Leading neuroscientist Matthew Walker on why sleep deprivation is increasing our risk of cancer, heart attack and Alzheimer's - and what you can do about it
Matthew Walker has learned to dread the question “What do you do?” At
parties, it signals the end of his evening; thereafter, his new
acquaintance will inevitably cling to him like ivy. On an aeroplane, it
usually means that while everyone else watches movies or reads a
thriller, he will find himself running an hours-long salon for the
benefit of passengers and crew alike. “I’ve begun to lie,” he says.
“Seriously. I just tell people I’m a dolphin trainer. It’s better for
everyone.”
Walker is a sleep scientist. To be specific, he is the director of the Center for Human Sleep
Science at the University of California, Berkeley, a research institute
whose goal – possibly unachievable – is to understand everything about
sleep’s impact on us, from birth to death, in sickness and health. No
wonder, then, that people long for his counsel. As the line between work
and leisure grows ever more blurred, rare is the person who doesn’t
worry about their sleep. But even as we contemplate the shadows beneath
our eyes, most of us don’t know the half of it – and perhaps this is
the real reason he has stopped telling strangers how he makes his
living. When Walker talks about sleep he can’t, in all conscience, limit
himself to whispering comforting nothings about camomile tea and warm
baths. It’s his conviction that we are in the midst of a “catastrophic
sleep-loss epidemic”, the consequences of which are far graver than any
of us could imagine. This situation, he believes, is only likely to
change if government gets involved.
Walker has spent the last four and a half years writing Why We Sleep,
a complex but urgent book that examines the effects of this epidemic
close up, the idea being that once people know of the powerful links
between sleep loss and, among other things, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer,
diabetes, obesity and poor mental health, they will try harder to get
the recommended eight hours a night (sleep deprivation, amazing as this
may sound to Donald Trump types, constitutes anything less than seven
hours). But, in the end, the individual can achieve only so much. Walker
wants major institutions and law-makers to take up his ideas, too. “No
aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation,” he says.
Click here for the full article.
Source: The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment