The first self help book I've written. The first half is an argument for "Deep Work," why it produces valuable outputs and is increasingly scarce. TheThe first self help book I've written. The first half is an argument for "Deep Work," why it produces valuable outputs and is increasingly scarce. The second half is very specific strategies for engaging in Deep Work, including protecting yourself from the distractions of social media, scheduling yourself, and not taking letting work invade every corner of your life.
I found the broad message compelling although somewhat specifically tailored to certain types of vocations--which happen to include mine. But I was not convinced that many of the specific strategies made sense for everyone--and in particular the emphasis on minutely scheduling and ritualizing every aspect of work seems to miss how a lot of my own work, at least, gets done. Moreover, his "proofs" of his propositions were largely examples of people that followed them and were successful, without any serious exploration of people who followed the advice and failed or succeeded without all of the highly regimented rites and rituals that he prescribes.
That said, just making FaceBook less accessible--which I did after hearing his interview with Ezra Klein--has certainly improved my life....more
“Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes yo“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?”
Well, are you?
Matthew Walker is part scientist, part evangelist, part zealot, and part monomaniac. He is like a carpenter with his tool (sleep study) and for him everything looks like a nail (i.e., something that just needs sleep to fix it). At one point he even speculates that homo sapiens’ evolutionary takeoff was caused by our ability to get better sleep than other animals that were up in trees.
Walker is good at providing the evidence for his main conjectures. They include controlled experiments with humans in sleep labs (e.g., randomly assign people to different amounts of sleep and give them mental or physical tests the next day), controlled experiments in animals, epidemiological research, theoretical propositions and other methods.
But Walker bad at providing context, interpretation or qualification for his evidence. He just about never gives a contradictory study, never addresses the “file drawer” bias of studies finding no effects no being published, doesn’t discuss the limits of animal research for humans, and can be casual about correlation vs. causation (e.g., sick people not sleeping much, does that mean lack of sleep caused their sickness or vice versa)? In fact, just about the only time he does take reverse causation seriously is one of the only contrary pieces of evidence he even cites, which is that sleeping too much is associated with earlier death—something that he dismisses as caused by cancer patients being tired so sleeping a lot.
All of that said, the book does a marvelous job presenting the current state of sleep science, the different roles that REM and NREM play, how we have learned about these, etc. The section on PTSD is particularly interesting, basically most people suppress anxiety producing chemicals while dreaming, allowing them to process bad memories in a safe way. That doesn’t happen with people with PTSD, so they don’t overcome and process the traumas in a way that is more accommodated over time. Giving them a drug to suppress these chemicals while dreaming allows them to process their dreams better, leading to less repetitive nightmares and alleviating PTSD to some degree. This would be an example of a theory, controlled experiments, and also a biological understanding of the mechanisms linked to the psychology of dreams. As such, it seems like something remarkable for people to have figured out.
And all of that said, Walker’s main thesis—that we are sleeping too little—is persuasive. As is his condemanation of the macho culture that associates lack of sleep with success, he points out would you want a drunk CEO or surgeon making decisions? This is what you’re like when sleep deprived. (He also is a little giddy in pointing out that testoerone, sperm count and even testicule size all shrink when sleep deprived, all points he uses to rebut the macho culture around sleep deprivation.) His solutions are mostly familiar—keep that iPhone in a different room—but I wasn’t aware of some of the others, like the importance of a lower temperature when sleeping.
Walker is also persuasive on some public policy issues, like we do way little to raise awareness of drowsy driving relative to the efforts to combat drunken driving and the importance of later start times for high schoolers (he points out their circadian rhythm is pushed back, so is not that they’re lazy but that we’re trying to wake them up at what would seem like 3am for us). And completely persuasive on the insanity of the long hours we make medical residents work.
Overall, we spend nearly 33% of our life in a semi-coma like state swirling with partial paralysis, crazy dreams, and amnesia. It seems worth spending 0.001% of our life reading a book to help us better understand this weird state, why we do it, what it does, and how to make it better....more
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