become less than effective, as we shall see.”

I had many take-away’s in this book and have included some of them below to help you see the importance of sleep and what you can do to improve your sleep. Here’s my highlights:

Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.

Tragically, one person dies in a traffic accident every hour in the United States due to a fatigue-related error. It is disquieting to learn that vehicular accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined.

The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarf those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise.

Emerging from this research renaissance is an unequivocal message: sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day—Mother Nature’s best effort yet at contra-death.

Caffeine is not a food supplement. Rather, caffeine is the most widely used (and abused) psychoactive stimulant in the world.

The consumption of caffeine represents one of the longest and largest unsupervised drug studies ever conducted on the human race, perhaps rivaled only by alcohol, and it continues to this day.

Levels of circulating caffeine peak approximately thirty minutes after oral administration. What is problematic, though, is the persistence of caffeine in your system. In pharmacology, we use the term “half-life” when discussing a drug’s efficacy. This simply refers to the length of time it takes for the body to remove 50 percent of a drug’s concentration. Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours. Let’s say that you have a cup of coffee after your evening dinner, around 7:30 p.m. This means that by 1:30 a.m., 50 percent of that caffeine may still be active and circulating throughout your brain tissue. In other words, by 1:30 a.m., you’re only halfway to completing the job of cleansing your brain of the caffeine you drank after dinner.

Also be aware that de-caffeinated does not mean non-caffeinated. One cup of decaf usually contains 15 to 30 percent of the dose of a regular cup of coffee, which is far from caffeine-free.

Aging also alters the speed of caffeine clearance: the older we are, the longer it takes our brain and body to remove caffeine, and thus the more sensitive we become in later life to caffeine’s sleep-disrupting influence.

But once your liver dismantles that barricade of caffeine, you feel a vicious backlash: you are hit with the sleepiness you had experienced two or three hours ago before you drank that cup of coffee plus all the extra adenosine that has accumulated in the hours in between, impatiently waiting for caffeine to leave. When the receptors become vacant by way of caffeine decomposition, adenosine rushes back in and smothers the receptors. When this happens, you are assaulted with a most forceful adenosine-trigger urge to sleep—the aforementioned caffeine crash.

When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities).

Humans are not sleeping the way nature intended. The number of sleep bouts, the duration of sleep, and when sleep occurs have all been comprehensively distorted by modernity.

Have you ever wondered about the meaning of the term “midnight”? It of course means the middle of the night, or, more technically, the middle point of the solar cycle. And so it is for the sleep cycle of hunter-gatherer cultures, and presumably all those that came before. Now consider our cultural sleep norms. Midnight is no longer “mid night.”

Compounding the problem, we do not then sleep any longer into the morning hours to accommodate these later sleep-onset times. We cannot. Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.

At one time we went to bed in the hours after dusk and woke up with the chickens.

All humans, irrespective of culture or geographical location, have a genetically hardwired dip in alertness that occurs in the midafternoon hours.

From a prescription written long ago in our ancestral genetic code, the practice of natural biphasic sleep, and a healthy diet, appear to be the keys to a long-sustained life.

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

What emerges from all of these studies is that REM sleep is not optional during early human life, but obligatory.

Feinberg’s study reminds me of a billboard advertisement I once saw from a large insurance firm, which read: “Why do most 16-year-olds drive like they’re missing part of their brain? Because they are.” It takes deep sleep, and developmental time, to accomplish the neural maturation that plugs this brain “gap” within the frontal lobe. When your children finally reach their mid-twenties and your car insurance premium drops, you can thank sleep for the savings.

Like an animal prematurely wrenched out of hibernation too early, the adolescent brain still needs more sleep and more time to complete the circadian cycle before it can operate efficiently, without grogginess.

Based on scientific evidence, a new policy has rightly been suggested by my colleague Dr. Mary Carskadon: “No child needs caffeine.”

That older adults simply need less sleep is a myth. Older adults appear to need just as much sleep as they do in midlife, but are simply less able to generate that (still necessary) sleep.

Once again, I urge an elderly individual who may be concerned about their sleep not to seek a sleeping pill prescription. Instead, I recommend you first explore the effective and scientifically proven non-pharmacological interventions that a doctor who is board certified in sleep medicine can provide.

The second hallmark of altered sleep as we age, and one that older adults are more conscious of, is fragmentation. The older we get, the more frequently we wake up throughout the night.

The third sleep change with advanced age is that of circadian timing. In sharp contrast to adolescents, seniors commonly experience a regression in sleep timing, leading to earlier and earlier bedtimes.

Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. It is far more than that. Described earlier, our nighttime sleep is an exquisitely complex, metabolically active, and deliberately ordered series of unique stages.

We had observed a real-estate transaction that takes place each night when we sleep. Fitting the notion of a long-wave radio signal that carries information across large geographical distances, the slow brainwaves of deep NREM had served as a courier service, transporting memory packets from a temporary storage hold (hippocampus) to a more secure, permanent home (the cortex). In doing so, sleep had helped future-proof those memories.

By transferring memories of yesterday from the short-term repository of the hippocampus to the long-term home within the cortex, you awake with both yesterday’s experiences safely filed away and having regained your short-term storage capacity for new learning throughout that following day.

Like a computer hard drive where some files have become corrupted and inaccessible, sleep offers a recovery service at night. Having repaired those memory items, rescuing them from the clutches of forgetting, you awake the next morning able to locate and retrieve those once unavailable memory files with ease and precision.

The term “muscle memory” is a misnomer. Muscles themselves have no such memory: a muscle that is not connected to a brain cannot perform any skilled actions, nor does a muscle store skilled routines.

Muscle memory is, in fact, brain memory. Training and strengthening muscles can help you better execute a skilled memory routine. But the routine itself—the memory program—resides firmly and exclusively within the brain.

