i believe in sleep essay

Theses on Sleep

Summary: In this essay, I question some of the consensus beliefs about sleep, such as the need for at least 7 hours of sleep for adults, harmfulness of acute sleep deprivation, and harmfulness of long-term sleep deprivation and our inability to adapt to it.

It appears that the evidence for all of these beliefs is much weaker than sleep scientists and public health experts want us to believe. In particular, I conclude that it’s plausible that at least acute sleep deprivation is not only not harmful but beneficial in some contexts and that it’s that we are able to adapt to long-term sleep deprivation.

I also discuss the bidirectional relationship of sleep and mania/depression and the costs of unnecessary sleep, noting that sleeping 1.5 hours per day less results in gaining more than a month of wakefulness per year, every year.

Note: I sleep the normal 7-9 hours if I don’t restrict my sleep. However, stimulants like coffee, modafinil, and adderall seem to have much smaller effect on my cognition than on cognition of most people I know. My brain in general, as you might guess from reading this site , is not very normal. So, be cautious before trying anything with your sleep on the basis of the arguments I lay out below. Specifically do not make any drastic changes to your sleep schedule on the basis of reading this essay and, if you want to experiment with sleep, do it gradually (i.e. varying the average amount of sleep by no more than 30 minutes at a time) and carefully.

Also see Natália Coelho Mendonça Counter-theses on Sleep .

Comfortable modern sleep is an unnatural superstimulus. Sleepiness, just like hunger, is normal.

The default argument for sleeping 7-9 hours a night is that this is the amount of sleep most of us get “naturally” when we sleep without using alarms. In this section, I argue against this line of reasoning, using the following analogy:

• Experiencing hunger is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are not eating enough. Never being hungry means you are probably eating too much.
• Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are undersleeping. Never being sleepy means you are probably sleeping too much.

Most of us (myself included) eat a lot of junk food and candy if we don’t restrict ourselves. Does this mean that lots of junk food and candy is the “natural” or the “optimal” amount for health?

Obviously, no. Modern junk food and candy are unnatural superstimuli, much tastier and much more abundant than any natural food, so they end up overwhelming our brains with pleasure, especially given that we are bored at work, college, or in high school so much of the day.

What if the only food available to you was junk food and candy?

• If you don’t eat any, you starve.
• If you eat just enough to be lean, you’ll keep salivating at the sight of pizzas and ice cream and feel distracted and hungry all the time. Importantly, in this situation, the feeling of hunger does not mean that you should eat more – it’s your brain being overpowered by a superstimulus while being bored.
• And if you eat way too much candy or pizza at once, you’ll be feeling terrible afterwards, however tasty the food was.

Most of us (myself included) sleep 7-9 hours if we don’t have any alarms in the morning and if we get out of bed when we feel like it. Does this mean that 7-9 hours of sleep is the “natural” or the “optimal” amount?

My thesis is: obviously, no. Modern sleep, in its infinite comfort, is an unnatural superstimulus that overwhelms our brains with pleasure and comfort (note: I’m not saying that it’s bad, simply that being in bed today is much more pleasurable than being in “bed” in the past.)

Think about sleep 10,000 years ago. You sleep in a cave, in a hut, or under the sky, with predators and enemy tribes roaming around. You are on a wooden floor, on an animal’s skin, or on the ground. The temperature will probably drop 5-10°C overnight, meaning that if you were comfortable when you were falling asleep, you are going to be freezing when you wake up. Finally, there’s moon shining right at you and all kinds of sounds coming from the forest around you.

In contrast, today: you sleep on your super-comfortable machine-crafted foam of the exact right firmness for you. You are completely safe in your home, protected by thick walls and doors. Your room’s temperature stays roughly constant, ensuring that you stay warm and comfy throughout the night. Finally, you are in a light and sound-insulated environment of your house. And if there’s any kind of disturbance you have eye masks and earplugs.

Does this sound “natural”?

Now, what if the only sleep available to you was modern sleep?

• If you don’t sleep at all, you go crazy, because some amount of sleep is necessary.
• If you sleep just enough to be awake during the day, you’ll be dreaming of getting a nap at the sight of a bed and will be distracted and sleepy all the time. Importantly, I claim, in this situation, the feeling of sleepiness does not mean that you should sleep more – it’s your brain being overpowered by a superstimulus while being bored.
• And if you sleep way too much at once, you’ll be feeling terrible afterwards, however pleasant the sleep was.

Even if I convinced you about the “sleeping too much” part, you are still probably wondering: but what does depression have to do with anything? Isn’t sleeping a lot good for mental health? Well…

Depression <-> oversleeping. Mania <-> acute sleep deprivation

In this section, I argue that depression triggers/amplifies oversleeping while oversleeping triggers/amplifies depression. Similarly, mania triggers/amplifies acute sleep deprivation while acute sleep deprivation triggers/amplifies mania.

One of the most notable facts about sleep is just how interlinked excessive sleep is with depression and how interlinked sleep deprivation is with mania in bipolar people.

Someone in r/BipolarReddit asked: How many hours do you sleep when stable vs (hypo)manic? Depressed?

Here are all 8 answers that compare hours for manic and depressed states, I excluded answers that describe hypomania but do not describe mania or that only describe mania or only describe depression. note the consistency:

• “Manic/hypomanic: 0-6 hours Stable: 7-9 hours Depressed: 10-19 hours”
• “Manic, 2-3, hypo, 5-6, stable 8-9, depressed 10-12. 8 is the number I try to hit.”
• “Severely depressed w/o mixed features - 12 to 15 hours Low to Moderate depressed w/o mixed - 10 hours, if no alarm. With alarm less, but super hangover Stable -Usually 7-9 hours Hypomanic taking sedating evening meds - 5 to 7 hours Hypomanic with no sedating evening meds - 3 to 5 hours Manic out of hand - 0 to 3 hours Manic in hospital put on maximum sedating meds or injections - 4 to 6 hours Mixed episodes = same as hypo(manic)”
• “I try to get at least 8 hours but when I’m depressed I nap a lot. When I’m hypo I sleep pretty much the same but when I’m manic I’m lucky to get 3 hours. Huhs”
• “Just got out of a manic episode. A few all-nighters, a lot of 3 hour nights, and a good night of sleep was 6 hours. Now I’m depressed and I’ve been sleeping from 9pm to noon and staying in bed for much longer after I’m awake.”
• “Manic 2-4, stable 6-7, depressed 10-12”
• “Around 15 hours of sleep per night while depressed, and between 0-4 hours per night while manic.”

Lack of sleep is such a potent trigger for mania that acute sleep deprivation is literally used to treat depression. Aside from ketamine, not sleeping for a night is the only medicine we have to quickly – literally overnight – and reliably (in ~50% of patients) improve mood in depressed patients (until they go to bed, unless you keep advancing their sleep phase Riemann, D., König, A., Hohagen, F., Kiemen, A., Voderholzer, U., Backhaus, J., Bunz, J., Wesiack, B., Hermle, L. and Berger, M., 1999. How to preserve the antidepressive effect of sleep deprivation: A comparison of sleep phase advance and sleep phase delay. European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience, 249(5), pp.231-237. ). NOTE: DO NOT TRY THIS IF YOU ARE BIPOLAR, YOU MIGHT GET A MANIC EPISODE.

Figure 1. Copied from Wehr TA. Improvement of depression and triggering of mania by sleep deprivation. JAMA. 1992 Jan 22;267(4):548-51.

Why does the lack of sleep promote manic states while long sleep promotes depression? I don’t know. But here are a couple of pointers to interesting papers relevant to the question: Can non-REM sleep be depressogenic? Beersma DG, Van den Hoofdakker RH. Can non-REM sleep be depressogenic?. Journal of affective disorders. 1992 Feb 1;24(2):101-8. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is associated with synapse growth. Sleep deprivation appears to increase BDNF [and therefore neurogenesis?]. Papers that showed up when I googled “sleep deprivation bdnf”: The Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor: Missing Link Between Sleep Deprivation, Insomnia, and Depression . Rahmani M, Rahmani F, Rezaei N. The brain-derived neurotrophic factor: missing link between sleep deprivation, insomnia, and depression. Neurochemical research. 2020 Feb;45(2):221-31. The link between sleep, stress and BDNF . Eckert A, Karen S, Beck J, Brand S, Hemmeter U, Hatzinger M, Holsboer-Trachsler E. The link between sleep, stress and BDNF. European Psychiatry. 2017 Apr;41(S1):S282-. BDNF: an indicator of insomnia? . Giese M, Unternährer E, Hüttig H, Beck J, Brand S, Calabrese P, Holsboer-Trachsler E, Eckert A. BDNF: an indicator of insomnia?. Molecular psychiatry. 2014 Feb;19(2):151-2. Recovery Sleep Significantly Decreases BDNF In Major Depression Following Therapeutic Sleep Deprivation . Goldschmied JR, Rao H, Dinges D, Goel N, Detre JA, Basner M, Sheline YI, Thase ME, Gehrman PR. 0886 Recovery Sleep Significantly Decreases BDNF In Major Depression Following Therapeutic Sleep Deprivation. Sleep. 2019 Apr;42(Supplement_1):A356-.

Jeremy Hadfield writes:

My (summarized/simplified) hypothesis based on what I’ve read: depression involves rigid, non-flexible brain states that correspond to rigid depressive world models. Depression also involves a non-updating of models or inability to draw new connections (brain is even literally slightly lighter in depressed patients). Sleep involves revising/simplifying world models based on connections learned during the day, involves pruning unneeded or irrelevant synaptic connections. Thus, excessive sleep + depression = even less world model updating, even more rigid brain, even fewer new connections. Sleep deprivation can resolve this problem at least temporarily by ensuring that you stay awake for longer and keep adding connections, thus compensating for the decreased connection-building caused by depression and “forcing” a brain update (perhaps through neural annealing - see QRI article).

Occasional acute sleep deprivation is good for health and promotes more efficient sleep

One other argument for sleeping the “natural” (7-9) number of hours is that we feel bad on days when we sleep less. In this section, I argue against this line of reasoning by asking: if fasting and exercising are good, shouldn’t acute sleep deprivation also be good? And I conclude that it is probably good.

Let’s continue our analogy of sleep to eating and add exercise to the mix.

It seems to me that most common arguments against acute sleep deprivation equally “demonstrate” that fasting and exercise are bad.

For example, I ran 7 kilometers 2 days ago and my legs still hurt like hell and I can’t run at all. Does this mean that running is “bad”?

Well, consensus seems to be that dizziness, muscle damage (and thus pain) and decreased physical performance after the run, are not just not bad, but are in fact necessary for the organism to train to run faster or to run longer distances by increasing muscle mass, muscle efficiency, and lung capacity.

What about fasting? When I fast, I am more anxious, I think about food a lot, meaning that focus is more difficult, and I feel cold. And if I decided to fast too much, I would pass out and then die. Does this mean that fasting is “bad”? Well, consensus seems to be that occasional fasting actually activates some “good” kind of stress, promotes healthy autophagy, (obviously) helps to lose weight, etc. and is in fact good.

Now, what happens when I sleep for 2 hours instead of 7 one night? I feel somewhat tingly in my hands, my mood is heightened a little bit, and, if I start watching a movie with my wife at 6pm, I’ll fall asleep. Does this mean that sleeping 2 hours one night is bad for my health?

Obviously no. The only thing we observe is that my organism was subjected to acute stress. However, the reaction to acute stress does not tell us anything about the long-term effects of this kind of stress. As we know, both in running and in fasting, short-term acute stress response results in adaptation and in long-term increase in performance and in benefit to the organism.

I combed through a lot of sleep literature and I haven’t seen a single study that made a parallel to either fasting or exercise and I haven’t seen a single pre-registered RCT that tried to see what happens to someone if you subject them to 1-3 nights per week of acute sleep deprivation and allow to recover the rest of the nights. Do they perform better or worse in the long-term on cognitive tests? Do they have more or less inflammation? Do they need less recovery sleep over time?

I think that the answers are:

• Acute sleep deprivation combined with caffeine or some other stimulant that cancels out sleep pressure does not result in decreased cognitive ability at least until 30-40 hours of wakefulness (if this is true, then sleepiness , rather absence of sleep per se is responsible for decreased cognitive performance during acute sleep deprivation).
• Occasional acute sleep deprivation has no impact on long-term cognitive ability or health.
• Sleep does become more efficient over time and, in complete analogy to exercise, you withstand both acute sleep deprivation better and can function at baseline with a lower amount of sleep in the long-term.

(The only parallel to fasting I’m aware of anyone making is by Nassim Taleb… when he was quote-tweeting me.)

Appendix: anecdotes about acute sleep deprivation

Appendix: philipp streicher on homeostasis, its relationship to mania/depression, and on other points i make, our priors about sleep research should be weak.

In this section, I note that most sleep research is extremely unreliable and we shouldn’t conclude much on the basis of it.

Do you believe in power-posing? In ego depletion? In hungry judges and brain training?

If the answer is no, then your priors for our knowledge about sleep should be weak because “sleep science” is mostly just rebranded cognitive psychology, with the vast majority of it being small-n, not pre-registered, p-hacked experiments.

I have been able to find exactly one pre-registered experiment of the impact of prolonged sleep deprivation on cognition. It was published by economists from Harvard and MIT in 2021 and its pre-registered analysis found null or negative effects of sleep on all primary outcomes Bessone P, Rao G, Schilbach F, Schofield H, Toma M. The economic consequences of increasing sleep among the urban poor. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 2021 Aug;136(3):1887-941. (note that both the abstract and the main body of this paper report results without the multiple-hypothesis correction, in contradiction to the pre-registration plan of the study. The paper does not mention this change anywhere. See comments for the details. ).

So why has sleep research not been facing a severe replication crisis, similar to psychology?

First, compared to psychology, where you just have people fill out questionnaires, sleep research is slow, relatively expensive, and requires specialized equipment (e.g. EEG, actigraphs). So skeptical outsiders go for easier targets (like social psychology) while the insiders keep doing the same shoddy experiments because they need to keep their careers going somehow .

Second, imagine if sleep researchers had conclusively shown that sleep is not important for memory, health, etc. – would they get any funding? No. Their jobs are literally predicated on convincing the NIH and other grantmakers that sleep is important. As Patrick McKenzie notes , “If you want a problem solved make it someone’s project. If you want it managed make it someone’s job.”

Figure 2. Relative risk of showing benefit or harm of treatment by year of publication for large NHLBI trials on pharmaceutical and dietary supplement interventions. Copied from Kaplan RM, Irvin VL. Likelihood of null effects of large NHLBI clinical trials has increased over time. PloS one. 2015 Aug 5;10(8):e0132382.

Figure 3. Eric Turner on Twitter: “Negative depression trials…Now you see ‘em, now you don’t. Published literature vs FDA, from [ Turner EH, Matthews AM, Linardatos E, Tell RA, Rosenthal R. Selective publication of antidepressant trials and its influence on apparent efficacy. New England Journal of Medicine. 2008 Jan 17;358(3):252-60. ]"

Even in medicine, without pre-registered RCTs truth is extremely difficult to come by, with more than one half Kaiser J. More than half of high-impact cancer lab studies could not be replicated in controversial analysis. AAAS Articles DO Group. 2021; of high-impact cancer papers failing to be replicated, and with one half of RCTs without pre-registration of positive outcomes being spun Kaplan RM, Irvin VL. Likelihood of null effects of large NHLBI clinical trials has increased over time. PloS one. 2015 Aug 5;10(8):e0132382. by researchers as providing benefit when there’s none. And this is in medicine, which is infinitely more consequential and rigorous than psychology.

Also see: Appendix: I have no trust in sleep scientists .

Decreasing sleep by 1-2 hours a night in the long-term has no negative health effects

In this section, I outline several lines of evidence that bring me to the conclusion that decreasing sleep by 1-2 hours a night in the long-term has no negative health effects. To summarize:

• A sleep researcher who trains sailors to sleep efficiently in order to maximize their race performance believes that 4.5-5.5 hours of sleep is fine.
• 70% of 84 hunter-gatherers studied in 2013 slept less than 7 hours per day, with 46% sleeping less than 6 hours.
• A single-point mutation can decrease the amount of required sleep by 2 hours, with no negative side-effects.
• A brain surgery can decrease the amount of sleep required by 3 hours, with no negative-side effects.
• Sleep is not required for memory consolidation.
• Claudio Stampi is a Newton, Massachusetts based sleep researcher. But he is not your normal sleep researcher whose career is built on observational studies or p-hacked n=20 experiments that always show “significant” results. He is one of the only sleep researchers with skin in the game: the goal of his research is to maximize performance of sailors by tinkering with their sleep cycles, and he believes that 4.5-5.5 hours of sleep is fine, The article uses the phrase “get by” and does not state that there’s no decrease in performance. However, it does state that the decrease in performance at 3 hours of sleep with lots of naps is 12-25%, so increasing sleep by 50-83% from this, seems unlikely to result in any decrease in performance, compared to 8 hours of sleep (“he had them shift to their three-hour routines. After more than a month, the monophasic group showed a 30 percent loss in cognitive performance. The group that divided its sleep between nighttime and short naps showed a 25 percent drop. But the polyphasic group, which slept exclusively in short naps, showed only a 12 percent drop."). as long as it’s broken down into core sleep and a series of short (usually 20-minute) naps. Here’s Outside :

“Solo sailing is one of the best models of 24/7 activity, and brains and muscles are required,” Stampi said one day at his home, from which he runs the institute. “If you sleep too much, you don’t win. If you don’t sleep enough, you break.” …

“For those sailors who are seriously competing, Stampi is a necessity,” says Brad Van Liew, a 37-year-old Californian who began working with Stampi in 1998 and went on to become America’s most accomplished solo racer and the winner in his class of the 2002-2003 Around Alone, a 28,000-mile global solo race. “You have to sleep efficiently, or it’s like having a bad set of sails or a boat bottom that isn’t prepared properly.” …

both Golding and MacArthur sleep about the same amount while racing, between 4.5 and 5.5 hours on average in every 24—the minimum amount, Stampi believes, on which humans can get by.

In 2013, scientists tracked the sleep of 84 hunter-gatherers from 3 different tribes Yetish G, Kaplan H, Gurven M, Wood B, Pontzer H, Manger PR, Wilson C, McGregor R, Siegel JM. Natural sleep and its seasonal variations in three pre-industrial societies. Current Biology. 2015 Nov 2;25(21):2862-8. (each person’s sleep was measured for about a week but measurements for different groups were taken in different parts of the year). The average amount of sleep among these 84 people was 6.5 hours. Judging by CDC’s “7 hours or more” recommendation , Consensus Conference Panel:, Watson, N.F., Badr, M.S., Belenky, G., Bliwise, D.L., Buxton, O.M., Buysse, D., Dinges, D.F., Gangwisch, J., Grandner, M.A. and Kushida, C., 2015. Joint consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society on the recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: methodology and discussion. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 11(8), pp.931-952. 70% out of these 84 undersleep:

• 6 people slept between 4 and 5 hours
• 19 people slept between 5 and 6 hours
• 34 people slept between 6 and 7 hours
• 21 people slept between 7 and 8 hours
• 4 people slept between 8 and 9 hours

One group of hunter-gatherers (10 people from Tsimane tribe studied in November/December of 2013) slept just 5.6 hours on average.

The authors of this study also note that “None of these groups began sleep near sunset, onset occurring, on average, 3.3 hr after sunset” (they are probably getting too much artificial light… or something).

What I’m getting from all of this is: there’s nothing “natural” about sleeping 7-9 hours. If you think that the amount of sleep hunter-gatherers are getting is the amount of sleep humans have evolved to get, then you should not worry at all about getting 4, 5, or 6 hours of sleep a night.

The CDC and the professional sleep researchers pull the numbers out of their asses without any kind of rigorous scientific evidence for their “consensus recommendations”. There’s no causal evidence that sleeping 7-9 hours is healthier than sleeping 6 hours or less. Correlational evidence suggests Shen X, Wu Y, Zhang D. Nighttime sleep duration, 24-hour sleep duration and risk of all-cause mortality among adults: a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. Scientific Reports. 2016 Feb 22;6:21480. that people who sleep 4 hours have the same if not lower mortality as those who sleep 8 hours and that people who sleep 6-7 hours have the lowest mortality.

Also see: Appendix: Jerome Siegel and Robert Vertes vs the sleep establishment

It appears that there is a distinct single-point mutation that allows some people to sleep several hours less than typical on average. A Rare Mutation of β1-Adrenergic Receptor Affects Sleep/Wake Behaviors : Shi G, Xing L, Wu D, Bhattacharyya BJ, Jones CR, McMahon T, Chong SC, Chen JA, Coppola G, Geschwind D, Krystal A. A rare mutation of β1-adrenergic receptor affects sleep/wake behaviors. Neuron. 2019 Sep 25;103(6):1044-55.

