Why we sleep? by Matthew Walker (professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley).

This book was definitely an eye opener. Matthew Walker was thoroughly able to put the importance of sleep in my mind with some experimental results. The major take away from this book would be that sleep in itself is an all in one medicine for our health in terms of both mental and physical. Sleep has been the one stop medicine that has been with us throughout our lives, 8 hours a day, and we tend to over look this thing called sleep to try and make the most of life by staying awake. But, instead, this book emphasizes that you need to sleep and reset your body, in order to make the most of life being awake.

Neither does the book delve into how those that are able to perform their best and sleep only for 4-5 hours, nor does it say how to hack your sleep and do less of that to magically stay awake for longer. But it mentions that, for the majority of humanity, people are at the mercy of sleep, which is pretty evident outside the book, in our life itself. If you don’t sleep the night before, you feel groggy and irritated the whole day, for which the inverse is true as well. A goodnight’s sleep is much appreciated when you feel energetic and happy.

The book also mentions how sleep directly affects the productivity of an industry, and furthermore the economy of a nation, which is pretty intuitive, but with no evidence that it does. So, hopefully more leaders read this book and bring in effect the habit of sleep in their employees to improve the overall efficiency of the organization. Seeing is believing, but until the visceral idea of leading the market by share comes out of these leaders, it is hard to see how increased sleep helps increase the productivity and furthermore the revenue of an organization, industry, country or the world itself.

P.S – I could not think of technically criticizing this book or the author. I stuck to the feeling of how sleep can have an affect on my overall performance and quality of life. 🙂