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š The Book in 3 Sentences
āļø How the Book Changed Me
āļø Top Quotes From the Book
- The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.
- Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimerās disease.
- As weāll discover later in this book, humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples.
- However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.
- Rather, caffeine blocks and effectively inactivates the receptors, acting as a masking agent. Itās the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears to shut out a sound.
- Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours.
- 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 caffeineās sleep-disrupting influence.
- Most important in this regard: do not seek sleeping pills as your first option.
- While it is true that we flip-flop back and forth between NREM and REM sleep throughout the night every ninety minutes, the ratio of NREM sleep to REM sleep within each ninety-minute cycle changes dramatically across the night.
- Since your brain desires most of its REM sleep in the last part of the night, which is to say the late-morning hours, you will lose 60 to 90 percent of all your REM sleep, even though you are losing 25 percent of your total sleep time.
- After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
- Second, NREM sleep rebounds harder. The brain will consume a far larger portion of deep NREM sleep than of REM sleep on the first night after total sleep deprivation, expressing a lopsided hunger.
- Throughout developed nations, most adults currently sleep in a monophasic patternāthat is, we try to take a long, single bout of slumber at night, the average duration of which is now less than seven hours.