Then came a comment that would leave me reeling, and trigger a major focus of my research for years to come. “As a pianist,” he said, “I have an experience that seems far too frequent to be chance. I will be practicing a particular piece, even late into the evening, and I cannot seem to master it. Often, I make the same mistake at the same place in a particular movement. I go to bed frustrated. But when I wake up the next morning and sit back down at the piano, I can just play, perfectly.”

Yet, that delayed, “offline” learning occurs exclusively across a period of sleep, and not across equivalent time periods spent awake, regardless of whether the time awake or time asleep comes first. Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.

When it comes to motor-skill memories, the brainwaves of sleep were acting like a good masseuse—you still get a full body massage, but they will place special focus on areas of the body that need the most help.

Perhaps more relevant to the modern world is the time-of-night effect we discovered. Those last two hours of sleep are precisely the window that many of us feel it is okay to cut short to get a jump start on the day. As a result, we miss out on this feast of late-morning sleep spindles. It also brings to mind the prototypical Olympic coach who stoically has her athletes practicing late into the day, only to have them wake in the early hours of the morning and return to practice.

Our own studies support his wisdom: daytime naps that contain sufficient numbers of sleep spindles also offer significant motor skill memory improvement, together with a restoring benefit on perceived energy and reduced muscle fatigue.

Standing in front of the manager, staff, and players, I tell them about one of the most sophisticated, potent, and powerful—not to mention legal—performance enhancers that has real game-winning potential: sleep.

Post-performance sleep accelerates physical recovery from common inflammation, stimulates muscle repair, and helps restock cellular energy in the form of glucose and glycogen.

A final benefit of sleep for memory is arguably the most remarkable of all: creativity. Sleep provides a nighttime theater in which your brain tests out and builds connections between vast stores of information.

One brain function that buckles under even the smallest dose of sleep deprivation is concentration. The deadly societal consequences of these concentration failures play out most obviously and fatally in the form of drowsy driving. Every hour, someone dies in a traffic accident in the US due to a fatigue-related error.

The second, more common cause is a momentary lapse in concentration, called a microsleep. These last for just a few seconds, during which time the eyelid will either partially or fully close.

During a microsleep, your brain becomes blind to the outside world for a brief moment—and not just the visual domain, but in all channels of perception. Most of the time you have no awareness of the event. More problematic is that your decisive control of motor actions, such as those necessary for operating a steering wheel or a brake pedal, will momentarily cease. As a result, you don’t need to fall asleep for ten to fifteen seconds to die while driving. Two seconds will do it.

Based on epidemiological studies of average sleep time, millions of individuals unwittingly spend years of their life in a sub-optimal state of psychological and physiological functioning, never maximizing their potential of mind or body due to their blind persistence in sleeping too little. Sixty years of scientific research prevent me from accepting anyone who tells me that he or she can “get by on just four or five hours of sleep a night just fine.”

Nor did any group recover all the sleep hours they had lost in the days prior. As we have already learned, the brain is incapable of that.

After being awake for nineteen hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk. Said another way, if you wake up at seven a.m. and remain awake throughout the day, then go out socializing with friends until late that evening, yet drink no alcohol whatsoever, by the time you are driving home at two a.m. you are as cognitively impaired in your ability to attend to the road and what is around you as a legally drunk driver.

The heady cocktail of sleep loss and alcohol was not additive, but instead multiplicative. They magnified each other, like two drugs whose effects are harmful by themselves but, when taken together, interact to produce truly dire consequences.

After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance.

After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.

This coming week, more than 2 million people in the US will fall asleep while driving their motor vehicle. That’s more than 250,000 every day, with more such events during the week than weekends for obvious reasons.

As a result, 1.2 million accidents are caused by sleepiness each year in the United States. Said another way: for every thirty seconds you’ve been reading this book, there has been a car accident somewhere in the US caused by sleeplessness.

More dangerous are drowsy truckers. Approximately 80 percent of truck drivers in the US are overweight, and 50 percent are clinically obese. This places truck drivers at a far, far higher risk of a disorder called sleep apnea, commonly associated with heavy snoring, which causes chronic, severe sleep deprivation. As a result, these truck drivers are 200 to 500 percent more likely to be involved in a traffic accident. And when a truck driver loses his or her life in a drowsy-driving crash, they will, on average, take 4.5

Universal parental wisdom knows that bad sleep the night before leads to a bad mood and emotional reactivity the next day.

With a full night of plentiful sleep, we have a balanced mix between our emotional gas pedal (amygdala) and brake (prefrontal cortex). Without sleep, however, the strong coupling between these two brain regions is lost. We cannot rein in our atavistic impulses—too much emotional gas pedal (amygdala) and not enough regulatory brake (prefrontal cortex).

There is no major psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. This is true of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder (once known as manic depression).

Depression is not, as you may think, just about the excess presence of negative feelings. Major depression has as much to do with absence of positive emotions, a feature described as anhedonia: the inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences, such as food, socializing, or sex.

E. Joseph Cossman: “The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.”

When we compared the effectiveness of learning between the two groups, the result was clear: there was a 40 percent deficit in the ability of the sleep-deprived group to cram new facts into the brain (i.e., to make new memories), relative to the group that obtained a full night of sleep. To put that in context, it would be the difference between acing an exam and failing it miserably!

Memories formed without sleep are weaker memories, evaporating rapidly.

A lack of sleep therefore is a deeply penetrating and corrosive force that enfeebles the memory-making apparatus within your brain, preventing you from constructing lasting memory traces. It is rather like building a sand castle too close to the tide line—the consequences are inevitable.

As with a fine-dining experience, it is far more preferable to separate the educational meal into smaller courses, with breaks in between to allow for digestion, rather than attempt to cram all of those informational calories down in one go.

