Sleep or Not

 Why We Sleep was published in September 2017. Part survey of sleep research, part self-help book. It was praised by The New York Times, The Guardian, and many others. It was named one of NPR’s favorite books of 2017. After publishing the book, Walker gave a TED talk, a talk at Google, and appeared on Joe Rogan’s and Peter Attia’s podcasts. A month after the book’s publication, he became a sleep scientist at Google. A guy named Alexey Guzey read and researched the information in the first chapter and just lost his mind over the inaccuracies. 

This is a summary:

In the first chapter of Why We Sleep, Walker:

1. completely misrepresents the relationship between sleep and longevity and between sleep and cancer (Section 1)
2. erroneously states that getting a good night’s sleep is always beneficial (Section 2)
3. erroneously states that patients with fatal familial insomnia die because of lack of sleep (Section 3)
4. seems to invent a “fact” that the WHO has declared a “sleep loss epidemic” (Section 4)
5. misrepresents National Sleep Foundation’s sleep recommendations and uses them to misrepresent the number of adults failing to get the recommended hours of sleep (Section 5)
   • also seems to invent the WHO’s sleep recommendations
6. calls his book “a scientifically accurate intervention”

Given the density of scientific and factual errors and an apparent invention of new “facts” by Walker, I would caution readers against taking the book’s recommendations at face value.