Inside Out | Wake up! It’s time to stop treating sleep deprivation as a badge of honour
Sleep helps stave off a host of ailments, keeps our minds sharp and boosts productivity. So why are we resisting it?
Imagine you opened the SCMP today, and saw the following advert:
AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH: Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer, enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive, keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia, and wards off colds and flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You will even feel happier, less depressed and less anxious. Are you interested?
No doubt the first response would be one of scepticism, presuming this was yet another of those cult-fad diets or snake-oil offerings.
But there really does seem to be such a treatment. It is readily available. It is free. And it seems most of us systematically ignore it. It is called sleep.
To Matthew Walker, one of the world’s leading sleep scientists at the University of California Berkeley, this is a disgrace and a travesty. “The decimation of sleep throughout industrialised nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health, our life expectancy, our safety, our productivity and the education of our children,” he says.
In his new book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, he talks with detailed authority of the “silent sleep loss epidemic” that has engulfed us almost unnoticed over the past century, robbing most industrial nations of at least 2 per cent of GDP in lost productivity every year, and inflicting innumerable other massive harms.