In other words, if you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter. In terms of memory, then, sleep is not like the bank. You cannot accumulate a debt and hope to pay it off at a later point in time. Sleep for memory consolidation is an all-or-nothing event. It is a concerning result in our 24/7, hurry-up, don’t-wait society.

The two most feared diseases throughout developed nations are dementia and cancer. Both are related to inadequate sleep. Regarding the former, which centers on the brain, a lack of sleep is fast becoming recognized as a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease.

One in ten adults over the age of sixty-five now suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Without advances in diagnosis, prevention, and therapeutics, the escalation will continue.

Phrased differently, and perhaps more simply, wakefulness is low-level brain damage, while sleep is neurological sanitation.

Adults forty-five years or older who sleep fewer than six hours a night are 200 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven to eight hours a night.

The sympathetic nervous system is resolutely activating, inciting, even agitating. If needed, it will mobilize the evolutionarily ancient fight-or-flight stress response within the body, comprehensively and in a matter of seconds. Like an accomplished general in command of a vast military, the sympathetic nervous system can muster activity in a vast assortment of the body’s physiological divisions—from respiration, immune function, and stress chemicals to blood pressure and heart rate.

Occurring at the same time is a chronic increase in a stress hormone called cortisol, which is triggered by the overactive sympathetic nervous system. One undesirable consequence of the sustained deluge of cortisol is the constriction of those blood vessels, triggering an even greater increase in blood pressure.

Making matters worse, growth hormone—a great healer of the body—which normally surges at night, is shut off by the state of sleep deprivation. Without growth hormone to replenish the lining of your blood vessels, called the endothelium, they will be slowly shorn and stripped of their integrity.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day.

The less you sleep, the more you are likely to eat. In addition, your body becomes unable to manage those calories effectively, especially the concentrations of sugar in your blood. In these two ways, sleeping less than seven or eight hours a night will increase your probability of gaining weight, being overweight, or being obese, and significantly increases your likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes.

The global health cost of diabetes is $375 billion a year. That of obesity is more than $2 trillion. Yet for the under-slept individual, the cost to health, quality of life, and a hastened arrival of death are more meaningful. Precisely how a lack of sleep sets you on a path toward diabetes and leads to obesity is now well understood and incontrovertible.

Chronic sleep deprivation is now recognized as one of the major contributors to the escalation of type 2 diabetes throughout first-world countries. It’s a preventable contribution.

When your sleep becomes short, you will gain weight. Multiple forces conspire to expand your waistline. The first concerns two hormones controlling appetite: leptin and ghrelin.II Leptin signals a sense of feeling full. When circulating levels of leptin are high, your appetite is blunted and you don’t feel like eating. Ghrelin, in contrast, triggers a strong sensation of hunger. When ghrelin levels increase, so, too, does your desire to eat.

By muting the chemical message that says “stop eating” (leptin), yet increasing the hormonal voice that shouts “please, keep eating” (ghrelin), your appetite remains unsatisfied when your sleep is anything less than plentiful, even after a kingly meal.

Making matters worse, the less an individual sleeps, the less energy he or she feels they have, and the more sedentary and less willing to exercise they are in real-world settings. Inadequate sleep is the perfect recipe for obesity: greater calorie intake, lower calorie expenditure.

Weight gain caused by short sleep is not just a matter of eating more, but also a change in what you binge eat. Looking across the different studies, Van Cauter noticed that cravings for sweets (e.g., cookies, chocolate, and ice cream), heavy-hitting carbohydrate-rich foods (e.g., bread and pasta), and salty snacks (e.g., potato chips and pretzels) all increased by 30 to 40 percent when sleep was reduced by several hours each night.

Was there a breakdown in impulse-control regions that normally keep our basic hedonic food desires in check, making us reach for doughnuts or pizza rather than whole grains and leafy greens?

As we learned about earlier, when you do not get enough sleep, and the body’s stress-related, fight-or-flight nervous system is revved up, this triggers an excess of circulating cortisol that cultivates “bad bacteria” to fester throughout your microbiome. As a result, insufficient sleep will prevent the meaningful absorption of all food nutrients and cause gastrointestinal problems.

The rise in consumption of processed foods, an increase in serving sizes, and the more sedentary nature of human beings are all triggers. However, these changes are insufficient to explain the dramatic escalation of obesity.

An intimate and bidirectional association exists between your sleep and your immune system. Sleep fights against infection and sickness by deploying all manner of weaponry within your immune arsenal, cladding you with protection. When you do fall ill, the immune system actively stimulates the sleep system, demanding more bed rest to help reinforce the war effort. Reduce sleep even for a single night, and that invisible suit of immune resilience is rudely stripped from your body.

The less sleep an individual was getting in the week before facing the active common cold virus, the more likely it was that they would be infected and catch a cold. In those sleeping five hours on average, the infection rate was almost 50 percent. In those sleeping seven hours or more a night in the week prior, the infection rate was just 18 percent.

As with the effects of sleep deprivation on memory, once you miss out on the benefit of sleep in the moment—here, regarding an immune response to this season’s flu—you cannot regain the benefit simply by trying to catch up on lost sleep.

It doesn’t require many nights of short sleeping before the body is rendered immunologically weak, and here the issue of cancer becomes relevant.

Examining healthy young men, Irwin demonstrated that a single night of four hours of sleep—such as going to bed at three a.m. and waking up at seven a.m.—swept away 70 percent of the natural killer cells circulating in the immune system, relative to a full eight-hour night of sleep. That is a dramatic state of immune deficiency to find yourself facing, and it happens quickly, after essentially one “bad night” of sleep. You could well imagine the enfeebled state of your cancer-fighting immune armory after a week of short sleep, let alone months or even years.

