Top 70 Matthew Walker Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Not sleeping enough, which for a portion of the population is a voluntary choice, significantly modifies your gene transcriptome – that is, the very essence of you, or at least you as defined biologically by your DNA. Neglect sleep, and you are deciding to perform a genetic engineering manipulation on yourself each night, tampering with the nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health story.”

— Matthew Walker

2. “The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.”

— Matthew Walker

3. “Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.”

— Matthew Walker

4. “AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH! Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested?”

— Matthew Walker

5. “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.”

— Matthew Walker

6. “It is disquieting to learn that vehicular accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined.”

— Matthew Walker

7. “Inadequate sleep – even moderate reductions for just one week – disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic.”

— Matthew Walker

8. “We will come to learn that sleep is the universal health care provider: whatever the physical or mental ailment, sleep has a prescription it can dispense.”

— Matthew Walker

9. “Universal parental wisdom knows that bad sleep the night before leads to a bad mood and emotional reactivity the next day.”

— Matthew Walker

10. “If you were one of the individuals who were obtaining just five to six hours each night or less, you were 200 to 300 percent more likely to suffer calcification of your coronary arteries over the next five years, relative to those individuals sleeping seven to eight hours.”

— Matthew Walker

11. “After participants had been restricted to four to five hours of sleep for a week, the cells of these tired individuals had become far less receptive to insulin.”

— Matthew Walker

12. “Without sufficient sleep, amyloid plaques build up in the brain, especially in deep-sleep-generating regions, attacking and degrading them. The loss of deep NREM sleep caused by this assault therefore lessens the ability to remove amyloid from the brain at night, resulting in greater amyloid deposition. More amyloid, less deep sleep, less deep sleep, more amyloid, and so on and so forth.”

— Matthew Walker

13. “Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain.”

— Matthew Walker

14. “Adults forty-five years or older who sleep fewer than six hours a night are 200 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven to eight hours a night.”

— Matthew Walker

15. “A meaningful, psychologically healthy life is an examined one, as Socrates so often declared.”

— Matthew Walker

16. “Driving drunk or driving drowsy were both dangerous, and equally dangerous.”

— Matthew Walker

17. “Caffeine – which is not only prevalent in coffee, certain teas, and many energy drinks, but also foods such as dark chocolate and ice cream, as well as drugs such as weight-loss pills and pain relievers – is one of the most common culprits that keep people from falling asleep easily and sleeping soundly thereafter, typically masquerading as insomnia, an actual medical condition.”

— Matthew Walker

18. “The pent-up REM-sleep pressure erupts forcefully into waking consciousness, causing hallucinations, delusions, and gross disorientation. The technical term for this terrifying psychotic state is “delirium tremens.”

— Matthew Walker

19. “Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called noradrenaline are completely shut off within your brain when you enter this dreaming sleep state. In fact, REM sleep is the only time during the twenty-four-hour period when your brain is completely devoid of this anxiety-triggering molecule.”

— Matthew Walker

20. “CBT-I must be used as the first-line treatment for all individuals with chronic insomnia, not sleeping pills.”

— Matthew Walker

21. “Artificial light in modern societies thus tricks us into believing night is still day, and does so using a physiological lie.”

— Matthew Walker

22. “Using MRI scans, we have since looked deep into the brains of participants to see where those memories are being retrieved from before sleep relative to after sleep. It turns out that those information packets were being recalled from very different geographical locations within the brain at the two different times.”

— Matthew Walker

23. “However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”

— Matthew Walker

24. “It was once thought that sharks did not sleep, in part because they never closed their eyes. Indeed, they do have clear active and passive phases that resemble wake and sleep. We now know that the reason they never close their eyes is because they have no eyelids.”

— Matthew Walker

25. “These napping communities have sometimes been described as “the places where people forget to die.” From a prescription written long ago in our ancestral genetic code, the practice of natural biphasic sleep, and a healthy diet, appear to be the keys to a long-sustained life.”

— Matthew Walker

26. “By the time that same individual has reached sixteen years of age, their circadian rhythm has undergone a dramatic shift forward in its cycling phase.”

— Matthew Walker

27. “It is perhaps unsurprising that in the small enclaves of Greece where siestas still remain intact, such as the island of Ikaria, men are nearly four times as likely to reach the age of ninety as American males. These napping communities have sometimes been described as “the places where people forget to die.”

— Matthew Walker

28. “Humans are not sleeping the way nature intended. The number of sleep bouts, the duration of sleep, and when sleep occurs has all been comprehensively distorted by modernity.”