We have identified a mutation in the β1-adrenergic receptor gene in humans who require fewer hours of sleep than most. In vitro, this mutation leads to decreased protein stability and dampened signaling in response to agonist treatment. In vivo, the mice carrying the same mutation demonstrated short sleep behavior. We found that this receptor is highly expressed in the dorsal pons and that these ADRB1+ neurons are active during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and wakefulness. Activating these neurons can lead to wakefulness, and the activity of these neurons is affected by the mutation. These results highlight the important role of β1-adrenergic receptors in sleep/wake regulation.

The study compares carriers of the mutation in one family to non-carriers in the same family and finds that carriers sleep about 2 hours per day less. Given the complexity of sleep and the multitude of its functions, it seems extremely implausible that just one mutation in the β1-adrenergic receptor gene was able to increase its efficiency by about 25%. It seems that it just made carriers sleep less (due to more stimulation of a group of neurons in the brain responsible for sleep/wakefulness) without anything else obviously changing when compared to non-carriers.

A similar example of a drop in the amount of sleep required without negative side effects and driven by a single factor was described in Development of a Short Sleeper Phenotype after Third Ventriculostomy in a Patient with Ependymal Cysts . Seystahl K, Könnecke H, Sürücü O, Baumann CR, Poryazova R. Development of a short sleeper phenotype after third ventriculostomy in a patient with ependymal cysts. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. 2014 Feb 15;10(2):211-3. To sum up: a 59-year-old patient had chronic hydrocephalus. An endoscopic third ventriculostomy was performed on him. His sleep dropped from 7-8 hours a night to 4-5 hours a night without him becoming sleepy, he stopped being depressed, and his physical or cognitive performance stayed normal, as measured by the doctors.

Sleep is not required for memory consolidation. Jerome Siegel (the author of the hunter-gatherers study mentioned above) writes in Memory Consolidation Is Similar in Waking and Sleep : Siegel JM. Memory Consolidation Is Similar in Waking and Sleep. Current Sleep Medicine Reports. 2021 Mar;7(1):15-8.

Under interference conditions, such as exist during sleep deprivation, subjects, by staying awake, necessarily interacting with the experimenter keeping them awake and experiencing the laboratory environment, will remember more than just the items that are presented. But they may be less able to recall the particular items the experimenter is measuring. This can lead to the mistaken conclusion that sleep is required for memory consolidation [7].

Recent work has, for the first time, dealt with this issue. It was shown that a quiet waking period or a meditative waking state in which the environment is being ignored, produces a gain in recall similar to that seen in sleep, relative to an active waking state or a sleep-deprived state [8–16]. …

REM sleep has been hypothesized to have a key role in memory consolidation [20]. But it has been reported that near total REM sleep deprivation for a period of 14 to 40 days by administration of the monoamine oxidase inhibitor phenelzine has no apparent effect on cognitive function in humans [21]. A systematic study using serotonin or norepinephrine re-uptake inhibitors to suppress REM sleep in humans had no deleterious effects on a variety of learning tasks [22, 23]. Humans rarely survive the damage to the pontine region which when discretely lesioned in animals greatly reduces or eliminates REM sleep [20, 23–25]. However, one such subject with pontine damage that severely reduced REM sleep has been thoroughly studied. The studies show normal or above normal cognitive performance and no deficit in memory formation or recall [26•]. It has been claimed that learning results in greater total amounts of sleep, or greater amounts of REM sleep [27], or greater amounts of sleep spindles, or slow wave activity. However, a systematic test of this hypothesis in 929 human subjects with night-long EEG recording found no such correlation with retention [28•].

The entire Scientific Consensus™ about sleep being essential for memory consolidation appears to be heavily flawed, driven by people like Matthew Walker, and making me lose the last remnants of trust in sleep science that I had .

Appendix: how I wake up after 6 or less hours of sleep

Appendix: anecdotes about long-term sleep deprivation.

• Appendix: the idea that sleep’s purpose is metabolite clearance, if not total bs, is massively overhyped

Chadwick worked for several nights straight without sleep on the seminal discovery [of the neutron, for which he was awarded the 1935 Nobel in physics]. When he was done he went to a meeting of the Kapitza Club at Cambridge and gave a talk about it, ending with the words, “Now I wish to be chloroformed and put to sleep”.

I’m not what they call a “natural short sleeper”. If I don’t restrict my sleep, I often sleep more than 8 hours and I still struggle with getting out of bed. I used to be really scared of not sleeping enough and almost never set the alarm for less than 7.5 hours after going to bed.

My sleep statistics tells me that I slept an average of 5:25 hours over the last 7 days, 5:49 hours over the last 30 days, and 5:57 over the last 180 days hours, meaning that I’m awake for 18 hours per day instead of 16.5 hours. I usually sleep 5.5-6 hours during the night and take a nap a few times a week when sleepy during the day.

This means that I’m gaining 33 days of life every year. 1 more year of life every 11 years. 5 more years of life every 55 years.

Why are people not all over this? Why is everyone in love with charlatans who say that sleeping 5 hours a night will double your risk of cancer, make you pre-diabetic, and cause Alzheimer’s, despite studies showing that people who sleep 5 hours have the same, if not lower, mortality than those who sleep 8 hours? Convincing a million 20-year-olds to sleep an unnecessary hour a day is equivalent, in terms of their hours of wakefulness, to killing 62,500 of them.

I wrote large chunks of this essay having slept less than 1.5 hours over a period of 38 hours. I came up with and developed the biggest arguments of it when I slept an average of 5 hours 39 minutes per day over the preceding 14 days. At this point, I’m pretty sure that the entire “not sleeping ‘enough’ makes you stupid” is a 100% psyop. It makes you somewhat more sleepy, yes. More stupid, no. I literally did an experiment in which I tried to find changes in my cognitive ability after sleeping 4 hours a day for 12-14 days , I couldn’t find any. My friends who I was talking to a lot during the experiment simply didn’t notice anything.

What do I lose due to sleeping 1.5 hours a day less? I’m somewhat more sleepy every day and staying awake during boring calls is even more difficult now. On the other hand, just a prospect of playing an exciting video game, makes me 100% alert even after sleeping for 2-3 hours. Related: Horne JA, Pettitt AN. High incentive effects on vigilance performance during 72 hours of total sleep deprivation. Acta psychologica. 1985 Feb 1;58(2):123-39. There’s no guarantee that what I’m doing is healthy after all, although, as I explained above, I think that it’s extremely unlikely due to likely adaptation, and likely beneficial effects of sleep deprivation (e.g. increased BDNF, less susceptibility to depression), and since I take a 20-minute nap under my wife’s watch whenever I don’t feel good.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank (in reverse alphabetic order): Misha Yagudin , Guy Wilson , Bart Sturm, Ulysse Sabbag , Stephen Malina , Gavin Leech , Anastasia Kuptsova , Jake Koenig , Aleksandr Kotyurgin, Alexander Kim , Basil Halperin , Jeremy Hadfield , Steve Gadd , and Willy Chertman for reading drafts of this essay and for disagreeing with many parts of it vehemently. All errors mine.

Guzey, Alexey. Theses on Sleep. Guzey.com. 2022 February. Available from https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/ .

Or download a BibTeX file here .

• One popular sleep tip I’ve come to wholeheartedly believe is the importance of waking up at the same time: from my experience, it does really seem that the organism adjusts the time it is ready to wake up if you keep a consistent schedule.
• observation: I find staying awake during boring lectures impossible and reliably fall asleep during them, regardless of the amount of sleep I’m getting
• observation: I can play video games with little sleep for several days and feel 100% alert (a superstimulus of its own, but still a valuable observation)
• observation: I become sleepy when I’m working on something boring and difficult

Common objections

Objection: “When I’m underslept I notice that I’m less productive.”

Yes, this is expected as per the analogy to exercise I make above . After exercise you are tired but over time you become stronger.

It might be that undersleeping itself causes you to be less productive. However, it might also be the case that there’s an upstream cause that results in both undersleeping and lack of productivity. I think either could be the case depending on the person but understanding what exactly happens is much harder than people typically appreciate when they notice such co-occurrences.

As Nick Wignall notes on Twitter:

People are also not great at distinguishing true sleepiness from tiredness.

Analogy would be: of all the times when you feel hungry, how much of that is true hunger vs a craving?

Also related: when people say that e.g. they have a small child, are doing medical residency, etc. and feel terrible due to undersleep, note that there’s a big difference between being randomly forced to not sleep when you want to sleep and managing one’s sleep consciously. The analogy would be to saying that fasting is bad because if you are forbidden by someone from eating randomly throughout the day.

Objection: “Driving when you are sleepy is dangerous, therefore you are wrong.”

Answer: Yep, I agree that driving while being sleepy is dangerous and I don’t want anyone to drive, to operate heavy machinery, etc. when they are sleepy. This, however, bears no relationship on any of the arguments I make.

Objection: “The graph that shows more sleep being associated with higher doesn’t tell us anything because sick people tend to sleep more.”

Answer: It is true that some diseases lead to prolonged sleep. However, some diseases also lead to shortened sleep. For example, many stroke patients suffer from insomnia Sterr A, Kuhn M, Nissen C, Ettine D, Funk S, Feige B, Umarova R, Urbach H, Weiller C, Riemann D. Post-stroke insomnia in community-dwelling patients with chronic motor stroke: physiological evidence and implications for stroke care. Scientific Reports. 2018 May 30;8(1):8409. and people with fatal familial insomnia struggle with insomnia. Therefore, if you want to make the argument that the association between longer sleep and higher mortality is not indicative of the effect of sleep, you have to accept that the same is true about shorter sleep and higher mortality.

Appendix: I have no trust in sleep scientists

Why do I bother with all of this theorizing? Why do I think I can discover something about sleep that thousands of them couldn’t discover over many decades?

The reason is that I have approximately 0 trust in the integrity of the field of sleep science.

As you might be aware, 2 years ago I wrote a detailed criticism of the book Why We Sleep written by a Professor of Neuroscience at psychology at UC Berkeley, the world’s leading sleep researcher and the most famous expert on sleep, and the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley, Matthew Walker.

Here are just a few of biggest issues (there were many more) with the book.

Walker wrote: “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer”, despite there being no evidence that cancer in general and sleep are related. There are obviously no RCTs on this, and, in fact, there’s not even a correlation between general cancer risk and sleep duration.

Walker falsified a graph from an academic study in the book.

Walker outright fakes data to support his “sleep epidemic” argument. The data on sleep duration Walker presents on the graph below simply does not exist :

Here’s some actual data on sleep duration over time:

By the time my review was published, the book had sold hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies and was praised by the New York Times , The Guardian , and many other highly-respected papers. It was named one of NPR’s favorite books of 2017 while Walker went on a full-blown podcast tour.

Did any sleep scientists voice the concerns they with the book or with Walker? No. They were too busy listening to his keynote at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2019 meeting.

Did any sleep scientists voice their concerns after I published my essay detailing its errors and fabrications? No (unless you count people replying to me on Twitter as “voicing a concern”).

Did Walker lose his status in the community, his NIH grants, or any of his appointments? No, no, and no.

I don’t believe that a community of scientists that refuses to police fraud and of which Walker is a foremost representative (recall that he is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley) could be a community of scientists that would produce a trustworthy and dependable body of scientific work.

Appendix: the idea that sleep’s purpose is metabolite clearance, if not total bs, is massively overhyped

Specifically, the original 2013 paper Xie L, Kang H, Xu Q, Chen MJ, Liao Y, Thiyagarajan M, O’Donnell J, Christensen DJ, Nicholson C, Iliff JJ, Takano T. Sleep drives metabolite clearance from the adult brain. science. 2013 Oct 18;342(6156):373-7. accumulated more than 3,000 (!) citations in less than 10 years and is highly misleading.

The paper is called “Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain”. The abstract says:

The conservation of sleep across all animal species suggests that sleep serves a vital function. We here report that sleep has a critical function in ensuring metabolic homeostasis. Using real-time assessments of tetramethylammonium diffusion and two-photon imaging in live mice, we show that natural sleep or anesthesia are associated with a 60% increase in the interstitial space, resulting in a striking increase in convective exchange of cerebrospinal fluid with interstitial fluid. In turn, convective fluxes of interstitial fluid increased the rate of β-amyloid clearance during sleep. Thus, the restorative function of sleep may be a consequence of the enhanced removal of potentially neurotoxic waste products that accumulate in the awake central nervous system.

At the same time, the paper found that anesthesia without sleep results in the same clearance (paper: “Aβ clearance did not differ between sleeping and anesthetized mice”), meaning that clearance is not caused by sleep per se, but instead only co-occurrs with it. Authors did not mention this in the abstract and mistitled the paper, thus misleading the readers. As far as I can tell, literally nobody pointed this out previously.

And on top of all of this “125I-Aβ1-40 was injected intracortically”, meaning that they did not actually find any brain waste products that would be cleared out. This is an exogenous compound that was injected god knows where disrupting god knows what in the brain.

Max Levchin in Founders at Work :

The product wasn’t really finished, and about a week before the beaming at Buck’s I realized that we weren’t going to be able to do it, because the code wasn’t done. Obviously it was really simple to mock it up—to sort of go, “Beep! Money is received.” But I was so disgusted with the idea. We have this security company; how could I possibly use a mock-up for something worth $4.5 million? What if it crashes? What if it shows something? I’ll have to go and commit ritual suicide to avoid any sort of embarrassment. So instead of just getting the mock-up done and getting reasonable rest, my two coders and I coded nonstop for 5 days. I think some people slept; I know I didn’t sleep at all. It was just this insane marathon where we were like, “We have to get this thing working.” It actually wound up working perfectly. The beaming was at 10:00 a.m.; we were done at 9:00 a.m.

/u/CPlusPlusDeveloper on Gwern’s Writing in the Morning :

We know that acute sleep deprivation seems to have a manic and euphoric effect on at least some percent of the population some percent of the time. For example staying up all night is one of the most effective ways to temporarily aleve depression. Of course the problem is that chronic sleep deprivation has the opposite effect, and the temporary mania and euphoria is not sustainable.

My speculative take is that whatever this mechanism, it was the main reason you experienced a productivity boost. By waking up early you intentionally were fighting against your chronobiology, hence adding an element of acute sleep deprivation regardless of how many hours you got the night before. That mania fuels an amphetamine like focus.

The upshot, if my hypothesis is true, is that waking up early would not produce similar gains if you did it everyday. Like the depressive who stays up all night, it may feels like you’ve discovered an intervention that will pay lasting gains. But if you were to actually make it part of your recurring lifestyle, the benefits would stop, and eventually the impact would work in reverse.

Along those lines that’s probably why you naturally tend to stop conforming to that pattern after a few days. As acute sleep deprivation becomes chronic, you’re most likely intuitively recognizing that the pattern has crossed over to the point of being counter-productive.

Lots of writers and software engineers note that their creative juices start flowing by evening extending late into the night - I think this phenomenon is closely related to the one described in the comment above.

Brian Timar :

sleep anecdote- In undergrad I had zero sleep before several major tests; also before quals in grad school. Basically wouldn’t sleep before things I really considered important (this included morning meetings I didn’t want to miss!). On such occasions I would feel:

miserable, then absurd and in a good humor, weirdly elated, then Super PumpedTM, and

really sharp when the test (or whatever) actually started.

Appendix: a well-documented case-study of a person living without sleep for 4 months

Total Wake: Natural, Pathological, and Experimental Limits to Sleep Reduction , Panchin Y, Kovalzon VM. Total Wake: Natural, Pathological, and Experimental Limits to Sleep Reduction. Frontiers in neuroscience. 2021 Apr 7;15:288. quoting Le sommeil, la conscience et l’éveil : Jouvet M. Le sommeil, la conscience et l’éveil. Odile Jacob; 2016 Mar 9.

There is such pathology as Morvan’s disease, in which quasi-wakefulness, which lasted 3,000 h (more precisely, 2,880), or 4 months, was not accompanied by sleep rebound, since the sleep generation system itself was disturbed.” Throughout this period the patient was under continuous polysomnographic control, so his agrypnia was confirmed objectively. Jouvet conclude that “… slow wave (NREM) and paradoxical (REM) sleep are not necessary for life (at least for 4–5 months for the first and about 8 months for the second), and we cannot consider their suppression to be the cause of any serious disorders in the body. A person who had lack of sleep and dreams for 4 months, of which there are only a few minutes of nightly hallucinations, can turn out to read newspapers during the day, make plans, play cards and win, and at the same time lie on the bed in the dark all night without sleep! In conclusion, we admit: this observation makes most theories about the functions of sleep and paradoxical (REM) sleep obsolete at once, but offers nothing else

I once tried to cheat sleep, and for a year I succeeded (strong peak-performance-sailing vibes):

In the summer of 2009, I was finishing the first—and toughest—year of my doctorate. …

To keep up this crazy sleep schedule, I always needed a good reason to wake up the next morning after my 3.5-hour nighttime sleep. So before I went to bed, I reviewed the day gone past and planned what I would do the next day. I’ve carried on with this habit, and it serves me well even today.

But the Everyman schedule was reasonably flexible. Some days when I missed a nap, I simply slept a little more at night. There were also days when I couldn’t manage a single nap, but it didn’t seem to affect me very much the next day.

To the surprise of many, and even myself, I had managed to be on the polyphasic schedule for more than a year. But then came a conference where for a week I could not get a single nap. It was unsettling but I was sure I would be able to get back to sleeping polyphasic without too much trouble.

I was wrong. When I tried to get back into the schedule, I couldn’t find the motivation to do it; I didn’t have the same urgent goals that I had had a year ago. So I returned to sleeping like an average human.

James Gleck in Chaos on Mitch Feigenbaum:

In the spring of 1976 he entered a mode of existence more intense than any he had lived through. He would concentrate as if in a trance, programming furiously, scribbling with his pencil, programming again. He could not call C division for help, because that would mean signing off the computer to use the telephone, and reconnection was chancy. He could not stop for more than five minutes’ thought, because the computer would automatically disconnect his line. Every so often the computer would go down anyway, leaving him shaking with adrenaline. He worked for two months without pause. His functional day was twenty-two hours. He would try to go to sleep in a kind of buzz, and awaken two hours later with his thoughts exactly where he had left them. His diet was strictly coffee. (Even when healthy and at peace, Feigenbaum subsisted exclusively on the reddest possible meat, coffee, and red wine. His friends speculated that he must be getting his vitamins from cigarettes.)

In the end, a doctor called it off. He prescribed a modest regimen of Valium and an enforced vacation. But by then Feigenbaum had created a universal theory.

Ryan Kulp’s experience with decreasing the amount of sleep by several hours :

i began learning to code in 2015. since i was working full-time i needed to maximize after-hours to learn quickly. i experimented for 10 days straight… go to sleep at 4am, wake up at 8am for work. felt fine.

actually, the first 5-10 minutes of “getting up” after 3-4 hours of sleep sucks more than if i sleep ~8 hours. but after 15 mins of moving around, a shower, etc, i feel as if i slept 8 hours.

since then i’ve routinely slept 4-6 hours /day and definitely been more productive. i think if more people experimented for themselves and had the same “aha” moment i did (that you feel fine after the initial gut-wrenching “i slept too little” reaction), they’d get more done too.

This is a very good point that shows that: there’s (1) how sleepy we feel when waking up and (2) how sleepy we feel during the day. (2) is probably more important but most people are focused on (1) and the implicit assumption is that poor (1) leads to (2) – which is unwarranted.

Also: https://twitter.com/BroodVx/status/1492227577896787969,

Nabeel Qureshi writes:

you’re combining two things here: (1) your brain is overpowered by the comfy soft temp-controlled bed (2) you’re bored. they might both be right but i think you conflate them, and they’re separate arguments. this is important bc i think the strongest counterargument to what you’re saying is the classic experience of: you force yourself to wake up early (say 6), you have a project you’re genuinely excited about (hence #2 is false), but when you sit down to work, you’re tired and can’t quite focus. in this scenario, i think your theory would say that i’m not really that excited about what i’m doing, because if i were (see video game argument) then i’d be awake. i’d disagree and say that the researcher should just go take a nap, and they’ll probably be able to make more progress per hour than the extra hours they gain… trying to force yourself to do something while underslept, subjectively, feels hellish. i’m sure you’ve had this experience - did you figure out a workaround?

It is completely true that if you are excited by a project but it’s not super stimulating, it’s still very easy to wake up after less than usual number of hours of sleep and feel sleepy and terrible. This is true for me as well. I found a solution to this: instead of heading straight to the computer, I first unload the clean plates from the dishwasher and load it with dirty plates. This activity is quite special in that it is:

• Why this matters: moving around wakes up the body much better than just sitting.
• Why this matters: moving around in automatic pre-defined movements eventually results in the brain just performing these movements on autopilot without waking up.
• Why this matters: I and people I know tend to find intense physical activities right after waking up really unpleasant and somewhat nauseating.

