Lack of sleep impairs a child’s ability to learn, their emotional well-being (mood swings, anxiety, depression, hyperactivity and other behavioral problems) and even leads to many health problems like infections, high blood pressure and obesity.”

You can think of it like having a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you can’t really do both at the same time.”

“Dream sleep appears to reset the magnetic north of our emotional compass. One question is whether we can now enhance the quality of dream sleep, and in doing so, improve emotional intelligence.”

A 2013 Danish study found that men who slept less than six hours or reported high levels of sleep disturbance saw a reduction in sperm count of more than 25 percent. Sleep deprivation has also been associated with erectile dysfunction. “Testosterone is produced during the night,” wrote Dr. Lisa Shives, the founder of Northshore Sleep Medicine in Ev

Fragmented sleep changes how the immune system deals with cancer in ways that make the disease more aggressive.”

Researchers found that lack of sleep in older adults increased the pace of brain-ventricle enlargement and decreased cognitive performance, the very markers of brain aging associated with the onset of Alzheimer’s.

humans has shown that attention span and several other aspects of cognition may not normalize even with three days of recovery sleep, raising the question of lasting injury in the brain.” Up until recently, she added, “no one really thought that the brain could be irreversibly injured from sleep loss.”

“Sleep is such a powerful source of resilience….We need to begin grouping sleep with all the other things we do to make patients better.”

When we wake up in bed on Monday morning and think of the various hurdles we have to jump that day, immediately we feel sad, bored, and bothered. Whereas actually, we’re just lying in bed. —ALAN WATTS, The Philosophies of Asia