There are many books about sleep and on how to improve one’s sleep, all emphasizing how important sleep is to living well and health. Different “experts” have different theories and recommendations, though there is a good deal of overlap between many of them. Neil Stanley’s How to Sleep Well is a wonderful antidote to most of those books. Stanley shows that things are not in fact getting worse and may indeed be getting better. He also shows that there is little evidence to support the many proposed theories about sleep. There is also little evidence that poor sleep is a direct cause of many diseases. Rather, it is associated with poverty, and poverty is associated with poor health. 

So Stanley, a sleep researcher previously associated with universities and now working independently, makes the case that sleep does help with living well, but we don’t need to believe any fancy theories. Rather, if your life is going well, then you are getting enough sleep. If you are not getting enough sleep, there are fairly simple steps that will help most. If you have a sleep disorder you should get expert help. But if you live a healthy life and act sensibly, you can generally get enough sleep. There is a great deal of individual variation, and the best guide to whether you need to sleep more is if you are sleepy during the day.

As someone who has some difficulty sleeping, it is alarming to read that getting less than 8 hours a night is a risk to health. How to Sleep Well is reassuring that probably everything is fine, and there is no strong evidence for the terrible effects of “sleep loss”. We simply need to make corrections to our lifestyle if our performance is reduced because we have not been sleeping enough. It turns out that just about every tale you have heard about sleep fixes (including avoiding blue computer light at night) is not well supported by evidence. You just need a good sleep routine. Maybe the most surprising claim in the book is that you are probably better off sleeping alone rather than with another person. 

The book is written clearly and has plenty of simple advice and some humor. The chapters explain what we know about sleep and mostly debunks many of the claims that others have made about sleep. The unabridged audiobook performed by BJ Harrison is nearly 7 hours long — the narration is clear and calm. 

Christian Perring is editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews. He teaches philosophy in the NYC area and is an APPA certified philosophical counselor.

Categories: Psychology

Keywords: sleep, psychology