In about 90% of the cases, 10 minutes later when I’m done with the dishwasher, I find that I’m fully awake and don’t actually want to sleep anymore. In the remaining 10% of the cases, I stay awake and work until my wife wakes up and then go take a 20-minute nap under her watch (and take as many 20-minute naps as I need during the day, although I only end up taking a few naps a week and rarely more than one per day, unless I’m sick).

Appendix: Elon Musk on working 120 hours a week and sleep

On Tesla’s first-quarter earnings conference call in May, Musk referred to inquiries from Wall Street analysts as “boring, bonehead questions” and as “so dry. They’re killing me.” On the next earnings conference call in August, Musk said he was sorry for “being impolite” on the previous call.

“Obviously I think there’s really no excuse for bad manners and I was violating my own rule in that regard. There are reasons for it, I got no sleep, 120 hour weeks, but nonetheless, there is still no excuse, so my apologies for not being polite on the prior call,” Musk said.

Later in August, in conversation with the New York Times, Musk reported using prescription sleep medication Ambien to sleep.

“Yeah. It’s not like for fun or something,” Musk told Swisher Wednesday. “If you’re super stressed, you can’t go to sleep. You either have a choice of, like, okay, I’ll have zero sleep and then my brain won’t work tomorrow, or you’re gonna take some kind of sleep medication to fall asleep.”

Musk said he was working such insane hours to get Tesla through the ramp up in production for its Model 3 vehicle. ”[A]s a startup, a car company, it is far more difficult to be successful than if you’re an established, entrenched brand. It is absurd that Tesla is alive. Absurd! Absurd.”

Philipp ( @Cautes ):

First, I wanted to share a way of thinking about some of your findings that builds on the idea of a homeostatic control system (brought to you from engineering via cybernetics). The classic example is a thermostat, which keeps temperature of a room close to a set point. Biology is quite a bit more messy than this, of course, but the body makes use of a plenty of feedback mechanisms to stay close to set points as well. You’re right in pointing out that these set points don’t need to be healthy though. For example, measured via EEG, PTSD patients have alpha power (which primarily modulates neural inhibition in frontal, parietal and occipital areas of the brain) set points far below that of healthy control groups. One way to deal with these suboptimal set points is to simply disrupt the system. Here’s a model that makes this point nicely: imagine all possible brain state dynamics as a two-dimensional plane and place a ball on it which represents the current brain state space. As the ball moves, the brain dynamics change as well (in frequency, phase, amplitude - you name it). On the plane, you have basins that give stability to the brain state, and repellers in the form of hills, as well as random noise and outside interference which drives the ball into various directions. Sometimes the ball will get stuck in basins which are highly suboptimal, but they are deep enough that exploration of other set points is not possible. If the system is disrupted, the ball might get jolted out of its basin though, and be again able to fall into a more optimal position.

With that said, there’s plenty of evidence that stability in itself (even within better basins) is suboptimal for perfect health, because contexts change. For example, people who are very physically healthy (athletes, for example), tend to have far greater variance in the time interval between individual heart beats (heart rate variability) than even the average person, and as the average person gets healthier, their heart rate variability increases as well. Basically, the body becomes more resilient by introducing a noise signal that produces chaotic fluctuations to homeostatic control mechanisms (controlled allostasis) and there are good reasons to think that this is true of psychological health as well.

Because of this, I think that you’re right in suggesting that varying the amount of time you sleep is a good thing - especially if you’re currently struggling with depression or mania. Not even necessarily because sleep per se is the culprit, but because it might dislodge a ball stuck in a suboptimal basin, so to speak. Depressed people tend to oversleep, people with mania tend to sleep too little, so steering in the opposite direction is only logical. For perfectly healthy people, sleep cycling is probably the best way to go - kind of a mirroring the logic of heart rate variability: introduce some noise to keep your body on your toes. It’s just like fasting, working out, cold exposure, saunas, etc. - it’s al about producing stressors on the body which stir up repair processes which keep you healthy (and biologically younger). I have done plenty of self-experiments with polyphasic 5-6 hour sleeping (similar to the the approach studied by Stampi, who you mentioned), with no negative consequences. The main thing that makes it impractical is that intermittent napping is sometimes hard to combine with professional responsibilities and a social life.

As a side note, because you ask the question about why depressed people sleep longer, and people with mania sleep less, the answer to this is very likely highly multi-causal. With that said, I wanted to point out that depressed people generally exhibit excessive alpha activity in eyes-open waking states, which normally becomes more pronounced in people as they drift off to sleep (because of the neural inhibition function). We also have reason to believe that it mediates between BDNF and subclinical depressed mood, so that’s a link to something else you talk about in your article. As for mania, I haven’t looked at this myself, but I remember hearing that it’s almost a mirror image, with generally decreased synchronisation of slower oscillations and heightened faster rhythms, generally associated with greater arousal and wakefulness.

One last thing: as you point out, sleep is likely not required for memory retention. Any claim that sleep is about any specific cognitive function should be suspect on the principle that the phenomenon of sleep predates the development of organisms with brains - it can’t have evolved specifically for something as high-level as memory retention. It’s more likely about something more basic like general metabolic health.

Appendix: Jerome Siegel and Robert Vertes vs the sleep establishment

Time for the Sleep Community to Take a Critical Look at the Purported Role of Sleep in Memory Processing Vertes RP, Siegel JM. Time for the sleep community to take a critical look at the purported role of sleep in memory processing. Sleep. 2005 Oct 1;28(10):1228-9. by Robert Vertes and Jerome Siegel (a reply to Walker claiming that the debate on memory processing in sleep is essentially settled):

The present ‘debate’ was sparked by an editorial by Robert Stickgold in SLEEP on an article in that issue by Schabus et a on paired associate learning and sleep spindles in humans

Regarding Stickgold’s editorial, I was particularly troubled by his opening statement, as follows: “The study of sleep-dependent memory consolidation has moved beyond the question of whether it exists to questions of its extent and of the mechanisms supporting it”. He then proceeded to cite evidence justifying this statement. Surprisingly, there was no mention of opposing views or a discussion of data inconsistent with the sleep-memory consolidation (S-MC) hypothesis. It seemed that the controversial nature of this issue should have at least been acknowledged, but apparently to do so would have undermined Stickgold’s position that the door is closed on this debate and only the fine points need be resolved. …

By all accounts, sleep does not serve a role in declarative memory. As reviewed by Smith, with few exceptions, reports have shown that depriving subjects of REM sleep does not disrupt learning/memory, or exposure to intense learning situations does not produce subsequent increases in REM sleep. Smith concluded: “REM sleep is not involved with consolidation of declarative material.” The study by Schabus et al (see above) is another example that the learning of declarative material is unaffected by sleep. They reported that subjects showed no significant difference in the percentage of word-pairs correctly recalled before and after 8 hours of sleep. Or as Stickgold stated in his editorial [the editorial Vertes and Siegel are replying to], “Performance in the morning was essentially unchanged from the night before”. It would seem important for Stickgold/Walker to acknowledge that the debate on sleep and memory has been reduced to a consideration of procedural memory – to the exclusion of declarative memory. If there are exceptions, they should note. Several lines of evidence indicate that REM sleep is not involved in memory processing/consolidation – or at least not in humans. Perhaps the strongest argument for this is the demonstration that the marked suppression or elimination of REM sleep in individuals with brainstem lesions or on antidepressant drugs has no detrimental effect on cognition. A classic case is that of an Israeli man who at the age of 19 suffered damage to the brainstem from shrapnel from a gunshot wound, and when examined at the age of 33 he showed no REM sleep. The man, now 55, is a lawyer, a painter and interestingly the editor of a puzzle column for an Israeli magazine. Recently commenting on his ‘famous’ patient, Peretz Lavie stated that “he is probably the most normal person I know and one of the most successful ones”. There are several other well documented cases of individuals with greatly reduced or absent REM sleep that exhibit no apparent cognitive deficits. It would seem that these individuals would be a valuable resource for examining the role of sleep in memory. …

In Memory Consolidation Is Similar in Waking and Sleep cited above, Siegel notes: Siegel JM. Memory Consolidation Is Similar in Waking and Sleep. Current Sleep Medicine Reports. 2021 Mar;7(1):15-8.

To critically evaluate this hypothesis [that sleep has a critical role in memory consolidation], we must take “interference” effects into account. If you learn something before or after the experimenter induced learning that is being measured in the typical sleep-memory study, it degrades recall of the tested information. For example if you tell a subject that the capital of Australia is Canberra and then allow the subject to have a normal night’s sleep, there is a high probability that the subject will remember this upon awakening. If on the other hand you tell the subject that the capital of Australia is Canberra, the capital of Brazil is Brasilia, the capital of Canada is Ottawa, the capital of Iceland is Reykjavik, the capital of Libya is Tripoli, the capital of Pakistan is Islamabad, etc., it is much less likely the subject will remember the capital of Australia. The effect of proactive and retroactive interference is dependent on the temporal juxtaposition, complexity, and similarity of the encountered material to the associations being tested. Interference is a well-established concept in the learning literature [1–6]. Under interference conditions, such as exist during sleep deprivation, subjects, by staying awake, necessarily interacting with the experimenter keeping them awake and experiencing the laboratory environment, will remember more than just the items that are presented. But they may be less able to recall the particular items the experimenter is measuring. This can lead to the mistaken conclusion that sleep is required for memory consolidation [7].

Fur Seals Suppress REM Sleep for Very Long Periods without Subsequent Rebound : Lyamin OI, Kosenko PO, Korneva SM, Vyssotski AL, Mukhametov LM, Siegel JM. Fur seals suppress REM sleep for very long periods without subsequent rebound. Current Biology. 2018 Jun 18;28(12):2000-5.

Virtually all land mammals and birds have two sleep states: slow-wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep [1, 2]. After deprivation of REM sleep by repeated awakenings, mammals increase REM sleep time [3], supporting the idea that REM sleep is homeostatically regulated. * Some evidence suggests that periods of REM sleep deprivation for a week or more cause physiological dysfunction and eventual death [4, 5]. However, separating the effects of REM sleep loss from the stress of repeated awakening is difficult [2, 6]. The northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus) is a semiaquatic mammal [7]. It can sleep on land and in seawater. The fur seal is unique in showing both the bilateral SWS seen in most mammals and the asymmetric sleep previously reported in cetaceans [8]. Here we show that when the fur seal stays in seawater, where it spends most of its life [7], it goes without or greatly reduces REM sleep for days or weeks. After this nearly complete elimination of REM, it displays minimal or no REM rebound upon returning to baseline conditions. Our data are consistent with the hypothesis that REM sleep may serve to reverse the reduced brain temperature and metabolism effects of bilateral nonREM sleep, a state that is greatly reduced when the fur seal is in the seawater, rather than REM sleep being directly homeostatically regulated. This can explain the absence of REM sleep in the dolphin and other cetaceans and its increasing proportion as the end of the sleep period approaches in humans and other mammals.

Appendix: more papers I found interesting

The end of sleep: ‘Sleep debt’ versus biological adaptation of human sleep to waking needs : Horne J. The end of sleep:‘sleep debt’versus biological adaptation of human sleep to waking needs. Biological psychology. 2011 Apr 1;87(1):1-4.

It is argued that the latter part of usual human sleep is phenotypically adaptable (without ‘sleep debt’) to habitual shortening or lengthening, according to environmental influences of light, safety, food availability and socio-economic factors, but without increasing daytime sleepiness. Pluripotent brain mechanisms linking sleep, hunger, foraging, locomotion and alertness, facilitate this time management, with REM acting as a ‘buffer’ between wakefulness and nonREM (‘true’) sleep. The adaptive sleep range is approximately 6–9 h, although, a timely short (<20 min) nap can equate to 1 h ‘extra’ nighttime sleep. Appraisal of recent epidemiological findings linking habitual sleep duration to mortality and morbidity points to nominal causal effects of sleep within this range. Statistical significance, here, may not equate to real clinical significance. Sleep durations outside 6–9 h are usually surrogates of common underlying causes, with sleep associations taking years to develop. Manipulation of sleep, alone, is unlikely to overcome these health effects, and there are effective, rapid, non-sleep, behavioural countermeasures. Sleep can be taken for pleasure, with minimal sleepiness; such ‘sleepability’ is ‘unmasked’ by sleep-conducive situations. Sleep is not the only anodyne to sleepiness, but so is wakefulness, inasmuch that some sleepiness disappears when wakefulness becomes more challenging and eventful. A more ecological approach to sleep and sleepiness is advocated.

Long-term moderate elevation of corticosterone facilitates avian food-caching behaviour and enhances spatial memory Pravosudov VV. Long-term moderate elevation of corticosterone facilitates avian food-caching behaviour and enhances spatial memory. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences. 2003 Dec 22;270(1533):2599-604.

It is widely assumed that chronic stress and corresponding chronic elevations of glucocorticoid levels have deleterious effects on animals' brain functions such as learning and memory. Some animals, however, appear to maintain moderately elevated levels of glucocorticoids over long periods of time under natural energetically demanding conditions, and it is not clear whether such chronic but moderate elevations may be adaptive. I implanted wild–caught food–caching mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli), which rely at least in part on spatial memory to find their caches, with 90–day continuous time–release corticosterone pellets designed to approximately double the baseline corticosterone levels. Corticosterone–implanted birds cached and consumed significantly more food and showed more efficient cache recovery and superior spatial memory performance compared with placebo–implanted birds. Thus, contrary to prevailing assumptions, long–term moderate elevations of corticosterone appear to enhance spatial memory in food–caching mountain chickadees. These results suggest that moderate chronic elevation of corticosterone may serve as an adaptation to unpredictable environments by facilitating feeding and food–caching behaviour and by improving cache–retrieval efficiency in food–caching birds.

Racemic Ketamine as an Alternative to Electroconvulsive Therapy for Unipolar Depression: A Randomized, Open-Label, Non-Inferiority Trial (KetECT) (via Tomas Roos ): Ekstrand J, Fattah C, Persson M, Cheng T, Nordanskog P, Åkeson J, Tingström A, Lindström M, Nordenskjöld A, Movahed RP. Racemic Ketamine as an Alternative to Electroconvulsive Therapy for Unipolar Depression:: A Randomized, Open-Label, Non-Inferiority Trial (KetECT). International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology. 2021.

Background Ketamine has emerged as a fast-acting and powerful antidepressant, but no head to head trial has been performed, Here, ketamine is compared with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), the most effective therapy for depression.

Methods Hospitalized patients with unipolar depression were randomized (1:1) to thrice-weekly racemic ketamine (0.5 mg/kg) infusions or ECT in a parallel, open-label, non-inferiority study. The primary outcome was remission (Montgomery Åsberg Depression Rating Scale score ≤10). Secondary outcomes included adverse events (AEs), time to remission, and relapse. Treatment sessions (maximum of 12) were administered until remission or maximal effect was achieved. Remitters were followed for 12 months after the final treatment session.

Results In total 186 inpatients were included and received treatment. Among patients receiving ECT, 63% remitted compared with 46% receiving ketamine infusions (P = .026; difference 95% CI 2%, 30%). Both ketamine and ECT required a median of 6 treatment sessions to induce remission. Distinct AEs were associated with each treatment. Serious and long-lasting AEs, including cases of persisting amnesia, were more common with ECT, while treatment-emergent AEs led to more dropouts in the ketamine group. Among remitters, 70% and 63%, with 57 and 61 median days in remission, relapsed within 12 months in the ketamine and ECT groups, respectively (P = .52).

Conclusion Remission and cumulative symptom reduction following multiple racemic ketamine infusions in severely ill patients (age 18–85 years) in an authentic clinical setting suggest that ketamine, despite being inferior to ECT, can be a safe and valuable tool in treating unipolar depression.

Beersma DG, Van den Hoofdakker RH. Can non-REM sleep be depressogenic?. Journal of affective disorders. 1992 Feb 1;24(2):101-8.

Bessone P, Rao G, Schilbach F, Schofield H, Toma M. The economic consequences of increasing sleep among the urban poor. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 2021 Aug;136(3):1887-941.

Consensus Conference Panel:, Watson, N.F., Badr, M.S., Belenky, G., Bliwise, D.L., Buxton, O.M., Buysse, D., Dinges, D.F., Gangwisch, J., Grandner, M.A. and Kushida, C., 2015. Joint consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society on the recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: methodology and discussion. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 11(8), pp.931-952.

Eckert A, Karen S, Beck J, Brand S, Hemmeter U, Hatzinger M, Holsboer-Trachsler E. The link between sleep, stress and BDNF. European Psychiatry. 2017 Apr;41(S1):S282-.

Ekstrand J, Fattah C, Persson M, Cheng T, Nordanskog P, Åkeson J, Tingström A, Lindström M, Nordenskjöld A, Movahed RP. Racemic Ketamine as an Alternative to Electroconvulsive Therapy for Unipolar Depression:: A Randomized, Open-Label, Non-Inferiority Trial (KetECT). International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology. 2021.

Giese M, Unternährer E, Hüttig H, Beck J, Brand S, Calabrese P, Holsboer-Trachsler E, Eckert A. BDNF: an indicator of insomnia?. Molecular psychiatry. 2014 Feb;19(2):151-2.

Goldschmied JR, Rao H, Dinges D, Goel N, Detre JA, Basner M, Sheline YI, Thase ME, Gehrman PR. 0886 Recovery Sleep Significantly Decreases BDNF In Major Depression Following Therapeutic Sleep Deprivation. Sleep. 2019 Apr;42(Supplement_1):A356-.

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127 Sleep Essay Topics and Essay Examples

🏆 best sleep topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good sleep topics to write about, 💡 interesting sleep topics, ❓ research questions about sleep.

