In his popular and oft-cited book,
Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams, professor Matthew Walker, Ph.D., founder and director of the University of California Berkeley's Center for Human Sleep Science, details many supposed benefits of longer sleep.
I've frequently referenced Walkers book in a number of my previous articles about sleep, which is why I became more than a little curious when I came across the work of Alexey Guzey.
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He claims to have spent more than 130 hours over the course of two months investigating the claims presented in only one chapter of Walker's book,
Why We Sleep,
coming to the conclusion that the chapter, and likely the book, is "riddled with scientific and factual errors."
"Continuing at the same pace, it would take me more than 3,000 hours to check the entire book. 3,000 hours is the equivalent of 75 weeks or 1.4 years of full-time work," Guzey writes.2 "I hope that going through one full chapter, rather than cherry-picking stuff from across the book, demonstrated the density of errors in the book."
While I do not have the kind of time required to duplicate Guzey's double-checking of Walker's work, I decided to present some of Guzey's findings here so that you can review them for yourself.
Certainly, I believe optimizing your sleep is crucial for mental and physiological health. The evidence for this is overwhelming.
The question is how much sleep one actually needs, and whether more sleep equates to better health and increased longevity. Guzey's findings contradict some of these assumptions.
Comment: It seems that every few months, health officials sound the measles alarm, pushing vaccines that are more dangerous to our health than actually catching 'wild type' measles. Worse, those vaccinated have been proven to spread outbreaks of the disease. See: