14 votes

Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" is riddled with scientific and factual errors

Posted by Deimos
Tags: sleep, books, science, matthew walker, reviews, author.alexey guzey, long read
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

Link information

This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.

Authors
Alexey Guzey
Word count
6758 words

2 comments

  1. user2
    (edited )
    Link
    This is a really interesting post @Deimos, thanks for linking! I've read Matthew's book and I've also seen pretty much all of his interviews (Rhonda's, Attias', Joe's, etc).. I recommend his book...

    This is a really interesting post @Deimos, thanks for linking! I've read Matthew's book and I've also seen pretty much all of his interviews (Rhonda's, Attias', Joe's, etc).. I recommend his book to everyone I know and have gifted it to some friends.

    I like this review and I would love to have Matthew's answer to it. I might send him an e-mail later. Having said that, there are a few things that rub me the wrong way, namely:

    • He states that there are "concrete harm done by the book", specifically when Matthew claims that we should be sleeping more. Well, the author goes in the opposite direction in section 16: "Appendix: my personal experience with sleep", where he claims one can function with 4.5h of sleep per day;
    • Many of his appendices are just "if Matthew got this number wrong, why should we think X is right?". See appendix 15 for this;
    • In section 2, the author claims that Matthew stated that a good night sleep is always better for you. I don't have the book handy but I seem to remember, at the end of the book Matthew does state that sleeping more then X hours has shown negative effects (higher mortality IIRC?), on avg.;

    But it's really good that people are critical of such books. I hope to read Matthew's reply soon.

    PS: The site is awesome. The TOC on the left side and the sources on the right side make for a really cool theme.

    6 votes