• Problem of Sleep Deprivation This is due to disruption of the sleep cycle. Based on the negative effects of sleep deprivation, there is need to manage this disorder among Americans.
• Sleep Habits and Its Impact on Human Mind Activity The researchers paid attention to the quality of sleep and mentioned such characteristics as the time of going to bed and waking up, the duration, and quality of sleep. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Effects of Sleeping Disorders on Human On the other hand, Dyssomnia relates to sleep disorders that develop as a result of lack of adequate sleep. In some cases, antidepressants have been used to cure sleep disorders that are as a result […]
• How Sleep Deprivation Affects College Students’ Academic Performance The study seeks to confirm the position of the hypothesis that sleep deprivation leads to poor academic performance in college students.
• Cross-Cultural Sleeping Arrangements in Children The aim of this paper is to study the different sleep patterns such as solitary or co sleeping in the United States of America and different cultures around the world.
• Sleep Deprivation Impacts on College Students Additional research in this field should involve the use of diverse categories of students to determine the effects that sleep deprivation would have on them.
• Sleepwalking Through Life In this case, there is a large context of life that people can be part of which should be understood. All in all, there is a lot that can be done to ensure that people […]
• Sleep Stages and Disorders A more elaborate look into understanding sleep take a look at the two aspects of sleep which is the behavior observed during sleeping periods as well as the scientific explanation of the physiological processes involved […]
• The Effect of Sleep Quality and IQ on Memory Therefore, the major aim of sleep is to balance the energies in the body. However, the nature of the activity that an individual is exposed to determines the rate of memory capture.
• Psychology of Sleep: Article Study The field of sleep and sleep disorders has been an integral part of psychological investigations: a number of scientists find it necessary to contribute sleep education and offer the ideas which help people improve their […]
• Sleep and Its Implication on Animals This paper is set to synthesize the evolution sleep in animals, its benefits and the recent knowledge that is linked to this natural phenomenon of near unconsciousness.”A Third of Life” addressed what is sleep and […]
• Insomnia: A Sleeping Disorder Type Causes of insomnia can be classified into two; factors contributing to acute insomnia and chronic insomnia. Chronic insomnia can be as a result of emotional stress.
• The Importance of Sleeping and Dreaming Finally, I would not take this pill since I love seeing dreams and realize that this “miracle medicine” will cause too many negative consequences.
• Effects of Sleep Deprivation While scientists are at a loss explaining the varying sleeping habits of different animals, they do concede that sleep is crucial and a sleeping disorder may be detrimental to the health and productivity of a […]
• Sleep and Sensory Reactivity in the School-Aged Children The interaction of these elements should be considered in therapies expressly designed to improve sleep disruptions or sensory processing difficulties in children as a possible negative determinant that may adversely affect children’s health and normal […]
• Stages of Sleep, Brain Waves, and the Neural Mechanisms of Sleep As sleep is extremely important for a person’s well-being, I believe it is essential to pay attention to the mechanisms of sleep and how they work.
• The Issue of Chronic Sleep Deprivation The quality of sleep significantly impacts the health and performance of the human body. These findings point to significant promise for the use of exercise in the treatment of sleep disorders, but a broader body […]
• Sleep-Wake, Eating, and Personality Disorders Treatment On the other hand, treatment with prazosin and mianserin was effective; for example, the drug mianserin benefits patients suffering from sleep disorders. Psychotherapy approaches like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia and Imaginary Rehearsal Therapy are […]
• How the Modern Life Has Affected Sleep Czeisler mentioned in the DW documentary about sleep: “The electric light to which we are exposed in terms of resetting our internal clock is like light on steroids”. That is why we should affect the […]
• Sleep and Meditation Can Predict an Individual’s Satisfaction With Life This aim of this study is to investigate the effects of quality sleep and mindfulness on life satisfaction. In a nutshell, life satisfaction depends on the quality of sleep and meditation.
• Water Consumption and Sleep Hygiene Practices First, I will discuss that safe and sufficient water facilitates the practice of hygiene and well-being and is a critical determining factor for health.
• Depression Associated With Sleep Disorders Y, Chang, C. Consequently, it directly affects the manifestation of obstructive sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, and periodic limb movement disorder in people with depression.
• How Technology Affects Sleep in Adolescents The critique will focus on the various sections of the article, where the strengths and weaknesses of each are outlined and discussed. The title of the article excellently reflects the essence of the research.
• Sleep Disturbance in Children Any disorder that alters the craniofacial or pharyngeal anatomy predisposes the child to obstructive narcolepsy is considered a medical problem associated with sleep disturbances in children. Central Sleep Apnea is the repeated cessation or decrease […]
• ADHD and Problems With Sleep This is because of the activity of a person in the middle of the day and the condition around them. The downside of the study is that the study group included 52 adults with ADHD […]
• Solving the Sleep Problem through TQM Principles The initiative to address the lack of sleep among employees and consequently improve their performance and the quality of services requires teamwork optimization.
• Effects of Lullaby Music on Quality of Sleep in Adults With Insomnia Insomnia consists of deprivation of the duration and quality of sleep, which affects the psychological and physical condition of people. In addition, the main limitation may be the unreliability of the information provided by the […]
• Eat, Sleep, and Console: Narcotic Abstinence Syndrome in Infants The choice of the quantitative design is justified by the necessity to prove the superiority of the proposed solution to the one that is currently deployed as the alternative way of managing the needs of […]
• Hippocampus-Dependent Memories During Sleep The smell was chosen because it was not necessary to interrupt the integrity of the subjects’ sleep to introduce it into the experiment.
• The Influence of Sleep Deprivation on Human Body It contradicts living in harmony with God, as when the person is irritated and moody, it is more difficult to be virtuous and to be a source of joy for others.
• Programs in Family Sleep Institute She explained to me the sleep cycle of the child and the adult, how many hours my child is supposed to sleep, the bedtime routine, and the method that we had to adopt during the […]
• Sleeping Habits & Physical Health: Students’ Perception Using the survey as the data collection tool, the investigators state that most students do not have appropriate sleep habits, although they agree that their academic success and physical health suffer because of the lack […]
• Sleep Deprivation and Insomnia: Study Sources The topic of this audio record is a variety of problems with sleep and their impact on an organism. They proved the aforementioned conclusion and also paid attention to the impact of sleep deprivation on […]
• Sleep Problems Among Student-Athletes Despite the importance of the topic under study and the conclusions reached, the work raised additional questions and had some limitations.
• Excessive Sleepiness May Be Cause of Learning, Attention, and School Problems The information in the article “Excessive Sleepiness May Be Cause of Learning, Attention, and School Problems” by Calhoun and Fernandez-Mendoza is used to show that heavy daytime sleeping may be a cause of attention, learning, […]
• Sleep Hygiene Intervention Plan for Young Adults The main goals of this plan are to develop a list of guidelines for nurses on how they can offer a kind of educational program to their patients based on which young adults can understand […]
• Neurocognitive Consequences of Sleep Deprivation The CNS consists of the brain and the spinal cord while the PNS consists of all the endings of the nerve extensions in all organs forming the web that extends throughout the entire organ.
• Sleep Apnea, the Heart and the Brain in the Elderly They should get the necessary treatment of heart diseases and neuromuscular disorders Be attentive to yourself and live a full life!
• Sleepiness Level and Degree: Research Instruments A sum ranging from 0 to 24 of the score on the eight items makes the total score of the ESS.
• Evolutionary Biology: Sleep Patterns in Mammals This synthesis addresses the question of the origin of sleep in mammals and traces this phenomenon by studying the evolution of the mammalian brain and suggesting possible external factors that affect sleep patterns.
• “Childbirth Fear and Sleep Deprivation in Pregnant Women” by Hall To further show that the information used is current, the authors have used the APA style of referencing which demand the naming of the author as well as the year of publication of the article/book […]
• African Sleeping Sickness Using the various forms of detection and diagnosis it was discovered that African sleeping sickness is a major problem in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• The Use of Sleephormone in Children With Neuro-Developmental Disorders For the better management of the data that are planned to be retrieved from the clinical trial procedures, the following list of the definitions and acronyms used in the trial process is given.
• Sleep Deprivation and Learning at University It is a widely known fact that numerous people face the problem of lack of sleep. Second, sleeping is essential for increasing the productivity of students in the context of learning.
• Communication Between Sleep, Behavior and Obesity The purpose of the study seeks to evaluate the association between nighttime media use with sleep behaviors and variation in weight status for first-semester college students.
• Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Heart Diseases In children with Down syndrome, incidence rates of hypertension and sleepiness are high, and the problem is compounded in the presence of OSA.
• Sleep is a Vital Stage of a Day Cycle in Humans During the first stage of sleep, the EEG shifts to theta waves, with a frequency of 4 7 Hz. There are numerous sleep disorders, which can affect the well-being of a person.
• “The Effect of Nursing Quality Improvement and Mobile Health Interventions on Infant Sleep Practices” by Moon The following analysis is related to the article, “The effect of nursing quality improvement and mobile health interventions on infant sleep practices” by Moon et al.
• Sleep Deprivation: Biopsychology and Health Psychology Another theory that has been proposed in relation to sleep is the Circadian theory which suggests that sleep evolved as a mechanism to fit organisms into the light dark cycle of the world.
• Study of the Sleeping Process The paper entails a comprehensive analysis of the sleeping process in addition to evaluating the factors that affect the sleeping process.
• Sleep Disorders: Sleep Deprivation of the Public Safety Officers The effects of sleep disorders and fatigue on public safety officers is a social issue that needs to be addressed with more vigor and urgency so that the key issues and factors that are salient […]
• Sleep, Satisfaction With Life and Cognitive Function Sleep is the state of the mind involving temporary loss of consciousness leading to the resting of the mind. Sleep is one of the most important requirements in individuals so as to ensure the well-being […]
• Sleep Versus Social Demands in Students The effects of has been exhibited more greatly in animals through studies and all animals have been shown to sleep in different forms.
• Sleep Deprivation: Personal Experiment As I had been perplexed, I did not take a step of reporting the matter to the police neither did I inform my neighbors.
• Sleep Patterns and Memory Performance of Children The article presents the essence, the methods and the results of the experiment which had to show the influence of TV and computer games on German children’s sleep.
• Recuperative Versus Circadian Theory of Sleep The Recuperative theory of sleep is based on the premise that humans require sleep to rejuvenate and recoup spent energy during the waking period.
• Biology. Adolescent Sleep Pattern The habit of sleep is very individual specific therefore a study of the pattern of sleep of a group needs to be evaluated to get an understating of the pattern of sleep.
• Non- and Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Non REM sleep represents 75% of sleep duration and occurs in four stages and REM sleep represents stage 5 of sleep.
• Main Information about Sleeping Disorders In the introduction part the paper provides an overview of sleep and sleep disorders. This led to the conclusion that instead of being a quite and peaceful period of rest and resuscitation as everyone would […]
• Memory Consolidation and Reconsolidation After Sleep The memory consolidation of the visual skill tasks is related to the REM sleep and the short wave component of the NREM.
• Sleep Disorders: Narcolepsy, Obstructive Sleep Apnea, Insomnia An important aspect of the pathogenesis is the autoimmune lesion of the orexin neurons of the hypothalamus, which leads to a decrease in the level of hypocretin-1.
• Sleeping Sickness Transmission and Control Measures Most of the cases of sleeping sickness are usually recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, northern parts of Uganda, Sudan, Angola, Zambia, Uganda, Tanzania, and Malawi.
• Blue Light Effect on Human Sleep The introduction is comprised of a thesis statement and a description of the critical thoughts of the paper. At the end of the paper, recommendations on how to reduce the adversarial effect of the blue […]
• Electronic Devices Use and Sleep in US Adolescents During the process of data collection, the authors discovered that most of the participants tended to go to bed very late, which affected the quality of their sleep and their ability to normally function over […]
• The Role of Sleep in Humans’ Well-Being Each of the speakers in the videos focuses on a different characteristic of sleep, but all of them agree that without enough sleep, one does not perform to the fullest potential.
• Sleep Helps to Repair Damaged DNA in Neurons The researchers found that the chromosomes in the fish’s neurons would often change shape while their owners slept, enabling the repair of the damage accumulated in periods of activity.
• Co-Sleeping Impact on Child Development At the same time, it is crucial to pay attention to the phases of sleep and the cycles of awakening. It will help to facilitate the process of sleep in the future and eliminate any […]
• Adolescent Sleep and the Impact of Technology Use Particularly, the authors of the study explain why there is the need to know the answer to the question by providing a profound background to the case and stating that innovative technology has a profound […]
• Sleeping Patterns Within Infants Infant A is put to sleep in the bassinet, and the parents use the sleeping bag in order to make the infant’s sleep more comfortable.
• Sleep Deprivation: Research Methods The purpose of the research will be to determine sleep deprivation, what causes it, the effect, and why sleep is important.
• Coffee Effects on Sleeping Patterns: Experiment Consumption of coffee before going to bed will cause individuals to have difficulty falling asleep The amount of coffee the subjects drink before going to bed The time after going to bed that subjects fall […]
• Sleep Disruptions in Healthcare Professionals First of all, the sleep disruption may lead to a lack of coordination in the team because some members would be fatigued during the working hours, which would interfere with their functioning and concentration in […]
• Sleep May Be Nature’s Time Management Tool by Carey The author states that no one knows why sleep exists therefore setting the context for the article in which she advances the numerous theories that are advanced as to the role that sleep plays.
• Physical Activity and Sleep Health in Adults In the introduction to the analysed study, a substantial scientific background for the problem of improving physical activity and sleep in adults is presented.
• Sleep-Disordered Breathing and Acute Ischemic Stroke In this case study, the investigator focused on ischemic stroke, one of the most common types of stroke in the world.
• Insomnia and Narcolepsy: Sleeping Disorders Besides, it was established that people with insomnia are inclined to overestimate the negative effect of sleeping disorder and underestimate the total time of sleep.
• Sleep Patterns’ Impact on Academic Performance Because some university classes begin as early as 7 o’clock in the morning and finish in the evening, the only option for such students is to reduce the length of night-time sleep in order to […]
• Prevalence of Sleep Disorders among Medical Students Nightmares and dreams arise in the course of REM sleep as it is linked to desynchronized and quick brain waves, deferral of homeostasis, and failure of muscular tonus.
• Emotions Clusters and Sleep Failure Earlier critics had argued that PANAS was not suitable for children, and this led to the development of specific PANAS-C for children.
• Sleep Deprivation and Specific Emotions The purpose of this study is to develop an understanding of the relationship between sleep deprivation and emotional behaviors. The study looks to create a link between the findings of past researches on the emotional […]
• Sleep Disturbance, Depression, Anxiety Correlation The above imply that many questions are still unanswered with respect to the kinds of sleep complaints affecting undergraduates and the impact on their psychological health.
• Relationship Between Depression and Sleep Disturbance It was emphasized that persistent disturbance, its severity, and the intermittent nature of the sleep were not associated with depression and its recurrence in the following years. The sleeping disturbance is a risk factor that […]
• Sleep and Psychopathology Relationships – Psychology Generally, available evidence shows that feelings of negative emotions such as anxiety are characterized by the dysfunction in cognitive and interpersonal spheres.
• Sleep Disorder Consequences on the Immune System Consequently, the research question for this paper is: what are the consequences of sleep disorder on the immune system? The primary goal of the study is to determine the effects of sleep disorder on the […]
• Importance of Sleep – Psychology Precisely, most of the organs of the body are at rest during sleep. It is during sleep that the body encodes the information it obtains during the day into the memory.
• Dream and Sleep Cycle Dreams occur in any of the phases of sleep, nonetheless, the most concise, clear, vivid and memorable dreams are observed in the last phase of sleep (known as the rapid eye movement REM sleep.
• Changes of Sleep in the Course of One Night Furthermore, voltage generated by eye rotation in their sockets and electrical activities of the muscles all help in the study of the cycles of sleep in the course of one night.
• Relationship Between Sleep and Depression in Adolescence Using SPSS for data analysis, the results indicate the presence of a correlation between elements of depression and sleep duration and quality.
• Ethical Issues in Treating Obstructive Sleep Apnea with Exercise Independently The approaches should ensure that necessary preventive and curative measures are put in place to facilitate the process of eradicating the disease that is causing immense sleep related complications.
• The Eight Hour Dilemma: Sleeping Time Reduction. When a Single Hour Makes a Difference While reducing the amount of sleeping hours to seven and less can possibly lead to sleep deprivation and the further changes for the worse in a human body, eight hours are no longer the borderline […]
• Infant Sleep Disturbance (ISD) The uniqueness of this study stems from the fact that it would provide a clear understanding of the most effective intervention/basis for physicians and parents to pursue in the management of sleep disorders among infants […]
• Underlying Issues Associated with Sleep Disorders and Stress Of fundamental importance to this research paper is the realization that the amount of sleep that an individual gets is one of the internal factors that influence his or her own capacity to handle stress.
• The Consequences of Poor Sleep Conducting a research devoted to human sleep habits in children and feeling the affect on their confidence as adults, the existing data should be evaluated and the conclusions are to be drawn in the sphere […]
• The Role of Melatonin in Determining the Sleep-Wake Cycle Melatonin plays a significant role in the circadian control of sleep as well as in restraining the development of malignant cells.
• The Phantom Menace of Sleep-Deprived Doctors This is one of the problems that should be addressed by hospital administrators. Therefore, it is vital to develop strategies that can improve the work of medical institutions.
• The Biological Basis of Sleep The authors suggest that it needs more accurate measurement of sleep and wake pattern by the use of the electrooculogram, the recording of the movement of the eye, EEG and electromyogram, the recording of the […]
• Sleep and Dreams: How Do They Work? During sleep, the brain is at rest while the rest of the body system is in active state. Thus, to prevent most of the body disorders in human both psychiatrists and health experts recommend sleep.
• Sleep Disorders with Children and Adolescences This study is important in terms of understanding of the effectives of empirical and theoretical research in the field and attracting the scientist’s attention to the problem so that appropriate and effective treatment to be […]
• Sleep Process Research There are said to have five sleep stages, which are divided in to two: the rapid eye movement and the non rapid eye movement during which the dreams occur.
• A Day in the Sleep Clinic: Culture and Health The third aspect of the PEN-3 Model looks at the cultural issues and health beliefs. For instance, the Sudanese family belief in superstition may not affect the health outcome in the hands of the doctor.
• Using Depressants During Sleep Time The paper also holds up the notion that, today it is important to control the sleeping patterns, to conform to the lifestyle demands. The drugs are mainly used generally to reduce the sleep delays, thus […]
• Sleep Improves Memory It is possible to replace a traumatic memory with a pleasant one then take a brief moment of sleep to reinforce the pleasant memory.
• How Much Sleep Do You Need by Age?
• What Is an Sleep?
• What Is the Purpose of Sleep?
• What Is Good Sleep?
• Why Is Sleep Important for Health?
• What Happens if We Don’t Sleep?
• Why Is It Called Sleep?
• What Causes Lack of Sleep?
• What Age Gets the Most Sleep?
• What Is the Most Healthy Time to Wake Up?
• Why Do Older People Need Less Sleep?
• How Much Sleep Is Healthy?
• What Are Interesting Facts About Sleep?
• What Happens During Sleep?
• Why Should We Drink Water Before Sleeping?
• How to Fall Asleep Fast Within 5 Minutes?
• Which Foods Make Sleepy?
• What to Drink to Sleep Faster?
• What Are the Sleep Tricks?
• What Part of the Brain Causes Sleep?
• How Can I Get Better Sleep?
• Which Oil Helps You Sleep?
• Does Warm Milk Help You Sleep?
• How Can I Relax When I Can’t Sleep?
• At What Time Is the Body Ready for Sleep?
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Dreams and Dreaming

Dreams and dreaming have been discussed in diverse areas of philosophy ranging from epistemology to ethics, ontology, and more recently philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This entry provides an overview of major themes in the philosophy of sleep and dreaming, with a focus on Western analytic philosophy, and discusses relevant scientific findings.

1.1 Cartesian dream skepticism

1.2 earlier discussions of dream skepticism and why descartes’ version is special, 1.3 dreaming and other skeptical scenarios, 1.4 descartes’ solution to the dream problem and real-world dreams, 2.1 are dreams experiences, 2.2 dreams as instantaneous memory insertions, 2.3 empirical evidence on the question of dream experience, 2.4 dreams and hallucinations, 2.5 dreams and illusions, 2.6 dreams as imaginative experiences, 2.7 dreaming and waking mind wandering, 2.8 the problem of dream belief, 3.1 dreaming as a model system and test case for consciousness research, 3.2 dreams, psychosis, and delusions, 3.3 beyond dreams: dreamless sleep experience and the concepts of sleep, waking, and consciousness, 4. dreaming and the self, 5. immorality and moral responsibility in dreams, 6.1 the meaning of dreams, 6.2 the functions of dreaming, 7. conclusions, other internet resources, related entries, 1. dreams and epistemology.

Dream skepticism has traditionally been the most famous and widely discussed philosophical problem raised by dreaming (see Williams 1978; Stroud 1984). In the Meditations , Descartes uses dreams to motivate skepticism about sensory-based beliefs about the external world and his own bodily existence. He notes that sensory experience can also lead us astray in commonplace sensory illusions such as seeing things as too big or small. But he does not think such cases justify general doubts about the reliability of sensory perception: by taking a closer look at an object seen under suboptimal conditions, we can easily avoid deception. By contrast, dreams suggest that even in a seemingly best-case scenario of sensory perception (Stroud 1984), deception is possible. Even the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire and looking at a piece of paper in one’s hands (Descartes 1641: I.5) is something that can, and according to Descartes often does, occur in a dream.

There are different ways of construing the dream argument. A strong reading is that Descartes is trapped in a lifelong dream and none of his experiences have ever been caused by external objects (the Always Dreaming Doubt ; see Newman 2019). A weaker reading is that he is just sometimes dreaming but cannot rule out at any given moment that he is dreaming right now (the Now Dreaming Doubt ; see Newman 2019). This is still epistemologically worrisome: even though some of his sensory-based beliefs might be true, he cannot determine which these are unless he can rule out that he is dreaming. Doubt is thus cast on all of his beliefs, making sensory-based knowledge slip out of reach.

Cartesian-style skeptical arguments have the following form (quoted from Klein 2015):

• If I know that p , then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that p .
• U is a genuine ground for doubting that p .
• Therefore, I do not know that p .

If we apply this to the case of dreaming, we get:

• If I know that I am sitting dressed by the fire, then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that I am really sitting dressed by the fire.
• If I were now dreaming, this would be a genuine ground for doubting that I am sitting dressed by the fire: in dreams, I have often had the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire when I was actually lying undressed in bed!
• Therefore, I do not know that I am now sitting dressed by the fire.

Importantly, both strong and weak versions of the dream argument cast doubt only on sensory-based beliefs, but leave other beliefs unscathed. According to Descartes, that 2+3=5 or that a square has no more than 4 sides is knowable even if he is now dreaming:

although, in truth, I should be dreaming, the rule still holds that all which is clearly presented to my intellect is indisputably true. (Descartes 1641: V.15)

By Descartes’ lights, dreams do not undermine our ability to engage in the project of pure, rational enquiry (Frankfurt 1970; but see Broughton 2002).

Dream arguments have been a staple of philosophical skepticism since antiquity and were so well known that in his objections to the Meditations , Hobbes (1641) criticized Descartes for not having come up with a more original argument. Yet, Descartes’ version of the problem, more than any other, has left its mark on the philosophical discussion.

Earlier versions tended to touch upon dreams just briefly and discuss them alongside other examples of sensory deception. For example, in the Theaetetus (157e), Plato has Socrates discuss a defect in perception that is common to

dreams and diseases, including insanity, and everything else that is said to cause illusions of sight and hearing and the other senses.

This leads to the conclusion that knowledge cannot be defined through perception.

Dreams also appear in the canon of standard skeptical arguments used by the Pyrrhonists. Again, dreams and sleep are just one of several conditions (including illness, joy, and sorrow) that cast doubt on the trusthworthiness of sensory perception (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers; Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism) .

Augustine ( Against the Academics ; Confessions) thought the dream problem could be contained, arguing that in retrospect, we can distinguish both dreams and illusions from actual perception (Matthew 2005: chapter 8). And Montaigne ( The Apology for Raymond Sebond ) noted that wakefulness itself teems with reveries and illusions, which he thought were even more epistemologically worrisome than nocturnal dreams.

Descartes devoted much more space to the discussion of dreaming and cast it as a unique epistemological threat distinct from both waking illusions and evil genius or brain-in-a-vat-style arguments. His claim that he has often been deceived by his dreams implies he also saw dreaming as a real-world (rather than merely hypothetical) threat.

This is further highlighted by the intimate, first-person style of the Meditations . Their narrator is supposed to exemplify everyone’s epistemic situation, illustrating the typical defects of the human mind. Readers are further drawn in by Descartes’ strategy of moving from commonsense examples towards more sophisticated philosophical claims (Frankfurt 1970). For example, Descartes builds up towards dream skepticism by first considering familiar cases of sensory illusions and then deceptively realistic dreams.

Finally, much attention has been devoted to several dreams Descartes reportedly had as a young man. Some believe these dreams embodied theoretical doubts he developed in the Discourse and Meditations (Baillet 1691; Leibniz 1880: IV; Cole 1992; Keefer 1996). Hacking (2001:252) suggests that for Descartes, dream skepticism was not just a philosophical conundrum but a source of genuine doubt. There is also some discussion about the dream reports’ authenticity (Freud 1940; Cole 1992; Clarke 2006; Browne 1977).

In the Meditations , after discussing the dream argument, Descartes raises the possibility of an omnipotent evil genius determined to deceive us even in our most basic beliefs. Contrary to dream deception, Descartes emphasizes that the evil genius hypothesis is a mere fiction. Still, it radicalizes the dream doubt in two respects. One, where the dream argument left the knowability of certain general truths intact, these are cast in doubt by the evil genius hypothesis . Two, where the dream argument, at least on the weaker reading, involves just temporary deception, the evil genius has us permanently deceived.

One modernized version, the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, says that if evil scientists placed your brain in a vat and stimulated it just right, your conscious experience would be exactly the same as if you were still an ordinary, embodied human being (Putnam 1981). In the Matrix -trilogy (Chalmers 2005), Matrixers live unbeknownst to themselves in a computer simulation. Unlike the brain-in-a-vat , they have bodies that are kept alive in pods, and flaws in the simulation allow some of them to bend its rules to their advantage.

Unlike dream deception, which is often cast as a regularly recurring actuality (cf. Windt 2011), brain-in-a-vat-style arguments are often thought to be merely logically or nomologically possible. However, there might be good reasons for thinking that we actually live in a computer simulation (Bostrom 2003), and if we lend some credence to radical skeptical scenarios, this may have consequences for how we act (Schwitzgebel 2017).

Even purely hypothetical skeptical scenarios may enhance their psychological force by capitalizing on the analogy with dreams. Clark (2005) argues that the Matrix contains elements of “industrial-strength deception” in which both sensory experience and intellectual functioning are exactly the same as in standard wake-states, whereas other aspects are more similar to the compromised reasoning and bizarre shifts that are the hallmark of dreams.

At the end of the Sixth Meditation , Descartes suggests a solution to the dream problem that is tied to a reassessment of what it is like to dream. Contrary to his remarks in the First Meditation , he notes that dreams are only rarely connected to waking memories and are often discontinuous, as when dream characters suddenly appear or disappear. He then introduces the coherence test:

But when I perceive objects with regard to which I can distinctly determine both the place whence they come, and that in which they are, and the time at which they appear to me, and when, without interruption, I can connect the perception I have of them with the whole of the other parts of my life, I am perfectly sure that what I thus perceive occurs while I am awake and not during sleep. (Meditation VI. 24)

For all practical purposes, he has now found a mark by which dreaming and waking can be distinguished (cf. Meditation I.7), and even if the coherence test is not fail-safe, the threat of dream deception has been averted.

Descartes’ remarks about the discontinuous and ad hoc nature of many dreams are backed up by empirical work on dream bizarreness (see Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). Still, many of his critics were not convinced this helped his case against the skeptic. Even if Descartes’ revised phenomenological description characterizes most dreams, one might occasionally merely dream of successfully performing the test (Hobbes 1641), and in some dreams, one might seem to have a clear and distinct idea but this impression is false (Bourdin 1641). Both the coherence test and the criterion of clarity and distinctness would then be unreliable.

How considerations of empirical plausibility impact the dream argument continues to be a matter of debate. Grundmann (2002) appeals to scientific dream research to introduce an introspective criterion: when we introspectively notice that we are able to engage in critical reflection, we have good reason to think that we are awake and not dreaming. However, this assumes critical reasoning to be uniformly absent in dreams. If attempts at critical reasoning do occur in dreams and if they generally tend to be corrupted, the introspective criterion might again be problematic (Windt 2011, 2015a). There are also cases in which even after awakening, people mistake what was in fact a dream for reality (Wamsley et al. 2014). At least in certain situations and for some people, dream deception might be a genuine cause of concern (Windt 2015a).

2. The ontology of dreams

In what follows, the term “conscious experience” is used as an umbrella term for the occurrence of sensations, thoughts, impressions, emotions etc. in dreams (cf. Dennett 1976). These are all phenomenal states: there is something it is like to be in these states for the subject of experience (cf. Nagel 1974). To ask about dream experience is to ask whether it is like something to dream while dreaming, and whether what it is like is similar to (or relevantly different from) corresponding waking experiences.

Cartesian dream skepticism depends on a seemingly innocent background assumption: that dreams are conscious experiences. If this is false, then dreams are not deceptive experiences during sleep and we cannot be deceived, while dreaming, about anything at all. Whether dreams are experiences is a major question for the ontology of dreams and closely bound up with dream skepticism.

The most famous argument denying that dreams are experiences was formulated by Norman Malcolm (1956, 1959). Today, his position is commonly rejected as implausible. Still, it set the tone for the analysis of dreaming as a target phenomenon for philosophy of mind.

For Malcolm, the denial of dream experience followed from the conceptual analysis of sleep: “if a person is in any state of consciousness it logically follows that he is not sound asleep” (Malcolm 1956: 21). Following some remarks of Wittgenstein’s (1953: 184; see Chihara 1965 for discussion), Malcolm claimed

the concept of dreaming is derived, not from dreaming, but from descriptions of dreams, i.e., from the familiar phenomenon that we call “telling a dream”. (Malcolm 1959:55)

Malcolm argued that retrospective dream reports are the sole criterion for determining whether a dream occurred and there is no independent way of verifying dream reports. While first-person, past-tense psychological statements (such as “I felt afraid”) can at least in principle be verified by independent observations (but see Canfield 1961; Siegler 1967; Schröder 1997), he argued dream reports (such as “in my dream, I felt afraid”) are governed by different grammars and merely superficially resemble waking reports. In particular, he denied dream reports imply the occurrence of experiences (such as thoughts, feelings, or judgements) in sleep:

If a man had certain thoughts and feelings in a dream it no more follows that he had those thoughts and feelings while asleep, than it follows from his having climbed a mountain in a dream that he climbed a mountain while asleep. (Malcolm 1959/1962: 51–52)

What exactly Malcolm means by “conscious experience” is unclear. Sometimes he seems to be saying that conscious experience is conceptually tied to wakefulness (Malcolm 1956); other times he claims that terms such as mental activity or conscious experience are vague and it is senseless to apply them to sleep and dreams (Malcolm 1959: 52).

Malcolm’s analysis of dreaming has been criticized as assuming an overly strict form of verificationism and a naïve view of language and conceptual change. A particularly counterintuitive consequence of his view is that there can be no observational evidence for the occurrence of dreams in sleep aside from dream reports. This includes behavioral evidence such as sleepwalking or sleeptalking, which he thought showed the person was partially awake; as he also thought dreams occur in sound sleep, such sleep behaviors were largely irrelevant to the investigation of dreaming proper. He also claimed adopting a physiological criterion of dreaming (such as EEG measures of brain activity during sleep) would change the concept of dreaming, which he argued was tied exclusively to dream reporting. This claim was particularly radical as it explicitly targeted the discovery of REM sleep and its association with dreaming (Dement & Kleitman 1957), which is commonly regarded as the beginning of the science of sleep and dreaming. Malcolm’s position was that the very project of a science of dreaming was misguided.

Contra Malcolm, most assume that justification does not depend on strict criteria with the help of which the truth of a statement can be determined with absolute certainty, but “on appeals to the simplicity, plausibility, and predictive adequacy of an explanatory system as a whole” (Chihara & Fodor 1965: 197). In this view, behavioral and/or physiological evidence can be used to verify dream reports (Ayer 1960) and the alleged principled difference between dream reports and other first-person, past-tense psychological sentences (Siegler 1967; Schröder 1997) disappears.

Putnam noted that Malcolm’s analysis of the concept of dreaming relies on the dubious idea that philosophers have access to deep conceptual truths that are hidden to laypeople:

the lexicographer would undoubtedly perceive the logical (or semantical) connection between being a pediatrician and being a doctor, but he would miss the allegedly “logical” character of the connection between dreams and waking impressions. […] this “depth grammar” kind of analyticity (or “logical dependence”) does not exist. (Putnam 1962 [1986]: 306)

Nagel argued that even if one accepts Malcolm’s analysis of the concept of dreaming,

it is a mistake to invest the demonstration that it is impossible to have experiences while asleep with more import than it has. It is an observation about our use of the word “experience”, and no more. It does not imply that nothing goes on in our minds while we dream. (Nagel 1959: 114)

Whether dream thoughts, feelings or beliefs should count as real instances of their kind now becomes an open question, and in any case there is no conceptual contradiction involved in saying one has experiences while asleep and dreaming.

To ask about dream experience is also to ask whether there is something it is like to dream during sleep as opposed to there just being something it is like to remember dreaming after awakening. Dennett’s (1976, 1979) cassette theory says dreams are the product of instantaneous memory insertion at the moment of the awakening, as if a cassette with pre-scripted dreams had been inserted into memory, ready for replay. Dennett claims the cassette theory and the view that dreams are experiences can deal equally well with empirical evidence for instance on the relationship between dreaming and REM sleep. The cassette theory is preferable because it is more parsimonious, positing only an unconscious dream composition process rather than an additional conscious presentation process in sleep. For Dennett, the important point is that it is impossible to distinguish between the two rival theories based on dream recall; the question of dream experience should be settled by independent empirical evidence.

While Dennett shares Malcolm’s skepticism about dream experience, this latter claim is diametrically opposed to Malcolm’s rejection of a science of dreaming. For Dennett, the unreliability of dream recall also is not unique, but exemplifies a broader problem with memory reports: we generally cannot use retrospective recall to distinguish conscious experience from memory insertion (Dennett 1991; see also Emmett 1978).

An earlier and much discussed (Binz 1878; Goblot 1896; Freud 1899; Hall 1981; Kramer 2007:22–24) version of Dennett’s cassette theory goes back to Maury’s (1861) description of a long and complex dream about the French revolution that culminated in his execution at the guillotine, at which point Maury suddenly awoke to find that the headboard had fallen on his neck. Because the dream seemed to systematically build up to this dramatic conclusion, which in turn coincided with a sudden external event, he suggested that such cases were best explained as instantaneous memory insertions experienced at the moment of awakening. Similarly, Gregory (1916) described dreams are psychical explosions occurring at the moment of awakening.

The trustworthiness of dream reports continues to be contentious. Rosen (2013) argues that dream reports are often fabricated and fail to accurately describe experiences occurring during sleep. By contrast, Windt (2013, 2015a) argues that dream reports can at least under certain conditions (such as in laboratory studies, when dreams are reported immediately after awakening by trained participants) be regarded as trustworthy sources of evidence with respect to previous experience during sleep.

Unlike Malcolm, many believe that whether dreams are experiences is an empirical question; and unlike Dennett, the predominant view is that the empirical evidence does indeed support this claim (Flanagan 2000; Metzinger 2003; Revonsuo 2006; Rosen 2013; Windt 2013, 2015a).

A first reason for thinking that dreams are experiences during sleep is the relationship between dreaming and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Researchers in the 1950s discovered that sleep is not a uniform state of rest and passivity, but there is a sleep architecture involving different stages of sleep that is relatively stable both within and across individuals (Aserinsky & Kleitman 1953, 1955; Dement & Kleitman 1957). Following sleep onset, periods of non-REM (or NREM) sleep including slow wave sleep (so called because of the presence of characteristic slow-wave, high-voltage EEG activity) are followed by periods of high-frequency, low-voltage activity during REM sleep. EEG measures from REM sleep strongly resemble waking EEG. REM sleep is additionally characterized by rapid eye movements and a near-complete loss of muscle tone (Dement 1999: 27–50; Jouvet 1999).

The alignment between conscious experience on the one hand and wake-like brain activity and muscular paralysis on the other hand would seem to support the experiential status of dreams as well as explain the outward passivity that typically accompanies them. Reports of dreaming are in fact much more frequent following REM (81.9%) than NREM sleep awakenings (43%; Nielsen 2000). REM reports tend to be more elaborate, vivid, and emotionally intense, whereas NREM reports tend to be more thought-like, confused, non-progressive, and repetitive (Hobson et al. 2000). These differences led to the idea that REM sleep is an objective marker of dreaming (Dement & Kleitman 1957; Hobson 1988: 154).

Attempts to identify dreaming with mental activity during REM sleep have not, however, been successful, and many now hold that dreams can occur in all stages of sleep (e.g., Antrobus 1990; Foulkes 1993b; Solms 1997, 2000; Domhoff 2003; Nemeth & Fazekas 2018). In recent years there has been renewed interest in NREM sleep for the study of dreaming (Noreika et al. 2009; Siclari et al. 2013, 2017). This suggests the inference from the physiology of REM sleep to the phenomenology of dreaming is not straightforward.

A second line of evidence comes from lucid dreams, or dreams in which one knows one is dreaming and often has some level of dream control (Voss et al. 2013; Voss & Hobson 2015; Baird et al. 2019). The term lucid dreaming was coined by van Eeden (1913), but Aristotle ( On Dreams ) already noted that one can sometimes be aware while dreaming that one is dreaming.

Scientific evidence that lucid dreaming is real and a genuine sleep phenomenon comes from laboratory studies (Hearne 1978; LaBerge et al. 1981) showing lucid dreamers can use specific, pre-arranged patterns of eye movements (e.g., right-left-right-left) to signal in real-time that they are now lucid and engaging in dream experiments. These signals are clearly identifiable on the EOG and suggest a correspondence between dream-eye movements and real-eye movements (as predicted by the so-called scanning hypothesis ; see Dement & Kleitman 1957; Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). Retrospective reports confirm that the dreamer really was lucid and signalled lucidity (Dresler et al. 2012; Stumbrys et al. 2014).

Signal-verified lucid dreams have been used to study muscular activity accompanying body movements in dreams (Erlacher et al. 2003; Dresler et al. 2011), for advanced EEG analysis of brain activity during lucid dreaming (Voss et al. 2009), and imaging studies (Dresler et al. 2011, 2012). Eye signals can also be used to measure the duration of different activities performed in lucid dreams; contrary to the cassette theory, lucid dreams have temporal extension and certain dream actions even seem to take slightly longer than in waking (Erlacher et al. 2014). There have also been attempts to induce lucidity through non-invasive electrical stimulation during sleep (Stumbrys et al. 2013; Voss et al. 2014). The combination of signal-verified lucid dreaming with volitional control over dream content, retrospective report, and objective sleep measures has been proposed to provide controlled conditions for the study of conscious experience in sleep and a new methodology for investigating the relationship between conscious experience and neurophysiological processes (Baird et al.2019).

A third line of evidence (Revonsuo 2006: 77) comes from dream-enactment behavior (Nielsen et al. 2009), most prominently in patients with REM-sleep behavior disorder (RBD; Schenck & Mahowald 1996; Schenck 2005; Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). Due to a loss of the muscular atonia that accompanies REM sleep in healthy subjects, these patients show complex, seemingly goal-directed outward behaviors such as running or fighting off an attacker during REM sleep. Retrospective dream reports often match these behaviors, suggesting that patients literally act out their dreams during sleep.

While persuasive, these lines of evidence might not satisfy skeptics about dream experience. They might worry that results from lucid dreaming and dream enactment do not generalize to ordinary, non-lucid dreams; they might also construe alternative explanations that do not require conscious experience in sleep. There are also methodological concerns, for instance about how closely sleep-behaviors actually match dream experience. A key issue is that to support the experiential status of dreams, evidence from sleep polysomnography, signal verified lucid dreams, or sleep behavior requires convergence with retrospective dream reports. This means trusting dream reports is built into any attempt to empirically resolve the question of dream experience – which then invites the familiar skeptical concerns. Again, an anti-skeptical strategy may be to appeal to explanatory considerations. In this view, the convergence of dream reports and objective polysomnographic or behavioral observations is best explained by the assumption that dreams are experiences in sleep, and this assumption is strengthened by further incoming findings. This strategy places dream reports at the center of scientific dream research while avoiding the contentious claim that their trustworthiness, and with it the experiential status of dreams, can be demonstrated conclusively by independent empirical means (Windt 2013, 2015a).

Even where philosophers agree dreams are experiences, they often disagree on how exactly to characterize dreaming relative to wake-state psychological terms. Often, questions about the ontology of dreaming intersect with epistemological issues. Increasingly, they also incorporate empirical findings.

The standard view is that dreams have the same phenomenal character as waking perception in that they seemingly put us in contact with mind-independent objects, yet no such object is actually being perceived. This means dreams count as hallucinations in the philosophical sense (Crane & French 2017; Macpherson 2013). Even if, in a particularly realistic dream, my visual experience was exactly as it would be if I were awake (I could see my bedroom, my hands on the bed sheets, etc.), as long as my eyes were closed during the episode, I would not, literally, be seeing anything.

There is some controversy in the psychological literature about whether dreams should be regarded as hallucinations. Some believe the term hallucination should be reserved for clinical contexts and wake-state pathologies (Aleman & Larøi 2008: 17; but see ffytche 2007; ffytche et al. 2010).

The view that dreams involve hallucinations is implicit in Descartes’ assumption that even when dreaming,

it is certain that I seem to see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false, and this is what in me is properly called perceiving ( sentire ). (Descartes 1641: II.9)

It also lies at the heart of Aristotle’s ( On Dreams ) assumption that dreams result from the movements of the sensory organs that continue even after the original stimulus has ceased. He believed that in the silence of sleep, these residual movements result in vivid sensory imagery that is subjectively indistinguishable from genuine perception (see also Dreisbach 2000; Barbera 2008).

The assumption of phenomenological equivalence between dream and waking experience can also be found in Berkeley’s (1710: I.18) idealist claim that the existence of external bodies is not necessary for the production of vivid, wake-like perceptual experience. Similarly, Russell defended sense-data theory by noting that in dreams,

I have all the experiences that I seem to have; it is only things outside my mind that are not as I believe them to be while I am dreaming. (Russell 1948: 149–150)

Elsewhere, he argued dreams and waking life

must be treated with equal respect; it is only by some reality not merely sensible that dreams can be condemned. (Russell 1914: 69)

Hume was less clear on this matter, proposing that dreams occupy an intermediate position between vivid and largely non-voluntary sensory impressions and ideas, or “the faint images of previous impressions in thinking and reasoning” (Hume 1739: 1.1.1.1). On the one hand, as mere creatures of the mind, Hume wanted to categorize dreams as ideas. On the other hand, he acknowledged that in sleep, “our ideas can approach the vivacity of sensory impressions” (Hume 1739: 1.1.1.1). Dreams do not fit comfortably into Hume’s attempt to draw a dichotomous distinction between impressions, including perception, and ideas, including sensory imagination (Ryle 1949; Waxman 1994; Broughton 2006).

Phenomenologists often focus not so much on the quality of dream imagery as on the overall character of experience, noting that dreams are experienced as reality; as in waking perception, we simply feel present in a world. This also sets dreams apart from waking fantasy and daydreams (Husserl 1904/1905; Uslar 1964; Conrad 1968; Globus 1987: 89.

At its strongest, the hallucination view claims that dreaming and waking experience are identical in both the quality of sensory imagery and their overall, self-in-a-world structure (Revonsuo 2006: 84). This claim is central to the virtual reality metaphor , according to which consciousness itself is dreamlike and waking perception a kind of online hallucination modulated by the senses (Llinás & Ribary 1994; Llinás & Paré 1991; Revonsuo 2006; Metzinger 2003, 2009).

This seems to be empirically supported. Neuroimaging studies (Dang-Vu et al. 2007; Nir & Tononi 2010; Desseilles et al. 2011) show that the predominance of visual and motor imagery as well as strong emotions in dreams is paralleled by high activation of the corresponding brain areas in REM sleep, which may exceed waking; at the same time, the cognitive deficits often thought to characterize dreams such as the loss of self-awareness, the absence of critical thinking, delusional reasoning, and mnemonic deficits fit in well with the comparative deactivation of frontal areas (Hobson et al. 2000). Hobson (1988, Hobson et al. 2000) has argued that the vivid, hallucinatory character of dreaming results from the fact that in REM sleep, the visual and motor areas are activated in the same way as in waking perception, the sole difference being dreams’ dependence on internal signal generation. Horikawa and colleagues (2013) used neuroimaging data from sleep onset to predict the types of objects described in mentation reports, which they took to support the perceptual equivalence between dreaming and waking.

Generally, versions of the hallucination view that suggest dreams replicate all aspects of waking perception are too vague to be informative. Especially for subtle perceptual activities (such as visual search), we might not know enough about dream phenomenology to make any strong claims (Nielsen 2010). Specifying points of similarity leads to a more informative and precise, but likely also more nuanced view. Dreams are heterogeneous, and some might be more perception-like while others resemble imagination (Windt 2015a). There might also be differences between or even within specific types of imagery. For example, visual imagery might be quite different from touch sensations, which tend to be rare in dreams (Hobson 1988). Visual dream imagery might overall resemble waking perception but lack color saturation, background detail and focus (Rechtschaffen & Buchignani, 1992). Classifying dreams as either hallucinatory or imaginative is further complicated by the fact that there is strong overlap in cortical activity associated with both visual imagery and perception (Zeidman & Maguire, 2016). This means even a strong overlap in cortical activity between, say, visual dream imagery and visual perception does not necessarily set dreaming apart from waking imagination.

This is also true for evidence on eye movements in dreams. LaBerge and colleagues (2018) recently showed that eye tracking of objects is smooth in lucid dreaming and perceiving, but not in imagining. Drawing from this evidence, Rosen (forthcoming) suggests many dreams mimic the phenomenology of interacting with a stable world, including eye movements and visual search. Others argue we should not analogize dream imagery to mind-independent, scannable objects and that eye movements might instead be implicated in the generation of dream imagery (Windt 2018).

Another way to make sense of the claim that dreaming has the same phenomenal character as waking perception is to say some kinds of dream imagery are illusory: they involve misperception of an external object as having different properties than it actually has (cf. Smith 2002; Crane & French 2017). The illusion view disagrees with the hallucination view on whether dreams have a contemporaneous external stimulus source.

The illusion view has fallen out of favor but has a long history. The Ancients believed dreams have bodily sources. This idea underlies the practice of using dreams to diagnose illness, as practiced in the shrines at Epidaurus (Galen On Diagnosis in Dreams ; van de Castle 1994). Aristotle ( On Dreams ) thought some dreams are caused by indigestion, and Hobbes adopted this view, claiming different kinds of dreams could be traced to different bodily sensations. For instance, “lying cold breedeth Dreams of Feare, and raiseth the thought and Image of some fearfull object” (Hobbes 1651: 91).

Appeals to the bodily sources of dreaming became especially popular in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Many believed specific dream themes such as flying were linked to sleeping position (Macnish 1838; Scherner 1861; Vold 1910/1912; Ellis 1911) and realizing, in sleep, that one’s feet are not touching the ground (Bergson 1914).

There were also attempts to explain the phenomenology of dreaming by appealing to the absence of outward movement. The lack of appropriate feedback and of movement and touch sensations was thought to cause dreams of being unable to move (Bradley 1894) or of trying but failing to do something (Gregory 1918).

Some proponents of the “ Leibreiztheorie ” (or somatic-stimulus theory) of dreaming attempted to go beyond anecdotal observations to conduct controlled experiments. Weygandt (1893) investigated the influence of various factors including breathing, blood circulation, temperature changes, urge to urinate, sleeping position, and visual or auditory stimulation during sleep on dream content (see Schredl 2010 for details). Singer (1924) proposed experiments on stimulus incorporation in dreams can inform claims on the ontology of dreaming: If dreams are sensations, a particular auditory stimulus should increase the frequency of dreams in nearby sleepers as well as the frequency of sound in their dreams, and it should decrease the range of quality and intensity of these dreams, making them overall more similar and predictable.

Newer studies provide evidence for the incorporation of external stimuli in dreams, including light flashes, sounds, sprays of water applied to the skin (Dement & Wolpert 1958), thermal (Baldridge 1966), electrical (Koulack 1969), and verbal stimuli (Berger 1963; Breger et al. 1971; Hoelscher et al., 1981), as well as blood pressure cuff stimulation on the leg (Nielsen et al. 1995; Sauvageau et al. 1998).

Muscular activity also often leaves its mark on dreams. It occurs throughout sleep but is especially frequent in REM sleep, mostly in the form of twitching but occasionally also in the form of larger, seemingly goal-directed movements (Blumberg 2010; Blumberg & Plumeau 2016). The relation between outward and dream movements is complex: in some cases, outward movements might mirror dream movements, while in others, sensory feedback might prompt dream imagery (Windt 2018).

Generally, it seems external and bodily stimuli can be related to varying degrees to dream and sleep onset imagery (Nielsen 2017; Windt 2018; Windt et al. 2016). Some of these cases appear to fit the concept of illusion, as in when the sound of the alarm clock is experienced, in a dream, as a siren, or when blood pressure cuff inflation on the leg leads to dreams of wearing strange shoes (Windt 2018; for these and other examples, see Nielsen et al. 1995). In other cases, such as when blood pressure cuff stimulation on the leg prompts a dream of seeing someone else’s leg being run over, describing this as illusory misperception might be less straightforward.

Saying that dreams can be prompted by external stimuli and that in some cases these are best described as illusions is different from the stronger claim, sometimes advanced by historical proponents of somatic-stimulus theory, that dreams generally are caused by external or bodily stimuli. As an example of the stronger claim, consider Wundt’s proposal that the

ideas which arise in dreams come, at least to a great extent, from sensations, especially from those of the general sense, and are therefore mostly illusions of fancy, probably only seldom pure memory ideas which hence become hallucinations. (Wundt 1896: 179)

This claim is likely too strong. It is also likely that appeals to external or bodily stimuli on their own cannot fully explain dream imagery, including when and how external stimuli are incorporated in dreams. Sensory incorporation in dreams is often hard to predict and indirect; associated imagery seems related not just to stimulus intensity, but also to short- and long term memories. A full explanation of dream content additionally has to take the cognitive and memory sources of dreaming into account (Windt 2018; Nielsen 2017; cf. Silberer 1919).

The most important rival to the hallucination view is that dreams are imaginative experiences (Liao & Gendler 2019; Thomas 2014). This can mean dream imagery involves imaginings rather than percepts (including hallucinations or illusions; McGinn 2004), that dream beliefs are imaginative and not real beliefs (Sosa 2007), or both (Ichikawa 2008, 2009). An important advantage is that by assimilating dreams to commonplace mental states such as waking fantasy and daydreaming, rather than a rare and often pathological occurrence such as hallucinations, it provides a more unified account of mental life (Stone 1984). However, the reasons for adopting the imagination view are diverse, and dreams have been proposed to resemble imaginings and differ from perception along a number of dimensions (e.g. McGinn 2004, 2005a,b; Thomas 2014). This issue is complicated by the fact that there is little agreement on the definition of imagination and its relation to perception (Kind 2013).

One way is to deny dreams involve presence or the feeling of being in a world, which many believe is central to waking perception. Imagination theorists compare the sense in which we feel present in our dreams to cognitive absorption, as when we are lost in a novel, film, or vivid daydream (Sartre 1940; McGinn 2004; but see Hering 1947; Globus 1987). Some argue that reflexive consciousness or meta-awareness (as in lucid dreams) interrupts cognitive absorption and terminates the ongoing dream (Sartre 1940), essentially denying lucid dreams are possible.

Another issue is whether dreams are subject to the will (Ichikawa 2009). Imagination is often characterized as active and under our control (Wittgenstein 1967: 621, 633), involving “a special effort of the mind” (Descartes 1641: VI, 2), whereas perception is passive. Because dreams just seem to happen to us without being under voluntary control, they present an important challenge for the imagination view. Ichikawa (2009) argues lucid control dreams show dreams are generally subject to the will even where they are not under deliberate control.

Dreams are widely described as more indeterminate than waking perception (James 1890: 47; Stone 1984). In scientific dream research, vagueness is regarded as one of three main subtypes of bizarreness (Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). An example are dream characters who are identified not by their behavior or looks, but by just knowing (Kahn et al. 2000, 2002; Revonsuo & Tarkko 2002). Dreams are also attention-dependent and lack foreground-background structure (Thompson 2014); while it is tempting to construe the dream world as rich in detail, there is no more to dreams than meets the eye, and many think dream experience is exhausted by what is the focus of selective attention (Hunter 1983; Thompson 2014).

Indeterminacy is also related to the question of whether we dream in color or in black and white. Based on a review of historical and recent studies, Schwitzgebel (2002, 2011) argues there has been a shift in theories on dream color that coincides with the rise first of black-and-white and then color television. He argues it is unlikely that dreams themselves changed from colored to black and white and back to colored, proposing that a change in opinion is a more plausible explanation. Maybe dreams were either black and white or colored all along; or maybe they are indeterminate with respect to color, as may be the case for imagined or fictional objects; were this the case, it would strengthen the imagination view (Ichikawa 2009). Schwitzgebel’s main point is that reports of colored dreaming are unreliable and our opinions about dreams can be mistaken (but see Windt 2013, 2015a). This relates to Schwitzgebel’s (2011; Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel 2007) general skepticism about the reliability of introspection.

The issue of dream color has led to a number of follow-up studies (Schwitzgebel 2003; Schwitzgebel et al. 2006; Murzyn 2008; Schredl et al. 2008; Hoss 2010). They suggest most people dream in color and a small percentage describe grayscale or even mixed dreams (Murzyn 2008) or dreams involving moderate color saturation (Rechtschaffen and Buchignani 1992). Indeterminacy is rarely reported.

The imagination view has consequences for Cartesian dream skepticism. If dream pain does not feel like real pain, there is a fail-safe way to determine whether one is now dreaming: one need only pinch oneself (Nelson 1966; Stone 1984; but see Hodges & Carter 1969; Kantor 1970). As Locke put it,

if our dreamer pleases to try, whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace, be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man’s fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. (Locke 1689: IV.XI.8)

If dreaming feels different from waking, this raises the question why we tend to describe dreams in the same terms as waking perception. Maybe this is because most people haven’t thought about these matters and they would find the imagination view plausible if they considered it (Ichikawa 2009). Or maybe

it is just because we all know that dreams are throughout un like waking experiences that we can safely use ordinary expressions in the narration of them. (Austin 1962: 42)

Some authors classify dreams as imaginings while acknowledging they feel like perceiving. For example, Hobbes describes dreams as “the imaginations of them that sleep” (Hobbes 1651: 90), and imagination as a “ decaying sense ” (Hobbes 1651: 88). Yet he also uses the concepts of imagination and fancy to describe perception and argues “their appearance to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming” (Hobbes 1651: 86).

In the scientific literature, the imagination view is complemented by cognitive theories. Foulkes (1978: 5) describes dreaming as a form of thinking with its own grammar and syntax, but allows that dream imagery is sufficently perception-like to deceive us. Domhoff’s neurocognitive model of dreaming (2001, 2003) emphasizes the dependence of dreaming on visuospatial skills and on a network including the association areas of the forebrain. The theory draws from findings on the partial or global cessation of dreaming following brain lesions (cf. Solms 1997, 2000), evidence that dreaming develops gradually and in tandem with visuospatial skills in children (Foulkes 1993a, 1999; but see Resnick et al. 1994), and results from dream content analysis supporting the continuity of dreaming with waking concerns and memories (the so-called continuity hypothesis ; see Domhoff 2001, 2003; Schredl & Hofmann 2003; Schredl 2006; see also Nir & Tononi 2010).

A number of researchers have begun to consider dreaming in the context of theories of mind wandering. Mind wandering is frequent in waking and involves spontaneous thoughts that unfold dynamically and are only weakly constrained by ongoing tasks and environmental demands (Schooler et al. 2011; Smallwood & Schooler 2015; Christoff et al. 2016). Based on phenomenological and neurophysiological similarities, dreams have been proposed to be an intensified form of waking mind wandering (Pace-Schott 2007, 2013; Domhoff 2011; Wamsley 2013; Fox et al. 2013). This basic idea seems to have been anticipated by Leibniz, who noted that the spontaneous formation of visions in dreams surpasses the capacity of our waking imagination (Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters , Vol. I, 177–178).

The analogy between dreams and waking mind wandering has been discussed in the context of cognitive agency. Metzinger (2013a,b, 2015) describes dreams and waking mind wandering as involving a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy, or the ability to deliberately control one’s conscious thought processes. Dreams and waking mind wandering are not mental actions but unintentional mental behaviors, comparable to subpersonal processes such as breathing or heartbeat. Because dreaming and waking mind wandering make up a the majority of our conscious mental lives, he argues that cognitive agency and mental autonomy are the exception, not the rule.

This raises the question of how to make sense of lucid control dreams, which involve both meta-awareness and agency. Windt and Voss (2018) argue that in such cases, spontaneous processes including imagery formation co-exist alongside more deliberate, top-down control; they also argue metacognitive insight and control themselves can have spontaneous elements. This suggests spontaneity and control are not opposites, but a more complex account is needed. Possibly, certain dreams and instances of waking mind wandering can be both spontaneous and agentive.

The analogy with mind wandering might help move forward the debate on the ontology of dreaming. In this debate, a common assumption is that dreams can be categorized as either hallucinatory or imaginative. Yet the application of these terms to dreams quickly runs into counterexamples and it is unclear they are mutually exclusive. One option is pluralism (Rosen 2018b), in which some aspects of dreaming are hallucinatory, others imaginative, and yet again others illusory. Another is that dreams are sui generis, combining aspects associated with wake states such as hallucinating, imagining, or perceiving in a novel manner without mimicking them completely. Windt (2015a) proposes that mind wandering, which describes a range of mental states loosely characterized by their spontaneous and dynamic character, might be particularly suitable for the characterization of dreaming precisely because that term leaves open more specific questions on the phenomenology of dreaming, allowing for variation in control, determinacy, and so on. This might be a good starting point for describing what is unique about dreaming while also acknowledging continuities across sleep-wake states and capitalizing on the strengths of the hallucination, illusion, imagination, and cognitive views.

The second strand of the imagination view argues that dream beliefs are not real beliefs, but propositional imaginings. This may or may not be combined with the claim that dream imagery is imaginative rather than perceptual (Sosa 2007; Ichikawa 2009).

Denying that dream beliefs have the status of real beliefs only makes sense before the background of a specific account of what beliefs are and how they are distinguished from other mental states such as delusions or propositional imaginings. For instance, Ichikawa (2009) argues that if we follow interpretationist or dispositionalist accounts of belief, dream beliefs fall short of real beliefs. He claims dream beliefs lack connection with perceptual experience and fail to motivate actions; consequently, they do not have the same functional role as real beliefs. Moreover, we cannot ascribe dream beliefs to a person by observing them lying asleep in bed. Dream beliefs are often inconsistent with longstanding waking beliefs and acquired and discarded without any process of belief revision (Ichikawa 2009).

This analysis of dream beliefs has consequences for skepticism. If dream beliefs are propositional imaginings, then we do not falsely believe while dreaming that we are now awake, but only imagine that we do (Sosa 2007). It is not clear though that this protects us from deception. If dream beliefs fall short of real beliefs, this might even make the specter of dream deception more worrisome: in mistaking dream beliefs for the real thing, we would now be deceived about the status of our own mental states (Ichikawa 2008).

It is also not clear whether the same type of argument extends to mental states other than beliefs. As Lewis points out, a person might

in fact believe or realize in the course of a dream that he was dreaming, and even if we said that, in such case, he only dreamt that he was dreaming, this still leaves it possible for someone who is asleep to entertain at the time the thought that he is asleep. (Lewis 1969: 133)

Mental states other than believing such as entertaining, thinking, or minimally appraisive instances of taking for granted might be sufficient for deception (Reed 1979).

The debate about dream beliefs is paralleled by a debate about whether delusions are beliefs or imaginings (see Currie 2000; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; McGinn 2004; Bayne & Pacherie 2005; Bortolotti 2009; Gendler 2013). Both debates might plausibly inform each other, especially as dreams are sometimes proposed to be delusional (Hobson 1999).

3. Dreaming and theories of consciousness

Dreams are a global state of consciousness in which experience arises under altered behavioral and neurophysiological conditions as compared to standard wakefulness; unlike other altered states of consciousness (such as drug-induced or deep meditative states) and pathological wake states (such as psychosis or neurological syndromes), dreams occur spontaneously and regularly in healthy subjects. For both reasons, many regard dreams as a test case for theories of consciousness or even an ideal model system for consciousness research (Churchland 1988; Revonsuo 2006).

Existing proposals differ on the phenomenology of dreaming: referring to dream bizarreness, Churchland describes dream experience as robustly different from waking, whereas Revonsuo argues dreaming is similar to waking and the purest form of experience:

the dreaming brain brings out the phenomenal level of organization in a clear and distinct form. Dreaming is phenomenality pure and simple, untouched by external physical stimulation or behavioural activity. (Revonsuo 2006: 75)

Revonsuo argues dreaming reveals the basic, state-independent structure of consciousness to be immersive: “dreaming depicts consciousness first and foremost as a subjective world- for-me ” (Revonsuo 2006: 75). This leads him to introduce the “world-simulation metaphor of consciousness”, according to which consciousness itself is essentially simulational and dreamlike. This is taken to support internalism about conscious experience.

This latter claim is also contentious. Noë (2004: 213) argues that phenomenological differences between dreaming and waking (such as greater instability of visual dream imagery) result from the lack of dynamic interaction with the environment in dreams. He proposes this shows that neural states are sufficient for dreaming but denies they are also sufficient for perceptual experience.

A possible problem for both views is their reliance on background assumptions about the phenomenology of dreaming and its disconnection from environmental stimuli and bodily sensations. Windt (2015a, 2018) argues both internalism and externalism mistakenly assume dreams to be isolated from external sensory input and own-body perception; she believes both the phenomenology of dreaming and its correlation with external stimuli are complex and variable. She argues the analysis of dreaming does not clearly support either side in the debate on internalism vs externalism (but see Rosen 2018a). Generally, in the absence of a well worked out theory of dreaming and its sleep-stage and neural correlates, proposals for using dreaming as a model system or test case run the risk of relying on an oversimplified description of the target phenomenon (Windt & Noreika 2011).

Recent accounts appealing to generative models and predictive processing (Clark 2013b; Hohwy 2013) suggest a new, unified account of perception, imagination, and dreaming. In these accounts, different mental states, including perception and action, embody different strategies of hypothesis testing and prediction error minimization. Perception is the attempt to model the hidden external causes of sensory stimuli; action involves keeping the internal model stable while changing the sensory input. Clark argues that on such a model,

systems that know how to perceive an object as a cat are thus systems that, ipso facto , are able to use a top-down cascade to bring about the kinds of activity pattern that would be characteristic of the presence of a cat. […] Perceivers like us, if this is correct, are inevitably potential dreamers and imaginers too. Moreover, they are beings who, in dreaming and imagining, are deploying many of the very same strategies and resources used in ordinary perception. (Clark 2013a: 764)

Predictive processing accounts have also been used to explain specific features of dreaming. Bizarreness has been associated with the comparative lack of external stimulus processing, implying dream imagery is relatively unconstrained by prediction errors (cf. Hobson & Friston 2012; Fletcher & Frith 2008; Bucci & Grasso 2017). Windt (2018) suggests a predictive processing account of dream imagery generation that links bodily self-experience to own-body perception and subtle motor behaviors such as twitching in REM sleep (Blumberg 2010; Blumberg & Plumeau 2016). She argues that movement sensations in dreams, in relation to REM-sleep related muscle twitching, involve a form of bodily self-sampling in which coordinated muscular activity contributes to the generation and maintenance of a body model. This is important because in predictive processing accounts neither the bodily nor the external causes of sensory inputs are known; at the same time, having an accurate body model is a prerequisite for action, requiring the system to disambiguate between self- and other generated changes to sensory inputs. Especially in early development, sleep might provide the ideal conditions for exploring one’s own body via subtle but coordinated muscular activity while processing of visual and auditory stimuli is reduced.

