Why Do We Sleep?

Three Books, Three Nudges: A Sleep Reading List

I don't think anyone has ever fixed their sleep by reading a book. But a book can change the way you think about sleep, and that's usually where the trouble starts. You don't have an insomnia problem so much as a set of habits and beliefs that quietly work against you every night, and most of us never examine them. 

Here are three books, and more importantly, three small nudges you can start using tonight.

1. "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker (Tip: Stop treating sleep like a luxury)

Walker's basic argument is that we've gotten the whole thing backwards. We treat sleep as the thing you cut when life gets busy.  It's more like the foundation the rest of your health is built on, and you don't notice a shaky foundation until something upstairs starts to crack.

Some of Walker's specific numbers have been challenged by other researchers, and I think that's worth knowing before you go quoting him at dinner parties. But the premise that sleep deserves the same respect you give diet and exercise is spot on.

The nudge: Pick one night this week and go to bed half an hour earlier than you think you need to. See what happens when you stop treating sleep like the thing you get to if there's time left over.

2. "The Sleep Solution" by W. Chris Winter (Tip: Stop fighting your own brain)

Winter's a practicing sleep doctor, and what I like about his approach is that he's deeply suspicious of gadgets and hacks.  His argument, roughly, is that a lot of insomnia isn't a broken body. It's a brain that's learned to treat the bed as a battleground, and the harder you fight to fall asleep, the more you confirm to your brain that bed is where the fighting happens.

That's a strange, almost economic insight, isn't it? The effort itself becomes the obstacle. You can't will yourself into a state that only works when you stop willing it.  It is like the poster we sometimes put out front . . “The cure to insomnia is a lot of sleep”

The nudge: If you're lying awake after twenty minutes, get up. Go to another room, do something boring, come back when you're actually tired. 

3. "Internal Time" by Till Roenneberg (Tip: Stop pretending everyone's clock runs the same).

This one's less famous, and I think that's a shame, because Roenneberg's central point is one most of us intuitively know but never act on: people have genuinely different internal clocks. 

And I get it and even how it changes.  I was up at 6:30 every day in college and busting down the dorm cafeteria for breakfast.  Now most days I could take a nap and still go to bed at 9:30.  And since I don't open the showroom until the crack of 10, I sleep in later than ever!

Some of us are wired to rise early: some of us are wired to come alive at 11pm. And most of modern life (our work schedules, school start times, when the world expects you to be sharp) is built for one type and punishes the other.

You can't out-discipline your own biology any more than you can negotiate with the tide. The people who sleep are the ones who've figured out which type they are and stopped fighting it.

The nudge: Pay attention for a week to actually feel tired. Your mattress, your room, your whole sleep setup should work with that rhythm.

None of these books will put you to sleep tonight. But each one chips away at the myth that sleep is optional, that willpower helps, that everyone's clock is the same.

The mattress matters. So does the pillow. But so does the story you're telling yourself at 11pm about what sleep is supposed to be.