This is a fantastic interview with one of my favorite former professors, Robert Stickgold, who discusses the many important functions that sleep has.
He touches on the unity of consciousness, immune function, memory processing, endocrine function and obesity, emotional regulation, and improvement on physical tasks. Most importantly he reminds us not to think of sleep as a waste of time.
We all face pressures that may cause us ignore the importance of sleep and our culture often makes the chronically-sleep deprived sound like heroes. Rather than trying to come up with ways of managing to sleep less, we should be rethinking our schedules and our priorities to ensure that we spend more time in this altered state of consciousness.
