# Notes on: *The Sleep Solution*, by W. Chris Winter.
## Prologue.
Helping a team plan out the best time to travel during a long road trip.
Or helping an athlete and his family adjsut to a new baby in the house.
|N: Status!
This book is meant to be read like a sweeping novel. It is not a reference book. I do not want you to skip ahead to the part of the book that you think is most important for you. It’s all important! Think of it as a complete process for understanding and overhauling both your sleep and the way you think about sleep. If you do it my way, you are going to finish this book with a newfound sense of what it means to have healthy sleep.
## An Introduction to Sleep Medicine.
Sleep conditions are highly tratable.
Tom Roth (2007): Insomnia may accept as many as 1/3 of our population at any given time.
Restless leg syndrome?
Everyone in medical school studies everything.
REM behavior disorder: The normal paralysis that accompanies dreaming is impaired.
According to researcher Raymond Rosen, most physicians have received less than two hours of training about the entire field of sleep in their four years of medical education.
Given that our psychiatry lecture about men who fantasize about their wives’ footwear lasted thirty minutes, you can see just how dramatically underrepresented the whole of sleep medicine was in our curriculum.
## Chapter 1: What is Sleep Good For? Absolutely Everything!
There is almost no disease or organ system in which you cannot find some kind of relationship
Sleep as one of the foundational processes within your body that you can actually change.
To me, the three main pillars of good health that we can exert some control over are nutrition, exercise, and sleep.
Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. Sleep is not a light switch in your braing that is either on or off. Your body is doing amazing things at night while you sleep.
Sleep resides in the brain. If you think your all-nighters or your crazy shift work schedule is no big deal, you might want to sit down before you continue to read. Long-term poor sleep is like bad cosmetic surgery: risky, costly, and not pretty.
### Sleep and the Brain
The brain does have a system for removing waste: the glymphatic system. Discovered in 2015!!
60% more productive when we're sleep.
Making the decision to stay up late impairs your brain's ability to get rid of toxic waste products building up during the day