— Matthew Walker

29. “After four hours of sleep for six nights, participants’ performance was just as bad as those who had not slept for twenty-four hours straight – that is, a 400 percent increase in the number of microsleeps. By day 11 on this diet of four hours of sleep a night, participants’ performance had degraded even further, matching that of someone who had pulled two back-to-back all-nighters, going without sleep for forty-eight hours.”

— Matthew Walker

30. “Why did we ever force doctors to learn their profession in this exhausting, sleepless way? The answer originates with the esteemed physician William Stewart Halsted, MD, who was also a helpless drug addict.”

— Matthew Walker

31. “The problem, however, is that people, especially those in such positions, came to erroneously believe that a twenty-minute power nap was all you needed to survive and function with perfect, or even acceptable, acumen.”

— Matthew Walker

32. “Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours.”

— Matthew Walker

33. “To sleep, perchance to heal.”

— Matthew Walker

34. “There is just one thing. From this moment forth, and for the rest of your child’s entire life, he will repeatedly and routinely lapse into a state of apparent coma. It might even resemble death at times. And while his body lies still his mind will often be filled with stunning, bizarre hallucinations. This state will consume one-third of his life and I have absolutely no idea why he’ll do it, or what it is for. Good luck!”

— Matthew Walker

35. “Feinberg’s study reminds me of a billboard advertisement I once saw from a large insurance firm, which read: “Why do most 16-year-olds drive like they’re missing part of their brain? Because they are.” It takes deep sleep, and developmental time, to accomplish the neural maturation that plugs this brain “gap” within the frontal lobe. When your children finally reach their mid-twenties and your car insurance premium drops, you can thank sleep for the savings.”

— Matthew Walker

36. “Indeed, journaling your waking thoughts, feelings, and concerns has a proven mental health benefit, and the same appears true of your dreams.”

— Matthew Walker

37. “Insufficient sleep robs most nations of more than 2 percent of their GDP – amounting to the entire cost of each country’s military.”

— Matthew Walker

38. “Denmark recently became the first country to pay worker compensation to women who had developed breast cancer after years of night-shift work in government-sponsored jobs, such as nurses and air cabin crew. Other governments – Britain, for example – have so far resisted similar legal claims, refusing payout compensation despite the science.”

— Matthew Walker

39. “Of note to those in business, many of these studies report deleterious effects on business outcomes on the basis of only very modest reductions in sleep amount within an individual, perhaps twenty- to sixty-minute differences between an employee who is honest, creative, innovate, collaborative, and productive and one who is not.”

— Matthew Walker

40. “Using performance as a measure of sleep need is perilous in older adults, since older adults are already impaired in their reaction times to begin with. Said unkindly, older adults don’t have much further to fall in terms of getting worse, sometimes called a “floor effect,” making it difficult to estimate the real performance impact of sleep deprivation.”

— Matthew Walker

41. “After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

— Matthew Walker

42. “From the REM-sleep dreaming state, almost anything goes – and the more bizarre the better, the results suggested.”

— Matthew Walker

43. “Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. It is far more than that.”

— Matthew Walker

44. “If you have a bed partner, try observing their eyelids the next time they are drifting off to sleep. You will see the closed lids of the eyes deforming as the eyeballs roll around underneath.”

— Matthew Walker

45. “The steady, slow, synchronous waves that sweep across the brain during deep sleep open up communication possibilities between distant regions of the brain, allowing them to collaboratively send and receive their different repositories of stored experience.”

— Matthew Walker

46. “Before Edison, and before gas and oil lamps, the setting sun would take with it this full stream of daylight from our eyes, sensed by the twenty-four-hour clock within the brain.”

— Matthew Walker

47. “While some have contested how accurate or sound the Edina test case is, well-controlled and far larger systematic studies have proved that Edina is no fluke. Numerous counties in several US states have shifted the start of schools to a later hour and their students experienced significantly higher grade point averages.”

— Matthew Walker

48. “The giant insurance company Aetna, which has almost fifty thousand employees, has instituted the option of bonuses for getting more sleep, based on verified sleep-tracker data.”

— Matthew Walker

49. “The part of his brain that was damaged was the hippocampus. It is the very same structure that sleep deprivation will attack, blocking your brain’s capacity for new learning.”

— Matthew Walker

50. “During deep NREM sleep specifically, the brain communicates a calming signal to the fight-or-flight sympathetic branch of the body’s nervous system, and does so for long durations of the night. As a result, deep sleep prevents an escalation of this physiological stress that is synonymous with increased blood pressure, heart attack, heart failure, and stroke.”

— Matthew Walker