A number of prominent epidemiological studies have reported that nighttime shift work, and the disruption to circadian rhythms and sleep that it causes, up your odds of developing numerous different forms of cancer considerably.

A large European study of almost 25,000 individuals demonstrated that sleeping six hours or less was associated with a 40 percent increased risk of developing cancer, relative to those sleeping seven hours a night or more.

That may sound alarmist, but the scientific evidence linking sleep disruption and cancer is now so damning that the World Health Organization has officially classified nighttime shift work as a “probable carcinogen.”

If increasing your risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, obesity, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease weren’t sufficiently disquieting, chronic sleep loss will erode the very essence of biological life itself: your genetic code and the structures that encapsulate it.

But the particular nature of the telomere damage caused by short sleeping is now becoming clear. It appears to mimic that seen in aging or advanced decrepitude.

Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic. It will happen again tonight. Before you reject this diagnosis, allow me to offer five justifying reasons. First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there—you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true—you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person—you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions—something psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth (and how delightful!), you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience—you were suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you’d be seeking immediate psychological treatment. Yet for reasons that are only now becoming clear, the brain state called REM sleep and the mental experience that goes along with it, dreaming, are normal biological and psychological processes, and truly essential ones, as we shall learn.

Discussed in chapter 7, the prefrontal cortex acts like the CEO of the brain. This region, especially the left and right sides, manages rational thought and logical decision-making, sending “top-down” instructions to your more primitive deep-brain centers, such as those instigating emotions. And it is this CEO region of your brain, which otherwise maintains your cognitive capacity for ordered, logical thought, that is temporarily ousted each time you enter into the dreaming state of REM sleep.

REM sleep can therefore be considered as a state characterized by strong activation in visual, motor, emotional, and autobiographical memory regions of the brain, yet a relative deactivation in regions that control rational thought.

True and inspired was his proposal that dreams emerge from the brain, as it implied that answers could only be found by way of a systematic interrogation of the brain.

If the method was scientifically reliable, with clear structured rules and metrics that the therapists could apply, then their respective interpretations of this dream should be the same—or at least have some degree of similarity in the extracted meaning they return. Instead, the psychoanalysts all gave remarkably different interpretations of this same dream, without any statistically significant similarity between them. There was no consistency. You cannot place a “QC”—quality control—sticker on Freudian psychoanalysis.

A cynical criticism of the Freudian psychoanalytic method is therefore one of “the disease of generic-ness.” Rather like horoscopes, the interpretations offered are generalizable, seemingly providing an explanatory fit to any and all things.

Indeed, journaling your waking thoughts, feelings, and concerns has a proven mental health benefit, and the same appears true of your dreams. A meaningful, psychologically healthy life is an examined one, as Socrates so often declared. Nevertheless, the psychoanalytic method built on Freudian theory is nonscientific and holds no repeatable, reliable, or systematic power for decoding dreams.

At the heart of the theory was an astonishing change in the chemical cocktail of your brain that takes place during REM sleep. Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called noradrenaline are completely shut off within your brain when you enter this dreaming sleep state. In fact, REM sleep is the only time during the twenty-four-hour period when your brain is completely devoid of this anxiety-triggering molecule. Noradrenaline, also known as norepinephrine, is the brain equivalent to a body chemical you already know and have felt the effects of: adrenaline (epinephrine).

Previous MRI studies established that key emotion- and memory-related structures of the brain are all reactivated during REM sleep, as we dream: the amygdala and emotion-related regions of the cortex, and the key mnemonic center, the hippocampus. Not only did this suggest the possibility that emotion-specific memory processing was possible, if not probable, during the dreaming state, but now we understood that this emotional memory reactivation was occurring in a brain free of a key stress chemical.

Is the REM-sleep dreaming state a perfectly designed nocturnal soothing balm—one that removes the emotional sharp edges of our daily lives? It seemed so from everything neurobiology and neurophysiology was telling us (me). If so, we should awake feeling better about distressing events of the day(s) prior.

It postulated that the process of REM-sleep dreaming accomplishes two critical goals: (1) sleeping to remember the details of those valuable, salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them into autobiographical perspective, yet (2) sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that had previously been wrapped around those memories.

As the theory predicted, it was the dreaming state of REM sleep—and specific patterns of electrical activity that reflected the drop in stress-related brain chemistry during the dream state—that determined the success of overnight therapy from one individual to the next. It was not, therefore, time per se that healed all wounds, but instead it was time spent in dream sleep that was providing emotional convalescence. To sleep, perchance to heal.

Sleep, and specifically REM sleep, was clearly needed in order for us to heal emotional wounds.

If you interview PTSD patients in the clinic, they will often tell you that they just cannot “get over” the experience. In part, they are describing a brain that has not detoxed the emotion from the trauma memory, such that every time the memory is relived (the flashback), so, too, is the emotion, which has not been effectively removed.

Deprive an individual of their REM-sleep dreaming state, and the emotional tuning curve of the brain loses its razor-sharp precision. Like viewing an image through frosted glass, or looking at an out-of-focus picture, a dream-starved brain cannot accurately decode facial expressions, which become distorted. You begin to mistake friends for foes.

Reality and perceived reality were no longer the same in the “eyes” of the sleepless brain. By removing REM sleep, we had, quite literally, removed participants’ levelheaded ability to read the social world around them.

Now think of occupations that require individuals to be sleep-deprived, such as law enforcement and military personnel, doctors, nurses, and those in the emergency services—not to mention the ultimate caretaking job: new parents.

Without REM sleep and its ability to reset the brain’s emotional compass, those same individuals will be inaccurate in their social and emotional comprehension of the world around them, leading to inappropriate decisions and actions that may have grave consequences.

REM-sleep dreaming is informational alchemy.

However, wake the brain up from REM sleep and the operating algorithm was completely different. Gone is the hierarchy of logical associative connection. The REM-sleep dreaming brain was utterly uninterested in bland, commonsense links—the one-step-to-the-next associations. Instead, the REM-sleep brain was shortcutting the obvious links and favoring very distantly related concepts. The logic guards had left the REM-sleep dreaming brain. Wonderfully eclectic lunatics were now running the associative memory asylum. From the REM-sleep dreaming state, almost anything goes—and the more bizarre the better, the results suggested.

Little wonder, then, that you have never been told to “stay awake on a problem.” Instead, you are instructed to “sleep on it.” Interestingly, this phrase, or something close to it, exists in most languages (from the French dormir sur un problem, to the Swahili kulala juu ya tatizo), indicating that the problem-solving benefit of dream sleep is universal, common across the globe.

The author John Steinbeck wrote, “A problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

Approximately one out of every nine people you pass on the street will meet the strict clinical criteria for insomnia, which translates to more than 40 million Americans struggling to make it through their waking days due to wide-eyed nights.

That the “sleep aid” industry, encompassing prescription sleeping medications and over-the-counter sleep remedies, is worth an astonishing $30 billion a year in the US is perhaps the only statistic one needs in order to realize how truly grave the problem is.

The two most common triggers of chronic insomnia are psychological: (1) emotional concerns, or worry, and (2) emotional distress, or anxiety.

One common culprit has become clear: an overactive sympathetic nervous system, which, as we have discussed in previous chapters, is the body’s aggravating fight-or-flight mechanism.

Weak immune systems are a known consequence of insufficient sleep, as we have discussed in great detail.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that the relationship between sleep and mortality risk is not linear, such that the more and more sleep you get, the lower and lower your death risk (and vice versa). Rather, there is an upward hook in death risk once the average sleep amount passes nine hours, resulting in a tilted backward J shape:

Five key factors have powerfully changed how much and how well we sleep: (1) constant electric light as well as LED light, (2) regularized temperature, (3) caffeine (discussed in chapter 2), (4) alcohol, and (5) a legacy of punching time cards.

The visible light spectrum—that which our eyes can see—runs the gamut from shorter wavelengths (approximately 380 nanometers) that we perceive as cooler violets and blues, to the longer wavelengths (around 700 nanometers) that we sense as warmer yellows and reds. Sunlight contains a powerful blend of all of these colors, and those in between (as the iconic Pink Floyd album cover of Dark Side of the Moon illuminates [so to speak]).

Just when things looked as bad as they could get for the suprachiasmatic nucleus with incandescent lamps, a new invention in 1997 made the situation far worse: blue light–emitting diodes, or blue LEDs.

Blue LED lights offer considerable advantages over incandescent lamps in terms of lower energy demands and, for the lights themselves, longer life spans. But they may be inadvertently shortening our own.

The light receptors in the eye that communicate “daytime” to the suprachiasmatic nucleus are most sensitive to short-wavelength light within the blue spectrum.

Of course, few of us stare headlong into the glare of an LED lamp each evening. But we do stare at LED-powered laptop screens, smartphones, and tablets each night, sometimes for many hours, often with these devices just feet or even inches away from our retinas.

A recent survey of over fifteen hundred American adults found that 90 percent of individuals regularly used some form of portable electronic device sixty minutes or less before bedtime. It has a very real impact on your melatonin release, and thus ability to time the onset of sleep.

One of the earliest studies found that using an iPad—an electronic tablet enriched with blue LED light—for two hours prior to bed blocked the otherwise rising levels of melatonin by a significant 23 percent.

Compared to reading a printed book, reading on an iPad suppressed melatonin release by over 50 percent at night.

But did reading on the iPad actually change sleep quantity/quality above and beyond the timing of melatonin? It did, in three concerning ways. First, individuals lost significant amounts of REM sleep following iPad reading. Second, the research subjects felt less rested and sleepier throughout the day following iPad use at night. Third was a lingering aftereffect, with participants suffering a ninety-minute lag in their evening rising melatonin levels for several days after iPad use ceased—almost like a digital hangover effect.

Due to its omnipresence, solutions for limiting exposure to artificial evening light are challenging. A good start is to create lowered, dim light in the rooms where you spend your evening hours. Avoid powerful overhead lights. Mood lighting is the order of the night. Some committed individuals will even wear yellow-tinted glasses indoors in the afternoon and evening to help filter out the most harmful blue light that suppresses melatonin. Maintaining complete darkness throughout the night is equally critical, the easiest fix for which comes from blackout curtains. Finally, you can install software on your computers, phones, and tablet devices that gradually de-saturate the harmful blue LED light as evening progresses.

Alcohol is in a class of drugs called sedatives. It binds to receptors within the brain that prevent neurons from firing their electrical impulses. Saying that alcohol is a sedative often confuses people, as alcohol in moderate doses helps individuals liven up and become more social. How can a sedative enliven you? The answer comes down to the fact that your increased sociability is caused by sedation of one part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, early in the timeline of alcohol’s creeping effects. As we have discussed, this frontal lobe region of the human brain helps control our impulses and restrains our behavior. Alcohol immobilizes that part of our brain first. As a result, we “loosen up,” becoming less controlled and more extroverted. But anatomically targeted brain sedation it still is.

More than its artificial sedating influence, alcohol dismantles an individual’s sleep in an additional two ways. First, alcohol fragments sleep, littering the night with brief awakenings. Alcohol-infused sleep is therefore not continuous and, as a result, not restorative.

Second, alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of. When the body metabolizes alcohol it produces by-product chemicals called aldehydes and ketones. The aldehydes in particular will block the brain’s ability to generate REM sleep. It’s rather like the cerebral version of cardiac arrest, preventing the pulsating beat of brainwaves that otherwise power dream sleep. People consuming even moderate amounts of alcohol in the afternoon and/or evening are thus depriving themselves of dream sleep.