Dreams have also been suggested as a test case for whether phenomenal consciousness can be divorced from cognitive access (e.g., Block 2007; but see Cohen & Dennett 2011). Sebastián (2014a) argues that dreams provide empirical evidence that conscious experience can occur independently of cognitive access. This is because during (non-lucid) REM-sleep dreams, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) as the most plausible mechanism underlying cognitive access is selectively deactivated (see also Pantani et al. 2018). This would challenge theories linking conscious experience to access, such as higher-order-thought theory (Sebastián 2014b). However, both the hypoactivation of the dlPCF in REM sleep and its association with cognitive access have been debated. Fazekas and Nemeth (2018) suggest that certain kinds of cognitive access may be independent of dlPFC activation, necessitating a more complex account.

Dreaming has been suggested as a model system not just of waking consciousness in general, but also of psychotic wake states in particular. The analogy between dreaming and madness has a long philosophical history (Plato, Phaedrus ; Kant 1766; Schopenhauer 1847) and finds particularly stark expression in Hobson’s claim that “dreaming is not a model of a psychosis. It is a psychosis. It’s just a healthy one” (Hobson 1999: 44). Gottesmann (2006) proposes dreaming as a neurophysiological model of schizophrenia. There is a rich discussion on the theoretical and methodological implications of dream research for psychiatry (see Scarone et al. 2007; d’Agostino et al. 2013; see Windt & Noreika 2011 as well as the other papers in this special issue) and a number of studies have investigated differences in dream reports from schizophrenic and healthy subjects (Limosani et al. 2011a,b).

Rather than likening dreaming to waking in general or specific wake states such as psychosis, there have also been attempts to compare specific dream phenomena to wake-state delusions. Gerrans (2012, 2013, 2014) focuses on character misidentification in dreams and delusions of hyperfamiliarity (such as the Frégoli delusion, in which strangers are mistakenly identified as family members, and déjà vu ) to argue that anomalous experience and faulty reality testing both play a role in delusion formation. Rosen (2015) analyzes instances of thought insertion and of auditory hallucinations, which are key symptoms of schizophrenia, to raise broader questions about the altered sense of agency in dreams as compared to waking.

Philosophers have focused almost exclusively on dreaming, largely leaving to the side questions about dreamless sleep including whether it is uniformly unconscious. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the possibility of dreamless sleep experience and foundational issues about the definition of sleep and waking. This has been paralleled by growing interest in dreaming in NREM sleep.

Conceptually, interest in dreamless sleep experience has been facilitated by the precise definition of dreaming offered by simulation views (Revonsuo et al. 2015). If dreams are immersive sleep experiences characterized by their here -and- now structure, it makes sense to ask whether this is true for all or just a subset of sleep-related experiences and whether non-immersive sleep experiences exist. By contrast, if dreaming is broadly identified with any conscious mentation in sleep (Pagel et al. 2001), there is no conceptual space for dreamless sleep experience.

Following Thompson's (2014, 2015) discussion of dreamless sleep in Indian and Buddhist philosophy, Windt and colleagues (2016; see also Windt 2015b) introduce a framework for different kinds of dreamless sleep experience ranging from thinking and isolated imagery, perception, or bodily sensations, where these lack integration into a scene, to minimal kinds of experience lacking imagery or specific thought contents. A possible example of minimal phenomenal experience in sleep are white dreams, where people report having had experiences during sleep but cannot remember any details. Taken at face value, some white dream reports might describe experiences that lack reportable content (Windt 2015b); others might describe forgotten dreams or dreams with degraded content (Fazekas et al. 2018). Another example are reports of witnessing dreamless sleep, as described in certain meditation practices. This state is said to involve non-conceptual awareness of sleep, again in the absence of imagery or specific thought contents, and loss of sense of self (Thompson 2014, 2015). Some schools in Buddhist philosophy explain claims of deep and dreamless sleep by saying we never fully lose consciousness in sleep (Prasad 2000, 66; and Thompson 2014, 2015).

Empirically, interest in dreamless sleep experience is paralleled by increasing interest in experiences in NREM sleep (Fazekas et al. 2018). Most researchers now accept that dreaming is not confined to REM sleep, but also occurs at sleep onset and in NREM sleep. The deeper stages of NREM sleep are particularly interesting as they involve roughly similar proportions of dreaming, unconscious sleep, and white dreams (Noreika et al. 2009: Siclari et al. 2013, 2017). In the search for the neural correlates of dreaming vs unconscious dreamless sleep, this makes comparisons within the same sleep stage possible and avoids confounds involved in comparing presumably dreamful REM sleep with presumably dreamless NREM sleep. Findings suggest that activity in the same parietal hot zone underlies dreaming in both NREM and REM sleep (Siclari et al. 2017).

Where sleep and dream research have traditionally tried to identify the sleep stage correlates of dreaming, newer research suggests local changes occurring independently of sleep stages might in fact be more relevant. Traditionally regarded as global, whole-brain phenomena, there is now increasing evidence that sleep itself is locally driven, and local changes in sleep depth might be associated with changes in sleep-related experience (Siclari & Tononi 2017; Andrillon et al. 2019). While sleep and dream research are often considered as separate fields, changes in how sleep in general and sleep stages in particular are defined appear closely associated with changes in the theoretical conception of dreaming and its empirical investigation.

Historically, discoveries about dreaming have precipitated changing conceptions of sleep (for an excellent history of the study of sleep and dreaming, see Kroker 2007). Following Aristotle ( On Sleeping and Waking ), sleep was traditionally defined in negative terms as the absence of wakefulness and perception. This is still reflected in Malcolm’s assumption that “to a person who is sound asleep, ‘dead to the world’, things cannot even seem” (Malcolm 1956: 26). With the discovery of REM sleep, sleep came to be regarded as a heterogeneous phenomenon characterized by the cyclic alteration of different sleep stages. REM sleep was now considered as “neither sleeping nor waking. It was obviously a third state of the brain, as different from sleep as sleep is from wakefulness” (Jouvet 1999: 5). The folk-psychological dichotomy between sleep and wakefulness now seemed oversimplified and empirically implausible. At the same time dreaming, which had previously been considered as an intermediate state of half-sleeping and half-waking, came to be regarded as a genuine sleep phenomenon, but narrowed to REM sleep. Today, the framework for describing dreams and other sleep-related experiences is more precise, but dreaming has also been cast adrift from REM sleep.

A closely associated issue is how to define waking. Crowther’s (2018) capacitation thesis casts waking consciousness as a state in which the individual is fully switched on to their environment, but also to their own epistemic (cf. O’Shaugnessy 2002) and agentive potential; the waking individual is empowered to act and think in certain ways, though this potential need not be actualized. By contrast, dreaming is an “imagining-of consciousness” (O’Shaughnessy 2002: 430) and consciousness is conceptually tied to wakefulness. Because in lucid dreams, the epistemic and agentive profile of waking is at least partly realized, they might, according to Crowther, be regarded as closer to waking than nonlucid dreams.

This account of waking and sleep may also have consequences for the imagination model of dreaming and dream skepticism (Soteriou 2017). As in the imagination model, dreaming would be passive and action, including cognitive agency, would be tied to waking. If dreaming nonetheless involved passive episodes of imagining oneself to be active, one would be unable to tell that one were dreaming and imagining, as this insight would require the exercise of real agency. The sceptical consequence would be that when dreaming, one would lose agency as well as the capacity to gain insight into one’s current state. Yet our ability to know we are waking when waking would be unscathed; according to Soteriou, waking would thus have an epistemic function connected to the capacity to exercise agency over our mental lives.

Finally, definitions of consciousness themselves are bound up with conceptions of sleep and dreaming. As dreaming went from a state whose experiential status was doubted to being widely recognized as a second global state of consciousness, consciousness sometimes came to be defined contrastively as that which disappears in deep, dreamless sleep and reappears in waking and dreaming (Searle 2000; Tononi 2008). In light of dreamless sleep experience, such definitions are problematic (Thompson 2014, 2015; Windt 2015b; Windt et al. 2016). Dreamless sleep experience has been proposed to be particularly relevant for understanding minimal phenomenal experience, or the conditions under which the simplest kind of conscious experience arises (Windt 2015b). The investigation of dreamless sleep might thus shed light on the transition from unconscious sleep to sleep-related experience.

We almost always have a self in dreams, though this self can sometimes be a slightly different (e.g. older or younger) version of our waking self or even a different person entirely. Dreams therefore raise interesting questions about the identity between the dream and waking self. Locke (1689) invites us to imagine two men alternating in turns between sleep and wakefulness and sharing one continuously thinking soul (Locke 1689: II.I.12). He argues that if one man retained no memory of the soul’s thoughts and perceptions while it was linked to the other man’s body, they would be distinct persons. His position is that personal identity depends on psychological continuity, including recall: in the absence of recall, as illustrated by the toy example of two people sharing one soul, continuous conscious thinking does not suffice for identity. Locke also rejects the possibility of unrecalled dreams and the idea that we dream throughout sleep, remembering only a small proportion of our dreams (Locke 1689: II.I.19).

Valberg distinguishes between the subject of the dream (i.e., the dream self) and the sleeping person who is the dreamer of the dream and recalls it upon awakening (Valberg 2007). He argues that awakening from a dream involves crossing a chasm between discrete worlds with discrete spaces and times; it does not make sense to say that “the ‘I’ at these times [is] a single individual who crosses from one world to the other” (Valberg 2007: 69). According to Valberg, this is relevant to dream skepticism because there is no simple way to make sense of the claims that it is I who emerge from a dream or that I was the victim of dream deception.

Vicarious dreams, or dreams in which the protagonist of the dream seems to be a different person from the dreamer, are particularly puzzling with respect to identity. They may even raise the question of whether the dream self has an independent existence (Rosen & Sutton 2013: 1047). Such dreams are superficially similar to cases in which we imagine being another person, but according to Rosen and Sutton require a different explanation: in the case of dreaming, the imagined person’s thoughts are not framed as diverging from one’s own and one does not retain one’s own perspective in addition to the imagined one; in nonlucid dreams, only the perspective of the dream’s protagonist is retained.

The dream self is also at the center of simulation views of dreaming, which define dreaming via its immersive, here and now character as the experience of a self in a world. This leads to further questions about the phenomenology of self-experience in dreams and how it is different from waking self-experience. Different versions of the simulation view focus on different aspects of self- and world experience in dreams, ranging from social simulation (Revonsuo et al. 2015) to the typical features of selfhood in dreams (Revonsuo 2005, 2006, Metzinger 2003, 2009) to the minimal conditions for experiencing oneself as a self in dreams and what this tells us about minimal phenomenal selfhood in general (Windt 2015a, 2018). Yet these different versions of the simulation view are largely complementary and together have forged unity in a field that was previously hampered by lack of agreement about the definition of dreaming. They also integrate the philosophy of dreaming and scientific dream research.

As so often in debates about dreaming, there is disagreement about basic phenomenological questions. Revonsuo (2005) describes self-experience including bodily experience in dreams as identical to waking, whereas Metzinger (2003, 2009; see also Windt & Metzinger 2007) argues that important layers of waking self-experience (such as autobiographical memory, agency, a stable first-person perspective, metacognitive insight, and self-knowledge) are missing in nonlucid dreams. He argues this is due to the cognitive and mnemonic deficit that characterizes nonlucid dreams (cf. Hobson et al. 2000). Windt (2015a) analyzes the range of cognitive and bodily self-experience in dreams, both of which she describes as variable. She argues that in a majority of cases, dreams are weakly phenomenally embodied states in which bodily experience is largely related to movement sensations but a detailed and integrated body representation is lacking; instead, bodily experience in dreams is largely indeterminate (for an attempt to test this empirically, see Koppehele-Gossel et al. 2016). She proposes this is because dreams are also weakly functionally embodied states, in which the specific pattern of bodily experience reflects altered processing of bodily sensations (as in the illusion view). She also analyzes instances of bodiless dreams, in which dreamers say they experienced themselves as disembodied entities, to argue that self-experience can be reduced to pure spatiotemporal-self-location (Windt 2010); she proposes these cases can help identify the conditions for the emergence of minimal phenomenal selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger 2009; see also Metzinger 2013b).

How the phenomenology of dreaming compares to waking and what to say about how the dream self relates to the waking self bears on questions about the moral status of dreams. For Augustine ( Confessions ) dreams were a cause of moral concern because of their indistinguishability from waking life. What particularly worried him about dreams of sexual acts was their vividness, as well as the feeling of pleasure and seeming acquiescence or consent on the part of the dreamer. He concluded, however, that the transition from sleep to wakefulness involves a radical chasm, enabling the dreamer to awaken with a clear conscience and absolving them from taking responsibility for their dream actions.

What exactly Augustine thought the chasm between dreaming and waking consists in allows for different interpretations (Matthews 1981). Firstly, if the dream and waking self are not identical, then waking Augustine is not morally responsible for dream-Augustine’s actions. Secondly, actions performed in dreams might be morally irrelevant because they did not really happen. And thirdly, assuming that moral responsibility requires the ability to act otherwise, dreams provide no grounds for moral concern because we cannot refrain from having certain types of dreams.

The issue of dream immorality may also present a choice point between different accounts of moral evaluation. Where internalists assume the moral status of a person’s actions is entirely determined by internal factors such as intentions and motives, externalists look beyond these to the effects of actions. Driver (2007) argues that the absurdity of dream immorality itself should count against purely internalist accounts; yet she also acknowledges this absurdity is not a necessary feature of dreams.

Central to the question of dream immorality is the status of dreams as actions rather than mere behaviors. Mullane (1965) argues that while we don’t have full control over our dreams, they are not completely involuntary either; as is the case for blushing, considerable effort is required to attain control over our dreams and in some cases they can even be considered as actions. That lucid dream control is, to some extent, a learnable skill (Stumbrys et al. 2014) lends some support to this claim.

6. The meaning of dreams and the functions of dreaming

Philosophical discussions of dreaming tend to focus on (a) dream deception and (b) questions about the ontology of dreaming, its moral status, etc., that tend to intersect with dream skepticism. By contrast, the main source of interest in dreams outside of philosophy traditionally has been dream interpretation and whether dreams are a source of knowledge and insight. Historically, the epistemic status of dreams and the use of prophetic and diagnostic dreams was not just a theoretical, but a practical problem (Barbera 2008). Different types of dreams were distinguished by their putative epistemic value. Artemidorus, for instance, used the term enhypnion to refer to dreams that merely reflect the sleeper’s current bodily or psychological state and hence do not merit further interpretation, whereas he reserved the term oneiron for meaningful and symbolic dreams of divine origin.

The practice of dream interpretation was famously attacked by Aristotle in On Prophecy in Sleep . He denied that dreams are of divine origin, but allowed that occasionally, small affections of the sensory organs as might stem from distant events that cannot be perceived in waking are perceptible in the quiet of sleep. He also believed such dreams were mostly likely to occur in dullards whose minds resemble an empty desert – an assessment that was not apt to encourage interest in dreams (Kroker 2007: 37). A similarly negative view was held by early modern philosophers who believed dreams were often the source of superstitious beliefs (Hobbes 1651; Kant 1766; Schopenhauer 1847).

In Freudian dream theory, dream interpretation once more assumed a prominent role as the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious. This was associated with claims about the psychic sources of dreaming. Freud (1899) also rejected the influence of external or bodily sources, as championed by contemporary proponents of somatic-stimulus theory.

In the neuroscience of dreaming, Hobson famously argued that dreams are the product of the random, brain-stem driven activation of the brain during sleep (Hobson 1988) and at best enable personal insights in the same way as a Rorschach test (Hobson et al. 2000). Dennett (1991) illustrates the lack of design underlying the production of dream narratives through the “party game of psychoanalysis”, which involves an aimless game of question-and-answer. In the game, players follow simple rules to jointly produce narratives that can seem symbolic and meaningful, even though no intelligent and deliberate process of narration was involved.

Even if we grant that dreams are not messages from a hidden entity in need of decoding, this does not imply that dream interpretation cannot be a personally meaningful source of insight and creativity (Hobson & Wohl 2005). Whether and under which conditions, and following which methods, dream interpretation can lead to personally significant insights is an empirical question that is only beginning to be investigated systematically (see Edwards et al. 2013).

Finally, throughout history, views on the epistemic status of dreams and the type of knowledge to be gained from dream interpretation (e.g., knowledge about the future, diagnosis of physical illness, or insights about one’s current concerns) often changed in tandem with views on the origin and sources of dreaming, which gradually moved from divine origins and external sources, via the body, to the unconscious, and finally to the brain.

Different theories on the functions of dreaming have been proposed and the debate is ongoing. An important distinction is between the functions of sleep stages and the functions of dreaming. Well-documented functions of REM sleep include thermoregulation and the development of cortical structures in birds and mammals, as well as neurotransmitter repletion, the reconstruction and maintenance of little-used brain circuits, the structural development of the brain in early developmental phases, as well as the preparation of a repertoire of reflexive or instinctive behaviors (Hobson 2009). Yet none of these functions are obviously linked to dreaming. An exception is protoconsciousness theory, in which REM sleep plays an important role in foetal development by providing a virtual world model even before the emergence of full-blown consciousness (Hobson 2009: 808) .

Numerous studies have investigated the contribution of sleep to memory consolidation, with different sleep stages promoting different types of memories (Diekelmann et al. 2009; Walker 2009). However, only a few studies have investigated the relationship between dream content and memory consolidation in sleep (for a review, see Nielsen & Stenstrom 2005). Dreams rarely involve episodic replay of waking memories (Fosse et al. 2003). The incorporation of memory sources seems to follow a specific temporal pattern in which recent memories are integrated with older but semantically related memories (Blagrove et al. 2011). Nielsen (2017) presents a model of how external and bodily stimuli on one hand and short- and long-term memories on the other hand form seemingly novel, complex, and dreamlike images at sleep onset; he proposes these microdreams shed light on the formation and sources of more complex dreams. There is also some evidence that dream imagery might be associated with memory consolidation and task performance after sleep, though this is preliminary (Wamsley & Stickgold 2009, 2010; Wamsley et al. 2010).

Prominent theories on the function of dreaming focus on bad dreams and nightmares. It has long been thought that dreaming contributes to emotional processing and that this is particularly obvious in the dreams of nightmare sufferers or in dreams following traumatic experiences (e.g., Hartmann 1998; Nielsen & Lara-Carrasco 2007; Levin & Nielsen 2009; Cartwright 2010; Perogamvros et al. 2013). Based on the high prevalence of negative emotions and threatening dream content, threat simulation theory suggests that the evolutionary function of dreaming lies in the simulation of ancestral threats and the rehearsal of threatening events and avoidance skills in dreams has an adaptive value by enhancing the individual’s chances of survival (see Revonsuo 2000; Valli 2008). A more recent proposal is social simulation theory, in which social imagery in dreams supports social cognition, bonds, and social skills. (Revonsuo et al. 2015).

An evolutionary perspective can also be fruitfully applied to specific aspects of dream phenomenology. According to the vigilance hypothesis , natural selection disfavored the occurrence of those types of sensations during sleep that would compromise vigilance (Symons 1993). Dream sounds, but also smells or pains might distract attention from the potentially dangerous surroundings of the sleeping subject, and the vigilance hypothesis predicts that they only rarely occur in dreams without causing awakening. By contrast, because most mammals sleep with their eyes closed and in an immobile position, vivid visual and movement hallucinations during sleep would not comprise vigilance and thus can occur in dreams without endangering the sleeping subject. Focusing on the stuff dreams are not made of might then be at least as important for understanding the function of dreaming as developing a positive account.

Finally, even if dreaming in general and specific types of dream content in particular were found to be strongly associated with specific cognitive functions, it would still be possible that dreams are mere epiphenomena of brain activity during sleep (Flanagan 1995, 2000). It is also possible that the function of dreams is not knowable (Springett 2019).

A particular problem for any theory on the function of dreaming is to explain why a majority of dreams are forgotten and how dreams can fulfill their putative function independently of recall. Crick and Mitchinson (1983) famously proposed that REM sleep “erases” or deletes surplus information and unnecessary memories, which would suggest that enhanced dream recall is counterproductive. Another problem is that dreaming can be lost selectively and independently of other cognitive deficits (Solms 1997, 2000).

