The importance of sleep

[Aegon]

I was listening to Matthew Walker, a neuroscience professor at UC Berkley, say some pretty incredible stuff about the necessity of sleep on Joe Rogan's podcast. 





Some of the crazy highlights:

• We absolutely need 7-9 hours of sleep per night. Any less than 7, and there is significant, visible cognitive impairment. 
  
• One hour of smart phone use will delay the onset of melatonin production by about 3 hours. Your peak melatonin levels will also be 50% less
  
• The shorter your sleep on average, the shorter your life. 
  
  
• Insufficient sleeps is the most significant lifestyle factor for determining whether or not you’ll develop Alzheimer’s Disease, and insufficient sleep is linked to bowel, prostate, and breast cancer
  
• The average American adult is sleeping 6 hours and 31 minutes during the week (it used to be 7.9 hours in 1942). The number of people who can survive on 6 hours of sleep or less, rounded to a whole number, and expressed as a percentage of the population is 0.
  
• Men who sleep 5-6 hours a night will have a level of testosterone 6-10 years their senior
  
• One study sleep deprived individuals for one night (to 4 hours of sleep) – they experienced a 70% reduction in critical anti cancer fighting cells (natural killer cells)
  
• One study found that, with one week of 6 hours of sleep per night, 711 genes were distorted in their activity. Half of those genes experienced an increase in activity – these were genes related to the promotion of tumors, genes related to chronic inflammation, and genes associated with stress (and therefore cardiovascular disease). Half of these genes were suppressed – many of these were genes related to immune response, so we become immune deficient with a lack of sleep
  
• This is the worst one.... medical residents working a 30 hours shift are 460% more likely to make diagnostic errors in the intensive care unit, relative to when they’re working 16 hours. 1 in 5 medical residents will make an error due to insufficient sleep, 1 in 20 medical residents will kill a patient due to a fatigue related error.
  

Some of these are absolutely insane. He also talks about how weed inhibits REM sleep, which is very bad, but... I'm going to try and ignore that one