Bedicine
Last night at a party, a fellow working-stiff friend and I were giving a hard time to two of our retiree buddies. “You need to be productive,” my friend said. “Napping all the time, goofing off… you need to accomplish something.” It brought me back to one of my favorite reads (and re-reads) this year, Dr. Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep . Walker, a sleep scientist at UC Berkeley and self-described “ Sleep Diplomat ” gives a fascinating and layperson-friendly overview of the science behind why we need sleep and the hundreds of benefits that it offers. From the benefits for memory (forget the all-nighters, kids), heart health, muscle and bone repair, athletic performance, mood, cognition, hormone regulation, and more, he shows that your sleeping hours are, in fact, the most productive hours of your day! The book (and, for the attention-span-deprived, his TED Talk ) is chock-full of mind-blowing facts and scientific studies. But at this time of year, one seems parti