There is a sad and extreme demonstration of this fact observed in alcoholics who, when drinking, can show little in the way of any identifiable REM sleep. Going for such long stretches of time without dream sleep produces a tremendous buildup in, and backlog of, pressure to obtain REM sleep. So great, in fact, that it inflicts a frightening consequence upon these individuals: aggressive intrusions of dreaming while they are wide awake. The pent-up REM-sleep pressure erupts forcefully into waking consciousness, causing hallucinations, delusions, and gross disorientation. The technical term for this terrifying psychotic state is “delirium tremens.”

The politically incorrect advice I would (of course never) give is this: go to the pub for a drink in the morning. That way, the alcohol will be out of your system before sleep. Glib advice aside, what is the recommendation when it comes to sleep and alcohol? It is hard not to sound puritanical, but the evidence is so strong regarding alcohol’s harmful effects on sleep that to do otherwise would be doing you, and the science, a disservice. Many people enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, even an aperitif thereafter. But it takes your liver and kidneys many hours to degrade and excrete that alcohol, even if you are an individual with fast-acting enzymes for ethanol decomposition. Nightly alcohol will disrupt your sleep, and the annoying advice of abstinence is the best, and most honest, I can offer.

To successfully initiate sleep, as described in chapter 2, your core temperature needs to decrease by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 1 degree Celsius. For this reason, you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that is too cold than too hot, since a room that is too cold is at least dragging your brain and body in the correct (downward) temperature direction for sleep.

It is no evolutionary coincidence that we humans have developed the pre-bed ritual of splashing water on one of the most vascular parts of our bodies—our face, using one of the other highly vascular surfaces—our hands. You may think the feeling of being facially clean helps you sleep better, but facial cleanliness makes no difference to your slumber. The act itself does have sleep-inviting powers, however, as that water, warm or cold, helps dissipate heat from the surface of the skin as it evaporates, thereby cooling the inner body core.

A bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3°C) is ideal for the sleep of most people, assuming standard bedding and clothing.

A luxury for many is to draw a hot bath in the evening and soak the body before bedtime. We feel it helps us fall asleep more quickly, which it can, but for the opposite reason most people imagine. You do not fall asleep faster because you are toasty and warm to the core. Instead, the hot bath invites blood to the surface of your skin, giving you that flushed appearance. When you get out of the bath, those dilated blood vessels on the surface quickly help radiate out inner heat, and your core body temperature plummets. Consequently, you fall asleep more quickly because your core is colder. Hot baths prior to bed can also induce 10 to 15 percent more deep NREM sleep in healthy adults.

Most of us are unaware of an even greater danger that lurks within the alarm clock: the snooze button. If alarming your heart, quite literally, were not bad enough, using the snooze feature means that you will repeatedly inflict that cardiovascular assault again and again within a short span of time.

In the past month, almost 10 million people in America will have swallowed some kind of a sleeping aid. Most relevant, and a key focus of this chapter, is the (ab)use of prescription sleeping pills. Sleeping pills do not provide natural sleep, can damage health, and increase the risk of life-threatening diseases.

No past or current sleeping medications on the legal (or illegal) market induce natural sleep. Don’t get me wrong—no one would claim that you are awake after taking prescription sleeping pills. But to suggest that you are experiencing natural sleep would be an equally false assertion.

Sleeping pills effectively knock out the higher regions of your brain’s cortex.

If you compare natural, deep-sleep brainwave activity to that induced by modern-day sleeping pills, such as zolpidem (brand name Ambien) or eszopiclone (brand name Lunesta), the electrical signature, or quality, is deficient. The electrical type of “sleep” these drugs produce is lacking in the largest, deepest brainwaves. Adding to this state of affairs are a number of unwanted side effects, including next-day grogginess, daytime forgetfulness, performing actions at night of which you are not conscious (or at least have partial amnesia of in the morning), and slowed reaction times during the day that can impact motor skills, such as driving.

Why, then, do individuals who are taking sleeping pills that purportedly “improve” sleep suffer higher rates of various infections, when the opposite is predicted? It is possible that medication-induced sleep does not provide the same restorative immune benefits as natural sleep.

Another cause of death linked to sleeping pill use is an increased risk for fatal car accidents. This is most likely caused by the non-restorative sleep such drugs induce and/or the groggy hangover that some suffer, both of which may leave individuals drowsy while driving the next day.

The obvious methods involve reducing caffeine and alcohol intake, removing screen technology from the bedroom, and having a cool bedroom. In addition, patients must (1) establish a regular bedtime and wake-up time, even on weekends, (2) go to bed only when sleepy and avoid sleeping on the couch early/mid-evenings, (3) never lie awake in bed for a significant time period; rather, get out of bed and do something quiet and relaxing until the urge to sleep returns, (4) avoid daytime napping if you are having difficulty sleeping at night, (5) reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts and worries by learning to mentally decelerate before bed, and (6) remove visible clockfaces from view in the bedroom, preventing clock-watching anxiety at night.

Sleep and physical exertion have a bidirectional relationship. Many of us know of the deep, sound sleep we often experience after sustained physical activity, such as a daylong hike, an extended bike ride, or even an exhausting day of working in the garden.

Less surprising, perhaps, is the inverse relationship between sleep and next-day exercise (rather than the influence of exercise on subsequent sleep at night). When sleep was poor the night prior, exercise intensity and duration were far worse the following day. When sleep was sound, levels of physical exertion were powerfully maximal the next day. In other words, sleep may have more of an influence on exercise than exercise has on sleep.

It is clear that a sedentary life is one that does not help with sound sleep, and all of us should try to engage in some degree of regular exercise to help maintain not only the fitness of our bodies but also the quantity and quality of our sleep. Sleep, in return, will boost your fitness and energy, setting in motion a positive, self-sustaining cycle of improved physical activity (and mental health).

