This isn’t news to the New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady, who managed to beat the Seahawks in the last Super Bowl—and win the MVP title. Brady goes to bed at 8:30 p.m. and is still managing to play at the highest level even as he approaches forty. “The decisions that I make always center around performance enhancement,” he says. “I want

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you’re tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance inside themselves without you. Go to sleep. Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch by inch America is giving itself to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness lap at

“To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”

That is due in part to the fact that people who get more sleep produce less of a hormone called ghrelin—the “hunger hormone,” which increases our appetite.

evolutionary process has ever made.

Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world. —HERACLITUS, Fragments

If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the

That’s why, as author Tom Rath writes, “We need to rethink sleep as a core family value.” When I was growing up, my mother

University of Delaware psychologist Brad Wolgast. In the Great British Sleep Survey, researchers found that sleep-deprived people were seven times