Matthew Walker on why the most productive thing we can all do is sleep

Even Walker’s entry into the field of sleep research was somewhat tangential. Having studied neuroscience, he went on to complete a PhD in neurophysiology, and it was then that he discovered that sleeping brainwaves held answers to dementia, opening the door to what else sleep could reveal.

Sharing his many resultant discoveries in Why We Sleep transformed Walker’s life. A self-confessed introvert, he says he had no idea how great the impact of his book would be. While the opportunities it has presented have been extensive, his discomfort with being recognised is clear, particularly as it means he’s often on the direct receiving end of the public’s many sleep woes—the most common being what he refers to as being “tired but wired”. 

“If there is one principal reason why society is struggling to sleep in this modern era, it’s anxiety and stress,” he says. People are exhausted but can’t fall asleep; when they wake up they can’t go back to sleep because they start ruminating, which especially when done at night, he says can lead to catastrophising that is difficult to quell. 

While Walker would prefer to offer bespoke sleep solutions, he does have some universal advice. Firstly, when people tell him that, for example, they are up at 3am, he asks them how they know what time it was. This is the first mistake, as looking at the time makes it harder to return to sleep according to research. Walker advocates for the removal of all clock faces from the bedroom. 

Secondly, he has some tried and studied tips for getting (back) to sleep, starting with meditation. This is something Walker says he was highly sceptical of when he started writing his book—even setting out to try to disprove its efficacy. But, through studying the research and testing it personally, he found that ten minutes of meditation daily before bed was a gamechanger, considerably improving his sleep. He went on to practice this for six or seven years, and still returns to regular meditation if he’s going through a bad sleep spell—yes, these impact the experts too.

Then, there’s breathwork. Walker suggests box breathing, of which there are various combinations—for example inhaling for four seconds, holding for six, exhaling for seven, then repeating. Another solution is to close your eyes and carry out a full body scan, starting with your head and working your way down, analysing each part of the body as you go to see where there is tension and then trying to relax it. 

The worst thing that you can do, Walker says, is to count sheep, a Western concept thought to help people nod off. “With every bleating sheep that goes over the fence, it only reminds you of how many extra minutes you’re not getting and makes matters worse,” he says. Instead, he suggests taking yourself on a mental walk that you know in vivid detail, and doing so in full technicolour resolution with every detail considered. 

“What’s common about all these things is that they are [taking] your mind off itself,” he says. “And usually when you do those things, the next thing you remember is your alarm going off in the morning.” Note, though, that Walker is not a fan of artificially terminating your sleep in such alarming fashion.

While clock faces are out, Walker is not averse to sleep tech. At one point during our interview he holds up his hands, joking that “I definitely don’t use any sleep trackers whatsoever”. On one hand he is wearing an Oura ring—he was an advisor to the healthtech company until recently when he left to pursue his own sleep tech solutions. An Ultrahuman ring is on his other hand, while on his wrist is an Apple watch. “I am a sleep tech nerd,” he admits. “I’ve probably got five or six different smart rings and I’ve tried just about every piece of sleep technology out there.”

Walker believes in the value of trackers. “In medicine, we say what gets measured gets managed,” he says. And because of our “non-conscious awareness” of sleep, unlike exercise or nutrition, it’s harder to quantify the quality of a person’s sleep without a tracker. Walker also says that people often think that time spent in bed equates to the amount of sleep they are getting, but people typically spend 20-40 minutes awake at night, even if that time is not committed to memory, adding that many are dismayed when they start wearing a tracker and realise that they aren’t getting as much sleep as they thought. 

Walker’s own forays into sleep tech include the Somnee sleep headband, a device that measures a person’s brainwave activity to deliver bespoke electrical stimulation to improve sleep quality and duration. He is, however, cognisant of the irony that sees humans trying to develop technology today to address sleep deprivation that has largely been driven by technology, going back almost 150 years to the invention of the lightbulb and further exacerbated by televisions and now personal devices.

“There’s no point in me telling people to put your phone away, don’t scroll when you’re in bed,” Walker says. “The technology genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back in, no matter how many books I write or podcasts I do. So, what can I do? Develop technology that helps bring you back in alignment, and that’s what I’m excited about.”

The sleep technology business is estimated to be worth almost US$30 billion today and is projected to expand significantly with Asia-Pacific predicted to be the fastest growing region. But while tech part of a solution, addressing the cause of our global sleep epidemic must be a priority. This is key at all levels, and should range from government campaigns educating on the importance of sleep for public health, to businesses acknowledging that less sleep does not equal greater productivity, and schools adapting timetabling to address the later circadian rhythms of teenagers so we are not “lumbering our children with chronic sleep debt”, says Walker, which can be detrimental to their health as well as their ability to learn.

Fundamentally, there needs to be a shift in perceptions around sleep. “Sleep has a stigma associated with it,” says Walker, “which is that you’re lazy and slothful if you get sufficient sleep.

“Nobody looks at an infant sleeping during the day and says, ‘What a lazy baby!’. Sleep is non-negotiably, absolutely, biologically necessary. But somewhere between infancy and now even in childhood, we not only abandon the notion that sleep is important and to be embraced, but we actually chastise people for getting sufficient sleep and we label them. There’s this mentality that if you are getting time to sufficiently sleep, you must not be busy, and in [today’s] society we equate busyness with importance. And so, I think people are scared of celebrating how much sleep they truly need because they worry that it’s a sign of them not having some degree of status.”

The message is clear: we need to stop apologising for and sacrificing our eight hours of shut-eye. Sleep isn’t selfish. Sleep isn’t slothful. Sleep is survival. It’s time to make sleeping well the new status symbol—especially in Asia, where our sleep deficit is most urgent.

Matthew Walker will be speaking at the Dragonfly Summit 2025, which takes place on September 27-28, 2025. As the official media partner, we have secured a discount for Tatler readers. Register here and use the code DFFLOWTAT.

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