03/20/2021
"Why We Sleep" has been mentioned a lot lately. It seems that Dr. Matthew Walker's aspirational call to get more sleep in order to stave off all manner of disease - and meet this newly added criterion for righteous living - has resonated with the health and fitness community.
Sadly, among leading sleep researchers, it's widely regarded as an error-riddled, scientifically questionable, and misleading book.
Interestingly, for many of them, the idea of writing a rebuttal has felt so overwhelming because of just how many errors there are.
However, Alexey Guzey put together this comprehensive review discussing some of the errors/inconsistencies.
Kudos to him for doing so.
Scientifically rebutting an entire book is a thankless, painstaking process. Consider that Walker was paid handsomely for the time he put into his best-seller and Guzey was paid nothing.
According to Guzey: "I spent more than 130 hrs over the last 2 months researching and writing this essay (~5 hrs to write the outline; ~60 hrs to get to the first draft; ~65 hrs to edit and fact-check), which constituted essentially all of my surplus free time over this time period."
Note that Guzye's review, which is over 13K words, only covers the problems with Ch 1!
Again, according to Guzey: "Continuing at the same pace, it would take me more than 3,000 hrs to check the entire book. 3,000 hrs is the equivalent of 75 weeks or 1.4 years of full-time work. I hope that going through one full chapter, rather than cherry-picking stuff from across the book, demonstrated the density of errors in the book."
In the end, reviews like this are so useful because they're so rare. There just aren't many incentives for clear-thinking professionals to spend hundreds of hours, unpaid, to rebut popular work.
Especially since most readers of Walker's book, who loved it, are unlikely to take kindly to the idea that they were hoodwinked. They're more likely to lash out at reviewers like Guzey than admit that the book they so liked could have been flawed.
In the end, if you'd like to check out the full review, google "Why We Sleep Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors" and you'll find it.