One brief note of caution regarding physical activity: try not to exercise right before bed. Body temperature can remain high for an hour or two after physical exertion.

Nevertheless, for healthy sleep, the scientific evidence suggests that you should avoid going to bed too full or too hungry, and shy away from diets that are excessively biased toward carbohydrates (greater than 70 percent of all energy intake), especially sugar.

A hundred years ago, less than 2 percent of the population in the United States slept six hours or less a night. Now, almost 30 percent of American adults do.

Each weekend, vast numbers of people are desperately trying to pay back a sleep debt they’ve accrued during the week. As we have learned time and again throughout the course of this book, sleep is not like a credit system or the bank. The brain can never recover all the sleep it has been deprived of. We cannot accumulate a debt without penalty, nor can we repay that sleep debt at a later time.

The irony that employees miss is that when you are not getting enough sleep, you work less productively and thus need to work longer to accomplish a goal.

This means you often must work longer and later into the evening, arrive home later, go to bed later, and need to wake up earlier, creating a negative feedback loop. Why try to boil a pot of water on medium heat when you could do so in half the time on high? People often tell me that they do not have enough time to sleep because they have so much work to do. Without wanting to be combative in any way whatsoever, I respond by informing them that perhaps the reason they still have so much to do at the end of the day is precisely because they do not get enough sleep at night.

Only then did scientists realize the rather profound conclusions of the experiment: REM sleep is what stands between rationality and insanity. Describe these symptoms to a psychiatrist without informing them of the REM-sleep deprivation context, and the clinician will give clear diagnoses of depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia.

It is the lack of REM sleep—that critical stage occurring in the final hours of sleep that we strip from our children and teenagers by way of early school start times—that creates the difference between a stable and unstable mental state.

Published in his seminal papers and book Genetic Studies of Genius, Terman found that no matter what the age, the longer a child slept, the more intellectually gifted they were.

It is clear that a tired, under-slept brain is little more than a leaky memory sieve, in no state to receive, absorb, or efficiently retain an education.

Children with this diagnosis are irritable, moodier, more distractible and unfocused in learning during the day, and have a significantly increased prevalence of depression and suicidal ideation. If you make a composite of these symptoms (unable to maintain focus and attention, deficient learning, behaviorally difficult, with mental health instability), and then strip away the label of ADHD, these symptoms are nearly identical to those caused by a lack of sleep.

There is more irony here than meets the eye. Most people know the name of the common ADHD medications: Adderall and Ritalin. But few know what these drugs actually are. Adderall is amphetamine with certain salts mixed in, and Ritalin is a similar stimulant, called methylphenidate. Amphetamine and methylphenidate are two of the most powerful drugs we know of to prevent sleep and keep the brain of an adult (or a child, in this case) wide awake. That is the very last thing that such a child needs.

As my colleague in the field, Dr. Charles Czeisler, has noted, there are people sitting in prison cells, and have been for decades, because they were caught selling amphetamines to minors on the street. However, we seem to have no problem at all in allowing pharmaceutical companies to broadcast prime-time commercials highlighting ADHD and promoting the sale of amphetamine-based drugs (e.g., Adderall, Ritalin). To a cynic, this seems like little more than an uptown version of a downtown drug pusher.

Based on recent surveys and clinical evaluations, we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications.

If you are about to receive medical treatment at a hospital, you’d be well advised to ask the doctor: “How much sleep have you had in the past twenty-four hours?” The doctor’s response will determine, to a statistically provable degree, whether the treatment you receive will result in a serious medical error, or even death.

Why did we ever force doctors to learn their profession in this exhausting, sleepless way? The answer originates with the esteemed physician William Stewart Halsted, MD, who was also a helpless drug addict.

But Halsted had a dirty secret that only came to light years after his death, and helped explain both the maniacal structure of his residency program and his ability to forgo sleep. Halsted was a cocaine addict. It was a sad and apparently accidental habit, one that started years before his arrival at Johns Hopkins.

Halsted inserted his cocaine-infused wakefulness into the heart of Johns Hopkins’s surgical program, imposing a similarly unrealistic mentality of sleeplessness upon his residents for the duration of their training. The exhausting residency program, which persists in one form or another throughout all US medical schools to this day, has left countless patients hurt or dead in its wake—and likely residents, too. That may sound like an unfair charge to level considering the wonderful, lifesaving work our committed and caring young doctors and medical staff perform, but it is a provable one.

Throughout the course of their residency, one in five medical residents will make a sleepless-related medical error that causes significant, liable harm to a patient. One in twenty residents will kill a patient due to a lack of sleep. Since there are over 100,000 residents currently in training in US medical programs, this means that many hundreds of people—sons, daughters, husbands, wives, grandparents, brothers, sisters—are needlessly losing their lives every year because residents are not allowed to get the sleep they need.

One of the most ironic statistics concerns drowsy driving. When a sleep-deprived resident finishes a long shift, such as a stint in the ER trying to save victims of car accidents, and then gets into their own car to drive home, their chances of being involved in a motor vehicle accident are increased by 168 percent because of fatigue.

If you are about to undergo an elective surgery, you should ask how much sleep your doctor has had and, if it is not to your liking, you may not want to proceed. No amount of years on the job helps a doctor “learn” how to overcome a lack of sleep and develop resilience.

Consider the infamous reactor meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power station on April 26, 1986. The radiation from the disaster was one hundred times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped in World War II. It was the fault of sleep-deprived operators working an exhaustive shift, occurring, without coincidence, at one a.m. Thousands died from the long-term effects of radiation in the protracted decades following the event, and tens of thousands more suffered a lifetime of debilitating medical and developmental ill health.

