Why We Sleep | Matthew Walker

In this particular year, when so many of us are struggling to sleep; this becomes an important book to read. Not only to understand the wonderful phenomena called sleep during these times of pandemic, but also to get an idea of its place in this digital age.

The book is divided in some interesting chapters which give details on the origin, importance and the changes in sleeping patterns across different species. But before moving on to the chapters, it’s quite interesting to get to the prologue of the book. You will definitely give a chuckle about author’s remarks that it’s ok to sleep while reading this book; he may be the first and probably, last author to say so.

Then each chapter delves deep into the phenomenon of sleep. What do you mean by deep sleep and dreams? How our brain is functioning while we sleep? What happens in your body- organs, bloodstream during the sleep? All such topics have been discussed in much of the details.

A lot of focus of the book is on the effects of sleep, with both spectrum being looked into i.e. less sleep as well as sufficient/ more sleep. These explanations are backed by some interesting experiments conducted by renowned researchers across the world. Through which, we get to understand various facets of sleep, either sufficient or deprivation of sleep. But, it is to be noted that at no times these scientific reports become too technical or boring from a lay person’s point of view, because the author puts across all these observations in quite a easy-to-understand words.

The book is divided into different sections which explain the concept of sleep, the severe effects of sleep spans, the psychological aspects of dreams and the most important pertinent question of whether or not to sleep. All these categories are divided into some interesting chapters which present the scientific studies in a very regular terminology.

Keeping in mind that non-fiction books are not that much easy to comprehend and not universally appealing. Still, I would suggest to take a look at this book as it deals with one of the most important functions of living being. Specially for modern humans, if we can take sleeping seriously then we can dream so many of our worries away.