The shorter our nights, the shorter our life. This is the message conveyed by neuroscientist Matthew Walker in his book Why we sleep. The man, who heads the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California at Berkeley (United States), speaks of a “catastrophic epidemic of loss of sleep“in an interview with Guardian.
Sleep is stigmatized
In this interview, the specialist sheds light on the links between sleep loss andAlzheimer’s, the Cancer, the diabetes, L’obesity or even mental health. “No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation,” he says. But what is the cause of this general lack of sleep? Matthew Walker explains that the constant presence of light, the increasingly porous boundaries between work and private life as well as the individualization of society are responsible for this phenomenon. But that’s not all: the stigma of sleep, increasingly associated with laziness, is also a big factor. “We want to be busy and one of the ways to prove that is to say how little we sleep,” he says.
Matthew Walker laments that nothing is done to encourage sleep. “I take my sleep extremely seriously because I have proof of its impact. When you know that after just four or five hours of sleep your natural killer cells drop by 70% or that sleep deprivation is related to sleep. bowel cancer, of the prostate and breast, or even just that the World Health Organization (WHO) has classified night work as a probable carcinogen, how can you do otherwise? ”he concludes.
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