We can also recount the Exxon Valdez oil tanker that ran aground on Bligh Reef in Alaska on March 24, 1989, breaching its hull. An estimated 10 million to 40 million gallons of crude oil spilled across a 1,300-mile range of the surrounding shoreline. Left dead were more than 500,000 seabirds, 5,000 otters, 300 seals, over 200 bald eagles, and 20 orca whales. The coastal ecosystem has never recovered. Early reports suggested that the captain was inebriated while navigating the vessel. Later, however, it was revealed that the sober captain had turned over command to his third mate on deck, who had only slept six out of the previous forty-eight hours, causing him to make the cataclysmic navigational error.

Moreover, you would discover that during months of the year when you were averaging more sleep, you were sick less; your weight, blood pressure, and medication use were all lower; and your relationship or marriage satisfaction, as well as sex life, were better.

It could be one of the most powerful factors in a future vision that shifts from a model of sick care (treatment), which is what we do now, to health care (prevention)—the latter aiming to stave off a need for the former. Prevention is far more efficient than treatment, and costs far less in the long run.

Few people realize that the annual financial cost of the flu in the US is around $100 billion ($10 billion direct and $90 billion in lost work productivity).

All told, the sleep environment, and thus sleep amount, of a patient in this hospital environment is entirely antithetical to their convalescence.

Sleep appears to be a natural analgesic, and without it, pain is perceived more acutely by the brain, and, most importantly, felt more powerfully by the individual.

Within the space of a mere hundred years, human beings have abandoned their biologically mandated need for adequate sleep—one that evolution spent 3,400,000 years perfecting in service of life-support functions.

This silent sleep loss epidemic is the greatest public health challenge we face in the twenty-first century in developed nations. If we wish to avoid the suffocating noose of sleep neglect, the premature death it inflicts, and the sickening health it invites, a radical shift in our personal, cultural, professional, and societal appreciation of sleep must occur.

I believe it is time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep, without embarrassment or the damaging stigma of laziness. In doing so, we can be reunited with that most powerful elixir of wellness and vitality, dispensed through every conceivable biological pathway. Then we may remember what it feels like to be truly awake during the day, infused with the very deepest plenitude of being.

Appendix Twelve Tips for Healthy Sleep

1. Stick to a sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning. Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set an alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep. If there is only one piece of advice you remember and take from these twelve tips, this should be it.

2. Exercise is great, but not too late in the day. Try to exercise at least thirty minutes on most days but not later than two to three hours before your bedtime.

3. Avoid caffeine and nicotine. Coffee, colas, certain teas, and chocolate contain the stimulant caffeine, and its effects can take as long as eight hours to wear off fully. Therefore, a cup of coffee in the late afternoon can make it hard for you to fall asleep at night. Nicotine is also a stimulant, often causing smokers to sleep only very lightly. In addition, smokers often wake up too early in the morning because of nicotine withdrawal.

4. Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed. Having a nightcap or alcoholic beverage before sleep may help you relax, but heavy use robs you of REM sleep, keeping you in the lighter stages of sleep. Heavy alcohol ingestion also may contribute to impairment in breathing at night. You also tend to wake up in the middle of the night when the effects of the alcohol have worn off.
5. Avoid large meals and beverages late at night. A light snack is okay, but a large meal can cause indigestion, which interferes with sleep. Drinking too many fluids at night can cause frequent awakenings to urinate.

6. If possible, avoid medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep. Some commonly prescribed heart, blood pressure, or asthma medications, as well as some over-the-counter and herbal remedies for coughs, colds, or allergies, can disrupt sleep patterns. If you have trouble sleeping, talk to your health care provider or pharmacist to see whether any drugs you’re taking might be contributing to your insomnia and ask whether they can be taken at other times during the day or early in the evening.

7. Don’t take naps after 3 p.m. Naps can help make up for lost sleep, but late afternoon naps can make it harder to fall asleep at night.

8. Relax before bed. Don’t overschedule your day so that no time is left for unwinding. A relaxing activity, such as reading or listening to music, should be part of your bedtime ritual.

9. Take a hot bath before bed. The drop in body temperature after getting out of the bath may help you feel sleepy, and the bath can help you relax and slow down so you’re more ready to sleep.

10. Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom. Get rid of anything in your bedroom that might distract you from sleep, such as noises, bright lights, an uncomfortable bed, or warm temperatures. You sleep better if the temperature in the room is kept on the cool side. A TV, cell phone, or computer in the bedroom can be a distraction and deprive you of needed sleep. Having a comfortable mattress and pillow can help promote a good night’s sleep. Individuals who have insomnia often watch the clock. Turn the clock’s face out of view so you don’t worry about the time while trying to fall asleep.

11. Have the right sunlight exposure. Daylight is key to regulating daily sleep patterns. Try to get outside in natural sunlight for at least thirty minutes each day. If possible, wake up with the sun or use very bright lights in the morning. Sleep experts recommend that, if you have problems falling asleep, you should get an hour of exposure to morning sunlight and turn down the lights before bedtime.

12. Don’t lie in bed awake. If you find yourself still awake after staying in bed for more than twenty minutes or if you are starting to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy. The anxiety of not being able to sleep can make it harder to fall asleep.

Reprinted from NIH Medline Plus (Internet). Bethesda, MD: National Library of Medicine (US); summer 2012. Tips for Getting a Good Night’s Sleep. Available from https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/magazine/issues/summer12/articles/summer12pg20.html.

May your sleep be restful and refreshing – sweet dreams,

It is vain for you to rise up early, to retire late, to eat the bread of painful labors; for He gives to His beloved even in his sleep. (Psalm 127:2)

Associate Pastor – Discipleship.  The Church at LifePark

Professor of Discipleship, Columbia International University

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