Why We Sleep

A really impactful book for me. I’ve always had a very direct relationship with sleep; I was never the kind of person who could get by on low sleep, and I envied those who did. I also felt that there was something deeply wrong and frankly foolish about the mentality of forgoing sleep to work “harder” that is pervasive in business and entrepreneurial society.

This book helped me match these intuitions to the science. Sleep is the best medicine the human body can have, and it is free and available all the time. The idea of sleep’s function partially being “file transfer” and the downloading into memory of experiences, and the concept of sleep as a needed regenerative function clicked for me from my own experience. Sleep and it’s relationship to aging, to muscle growth, to skin and hair health, and so much more is fleshed out here in significant detail.

There is also a healthy discussion of what we still don’t know about sleep here. We still don’t know whether sleep came first, before consciousness, or whether the reverse is true. We also still don’t know why some people are able to not sleep as much as others, and function seemingly well.