Some of the problems that arise for theories on the functions of dreaming can be avoided if we do not assume that dreaming has a specific function, separate from the function(s) of conscious wakeful states. This depends on the broader taxonomy of dreaming in relation to wakeful states. For example, if dreaming is continuous with waking mind wandering, imagination, and/or own-body perception, we should not expect it to have a unique function, but rather to express a similar function as these wakeful states, perhaps to varying degrees. Nor should we expect dreams to have a single function; the functions of dreaming might be as varied and complex as those of consciousness, and given the complexity of the target phenomenon, the failure to pin down a single function should not be surprising (Windt 2015a).

Questions about dreaming in different areas of philosophy such as epistemology, ontology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and ethics are closely intertwined. Scientific evidence from sleep and dream research can meaningfully inform the philosophical discussion and has often done so in the past. The discussion of dreaming has also often functioned as a lens on broader questions about knowledge, morality, consciousness, and self. Long a marginalized area, the philosophy of dreaming and of sleep is central to important philosophical questions and increasingly plays an important role in interdisciplinary consciousness research, for example in the search for the neural correlates of conscious states, in conscious state taxonomies, and in research on the minimal conditions for phenomenal selfhood and conscious experience.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Philosophy of Dreaming , entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
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• Dreams and Skepticism , PhilPapers collection.

belief | Berkeley, George | delusion | Descartes, René: epistemology | imagination | Locke, John | perception: the problem of | personal identity | personal identity: and ethics | Plato: on knowledge in the Theaetetus | sense data | skepticism | skepticism: and content externalism

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Regina Fabry and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and constructive criticism on an earlier version of this manuscript. And as always, I am greatly indebted to Stefan Pitz for his support.

Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer M. Windt < jennifer . windt @ monash . edu >

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32 “This I Believe” Essay

The history of ‘this i believe’.

by Tanya Matthews

This I Believe is an exciting media project that invites individuals from all walks of life to write about and discuss the core beliefs that guide their daily lives. They share these statements in weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered .

The series is based on the 1950’s radio program This I Believe , hosted by acclaimed journalist Edward R. Murrow. Each day, some 39-million Americans gathered by their radios to hear compelling essays from the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller and Harry Truman as well as corporate leaders, cab drivers, scientists and secretaries — anyone able to distill into a few minutes the guiding principles by which they lived. Their words brought comfort and inspiration to a country worried about the Cold War, McCarthyism and racial division.

Eventually, the radio series became a cultural phenomenon. Eighty-five leading newspapers printed a weekly column based on This I Believe . A collection of essays published in 1952 sold 300,000 copies — second only to the Bible that year. The series was translated and broadcast around the globe on the Voice of America. A book of essays translated into Arabic sold 30,000 copies in just three days.

[The NPR series This I Believe can be read and heard here . In addition, the website and organization This I Believe houses thousands of essays written by famous people, such as the ones mentioned above, and everyday people like you and me.]

As a college student in 2020, you are faced with turbulent politics, socioeconomic issues, and ethical dilemmas that will challenge you to take a stand and contribute to the local, national, and global conversation around you. The purpose of this writing task is not to persuade you to agree on the same beliefs. Rather, it is to encourage you to begin the much more difficult task of developing respect for beliefs different from your own. Fifty years ago, Edward R. Murrow’s project struck such a chord with millions of Americans. It can do so again today…with you.

Video Resources for Generating Ideas

Dan gediman on writing a “this i believe essay”.

Read Cecelia Munoz’s essay “Getting Angry Can Be a Good Thing” referred to in the previous video here .

“This I Believe” Essay with Animation

“This I Believe” Essay Ideas

Prewriting Activity

1) analyze others’ statements.

Consider the following statements, written in response to the question What Have You Learned About Life? Highlight any sentences that resonate with you. Talk about them with a partner or group, explaining why. 1. I’ve learned that when I wave to people in the country, they stop what they are doing and wave back. – Age 9 2. I’ve learned that if you want to cheer yourself up, you should try cheering someone else up. – Age 14 3. I’ve learned that although it’s hard to admit it, I’m secretly glad my parents are strict with me. – Age 15 4. I’ve learned that if someone says something unkind about me, I must live so that no one will believe it. – Age 39 5. I’ve learned that there are people who love you dearly but just don’t know how to show it. – Age 42 6. I’ve learned that you can make someone’s day by simply sending them a little note. – Age 44 7. I’ve learned that the greater a person’s sense of guilt, the greater his or her need to cast blame on others. – Age 46 8. I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. – Age 48 9. I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you miss them terribly after they die. – Age 53 10. I’ve learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life. – Age 58 11. I’ve learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. – Age 62 12. I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with kindness, I usually make the right decision. – Age 66 13. I’ve learned that it pays to believe in miracles. And to tell the truth, I’ve seen several. – Age 75 14. I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one. – Age 82 15. I’ve learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love that human touch—holding hands, a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. – Age 85 16. I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn. – Age 92

2) Compose Your Own Statement

Write down a sentence that expresses what YOU have learned about life. Maybe it is similar to one of the statements above; maybe it’s completely different. Whatever it is, write it down.

3) Freewrit e

Now free-write about your sentence. Include at least two examples / experiences that you have had that support why you think this way.

Personal Statement/Philosophy: ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Why do you believe in this statement? ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Name two experiences that you had that would support the statement: _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ What does this say about yourself or your personality? _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ After your life experience, how have you come to the conclusion that this should be your statement? How have your beliefs changed, if at all? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ How has the event effected your relationship with a person, place, or object? _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ How does your statement apply to you today? (How you view yourself & society) ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

SAMPLE STUDENT ESSAYS

Sample #1: america’s beauty is in its diversity.

written by Alaa El-Saad,  high school student,  as heard on NPR’s Tell Me More (2009)

America is built on the idea of freedom, and there is no exception for Muslim women. I believe in the freedom of religion and speech. But mostly, I believe it’s OK to be different, and to stand up for who and what you are. So I believe in wearing the hijab.

The hijab is a religious head covering, like a scarf. I am Muslim and keeping my head covered is a sign of maturity and respect toward my religion and to Allah’s will. To be honest, I also like to wear it to be different. I don’t usually like to do what everyone else is doing. I want to be an individual, not just part of the crowd. But when I first wore it, I was also afraid of the reaction that I’d get at school.

I decided on my own that sixth grade was the time I should start wearing the hijab. I was scared about what the kids would say or even do to me. I thought they might make fun of me, or even be scared of me and pull off my headscarf. Kids at that age usually like to be all the same, and there’s little or no acceptance for being different.

On the first day of school, I put all those negative thoughts behind my back and walked in with my head held high. I was holding my breath a little, but inside I was also proud to be a Muslim, proud to be wearing the hijab, proud to be different.

I was wrong about everything I thought the kids would say or even do to me. I actually met a lot of people because of wearing my head covering. Most of the kids would come and ask me questions—respectfully—about the hijab, and why I wore it.

I did hear some kid was making fun of me, but there was one girl—she wasn’t even in my class, we never really talked much—and she stood up for me, and I wasn’t even there! I made a lot of new friends that year, friends that I still have until this very day, five years later.

Yes, I’m different, but everyone is different here, in one way or another. This is the beauty of America. I believe in what America is built on: all different religions, races and beliefs. Different everything.

Sample #2: The Essentials to Happiness

written by Alexxandra Schuman, high school student, as heard on The Bob Edwards Show (2013)

As a child, I was generally happy; singing and dancing to my favorite songs; smiling and laughing with my friends and family. But as far back as second grade, I noticed a “darkness,” about me. I didn’t enjoy engaging in many things. I didn’t relate to my peers in elementary school because they appeared so happy, and I didn’t have that ability to achieve happiness so easily.

In middle school things in my life began to get even worse. I began withdrawing from everything I once enjoyed; swimming, tennis, family. I hated going to sleep knowing I had to wake up to another day. I was always tired. Everything was horrible. Finally, midway through eighth grade, I was told I had a chemical imbalance; diagnosed with clinical depression and put on medication. It took months for me to feel the effects of the medication.

When I began to feel happy again, is when I realized that I had to take the responsibility for getting better myself, rather than relying on medication and therapy alone. Aristotle said, “To live happily is an inward power of the soul,” and I believe that this quote describes what I had to do to achieve happiness. Happiness is a journey. Everyone seems to need different things to be happy. But I believe people are blinded from what truly makes one happy.

Growing up, we’re encouraged to be successful in life; but how is success defined? Success and happiness are imagined now as having a lot of money. It is so untrue. Recently I went to Costa Rica and visited the small town of El Roble. I spent the day with a nine-year old girl named Marilyn. She took me to her house to meet her parents. It was obvious that they were not rich; living in a small house with seven children. The house was cluttered but full of life. Those who have decided that success and happiness comes from having money and a big house would be appalled at how utterly happy this family from El Roble is. People say that seeing things like that make you appreciate what you have, but for me, it made me envy them for being so happy without all the things I have.

“The essentials to happiness are something to love, something to do, and something to hope for,” a quote from William Blake sums up what I believe people need to realize to be truly happy in life. People need love; I feel they need their family and their friends more than anything in the world. People need work to do, something to make them feel they are making a difference in the world. People need to know that more good is to come in the future, so they continue to live for “now” instead of constantly worrying about the bad that could come. And most importantly people need to know that happiness is not something that happens overnight. Love and hope is happiness.

Sample #3: Find a Good Frog

written by Delia Motavalli, high school student, as heard on The Bob Edwards Show (2013)

I believe in finding a good frog. It seems that all throughout childhood, we are taught to look for a happily ever after. “And they all lived happily ever after”; isn’t that the conclusion to many children’s films? When I was a kid I always thought of that as magical; but now really it just seems unrealistic. And it teaches us that what we want is a fairytale like they have in the storybooks. We all want to be Cinderella who gets swept off her feet by the hot prince; we want to live in the royal castle, right? But I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing for us to seek. Now I’m not saying I believe in being pessimistic, but I do believe in being realistic; it’s something I got from my mom.

My mother and I always have our best conversations in the rain. We sit in the car, neither of us wanting to brave the rain to get to the house. So we sit. We watch droplets race down the windshield, listen to the rain strike the roof of her little blue Honda, and feel the heater on full-blast rushing at our feet (just the way we like it). I don’t know why, but sitting in the car, we always talk more than normal. There was one rainy day when my mom told me something that is going to stick with me forever. Earlier that day she and my dad had been arguing about something; I can’t remember what. So she said, “Don’t spend your life looking for Prince Charming. Instead, find yourself a really good frog.”

At the time, I found this thought really disheartening. Who wants to think that you’ll never find Prince Charming? You’ll never get to be Cinderella? Another thought that struck my mind: if my mom says there’s no Prince Charming, then what’s my dad? A frog? I asked her, and she replied with, “Of course! If he were Prince Charming, he wouldn’t snore, would be able to cook, and we would never argue. But you know what? He’s a damn good frog.” Of course, being young, I didn’t think of the meaning behind what she was saying. I was too busy thinking of it literally, visualizing my mom as a princess and my dad in frog form.

But a few years later, I understand the value of my mom’s words. You can’t expect everything to be perfect. Let’s be completely honest; if you wait your whole life for your prince with flowing hair, statuesque features, and a white horse, you’re going to be lonely. I think that the point of finding a good frog is you accept something that’s great, flaws and all. It’s so easy to be picky. You can find the one tiny thing that’s wrong, and that one tiny thing is what you can’t get your mind off of. But in life, we can’t afford to wait years in vain for perfection. So I think that a good frog, an amazing frog, the best frog you can find is what we’re really looking for in this world. Don’t laze through life waiting for a happily ever after, because I don’t think you’ll be very happy with the outcome.

Examples from the ‘This I Believe’ Website

Be Cool to the Pizza Dude by Sarah Adams

They Lived Their Faith by Charles Henry Parrish

Returning to What’s Natural by Amelia Baxter-Stoltzfus

The Birthright of Human Dignity by Will Thomas

Remembering All The Boys by Elvia Bautista

I Am Still The Greatest by Muhammad Ali

A Goal Of Service To Humankind by Anthony Fauci

My Life Is Better by Abraham

Give Me a Waffle by Brenda

The Little Things by Sophie Crossley

You can also browse thousands more This I Believe essays by theme .

Prefer to Listen to Get Inspiration?

Check out This I Believe’s Podcast Series

4) Drafting

Assignment guidelines + suggestions and tips for drafting.

1. While the examples you’ve been given can serve as a model, it is essential that each of you write about a personal belief or philosophy that you feel strongly about. 2. Tell a story. Personal experiences are the corner stone of a good essay. Your story doesn’t have to be a heart breaker or even a major event, but it must be something that has affected how you think, feel, and act. List your personal experiences that you intend to use as evidence below: 3. Be concise. Avoid repetition. This essay should be between 500 – 650 words. When read aloud, it should take roughly four minutes. 4. Name your belief. It is essential that you can name your belief in a sentence or two. Focus on one belief only. This is your thesis. Write it here: 5. Be positive. Avoid preaching or persuading. You aren’t trying to change the way others think or act. Write about what you believe, not what you don’t believe. 6. Use the first person. Speak for yourself. Avoid using we or you. 7. Let your voice shine. Use language that sounds like you. Read it aloud as your revise. Keep making changes until your essay sounds like you and captures the essence of your belief.

5) Peer Review

Once you have written your first draft, arrange for your essay to be edited by a peer, using the following Peer-Editing Checklist: Writer’s Name: ________________________________________________ Peer Editor’s Name: ________________________________________________ Use your PENCIL or PEN (NOT red or green) to make corrections. Remember, this essay is a work in progress. You are not done writing! Look for ways to improve what you’ve already written. Tick each step if it has been completed. _____ 1. Read the paper backwards, one sentence at a time. Check for spelling errors. Use a dictionary, a friend, or a spell checker to find the correct spelling. _____ 2. Check for capitalized proper nouns and the first word of each sentence. _____ 3. Skip a line between each paragraph. _____ 4. Every sentence should have end punctuation. _____ 5. Check commas. Are they only used for compound sentences, a list of items, an introductory word or phrase, direct address, setting off interruptions, separating adjectives, or in dates? Do you need to add commas? Make sure you do not have commas separating complete sentences (i.e. comma splice errors that create run-on sentences). _____ 6. Apostrophes are used only for contractions and to show ownership. _____ 7. The use of more complex punctuation (dashes, hyphens, semi-colons, parentheses, etc.) is done correctly. _____ 8. Have you used commonly mixed pairs of words correctly? Check these: they’re/their/there, your/you’re, it’s/its, a/an, to/too/two, are/our/hour, and others. _____ 9. Read the paper backwards one sentence at a time. Check for sentence fragments and run-ons and correct them. _____ 10. Did you stay in present tense (such as is, am, do, take, know, etc.) or past tense (such as was, were, did, took, knew, etc.) throughout the entire essay? _____ 11. Did you stay in first person (I, me, my, we, us, our) or third person (he, him, she, her, they, them, their) throughout the entire essay? _____ 12. Was there adequate use of specific details and sensory details? Were the details clear and relevant to the statement? _____ 13. Is the overall purpose/philosophy clear? _____ 14. Does the conclusion make you go, “Wow!” “Cool!” “I never thought about it that way,” or any other similar reaction? Other suggestions for the overall content of the piece: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This I Believe by Tanya Matthews is licensed by CC-BY-SA

“This I Believe” Essay Copyright © 2020 by Liza Long; Amy Minervini; and Joel Gladd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Beliefs About Sleep

Beliefs about sleep.

Did you know that faulty beliefs and excessive worry about sleep can make insomnia worse? Are your thoughts about sleep causing you to lose sleep? Dr. Charles Morin and colleagues created a 16 question assessment to help you learn about your own beliefs and attitude toward insomnia. There are no right or wrong answers. However, higher scores could indicate that the strong belief or attitude could be a trigger for worry or concern about insomnia making it harder to fall asleep at night.

For each statement, move the slider from 0 to 10 to correspond with your own personal belief, even if it does not apply directly to your situation.

The 16-item Dysfunctional Beliefs and Attitudes About Sleep (DBAS-16) assessment. © Charles Morin, 1993

Your score:

Researchers suggest that a score of 3.5 or higher can be used to identify people whose beliefs about insomnia may be part of the reason they are experiencing insomnia. If you are one of these people, you are encouraged to focus on your thinking around insomnia as an important component of your treatment of insomnia. It is possible that beliefs scoring less than 3.5 can also be associated with insomnia and it is also possible that scores above 3.5 come from people who are good sleepers.

Print my self-assessment

Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Believe, Sleep, Play: 3 Research-Based Ideas for Effective Teaching

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So much research is done on education, and so much of it doesn’t get communicated to us teachers.

This multipart series will share various research findings that contributors feel educators should know.

Believing in Students

Ron Berger has over 45 years of experience in education, 28 of them as a public school teacher. He is the author of a collection of books on education, including Management in the Active Classroom and Leaders of Their Own Learning . He leads EL Education’s vision for teaching and learning:

I was discussing education with my friend Albert during a long run when he surprised me with a bold statement: “Well, there’s only one thing that matters about being a good teacher.” Having worked in education for almost 50 years, I told him with an amused smile that I had no idea what that one thing was.

Albert said: “The only thing that matters is that the teacher believes in you. And that they act on that.”

I asked him to say more.

He said, “I was a knucklehead of a student, making bad choices and being a wise guy. I did not come from an academic background. I was not wealthy; I was not white. None of my teachers thought I would amount to anything, and they showed that in how they treated me. In all my time in school, there were only two teachers who saw my potential and believed in me. They told me so and they pushed me and had high expectations for me. Now I’m about to get my Ph.D., and it’s all because of those two teachers.”

Most of us working in education believe that things are not that simple.

But there is much truth in what Albert said, and a body of compelling recent research makes that clear. A group of brilliant researchers, many of whom studied at Stanford with Carol Dweck’s mindset-focused team, continue to lead studies that make Albert’s statement seem profound. That group includes David Yeager, Greg Walton, Jason Okonofua, and Dave Paunesku.

I will describe just two studies here while encouraging readers to look into more work from these researchers.

In 2013, David Yeager and colleagues tested out the power of what simple written feedback that conveyed belief in students could achieve. In their words:

“7 th -grade students wrote first drafts of a five-paragraph essay about their personal heroes. Next, teachers covered the essays with comments. Before the students got the comments, though, the research team attached hand-written notes from the teachers to the essays—either a “treatment” note or a “control” note. (Teachers wrote the notes, but they didn’t know which student got which note or what the study was trying to test.) Half the students were in the treatment group, which provided wise feedback.

The treatment note with the wise feedback said, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high standards, and I know that you can meet them.” Half the students were in a control group that got a non-specific control note along the lines of, “I’m sharing these comments so you have feedback on your essay,” which conveyed no clear benevolent reason for the feedback. Teachers handed back the essays (in sealed folders so they couldn’t see who got which note). Then, students had a week to revise their essays.”

The results:

“Our study showed that students who got the wise feedback note were twice as likely to revise their essays as those who didn’t: 40% revised their essays in the control group, but 80% revised them in the treatment group. The next year, when we ran the study with new students in the same teachers’ classes, we required all students to revise their essays. We found that students made more than twice as many of the teachers’ suggested corrections (e.g., you need to put a comma here, explain this idea further, rearrange this sentence), from 2.2 in the control to 5.5 when they got the wise feedback treatment note. What’s more, we found more equitable outcomes. Although students benefited overall from wise feedback, those belonging to minority groups (in this case, Black students) benefited most, which eliminated racial disparities in their revisions.”

You can read the full study here .

In 2021, Greg Walton, Jason Okonofua, and colleagues published a study about an intervention to help adjudicated youth—students who had been incarcerated—successfully reenter school.

In the researchers’ words:

“The intervention was simple to implement yet precisely designed, timed, and targeted. Students reflected on their values and goals in school and identified and introduced themselves to an educator with whom they wished to build a stronger relationship—all in a 45-minute to 60-minute one-on-one session a few days after reentering school. This educator then received the student’s self-introduction in a one-page letter from our team requesting their support.

Unlike past interventions, this approach focuses on students and educators simultaneously in an integrated manner. When reentering school, youths have already been told that they do not belong, stereotypes are palpably on the table, and trust has been broken. Even if students approach an educator with a positive mindset, they may not be well-received. Thus, we aimed to support (a) students’ belief in the value and possibility of cultivating positive relationships with educators as well as (b) educators’ receptiveness to those efforts. We targeted the relationship, not either person alone.”

“In a preliminary field trial (N = 47), presenting this self-introduction to this educator in a one-page letter via a third party requesting the educator’s help reduced recidivism to juvenile detention through the next semester from 69% to 29%. In Study 2, the letter led experienced teachers (N = 349) to express greater commitment to, anticipate more success for, and feel more love and respect for a student beginning their reentry into school …”

You can read the full paper here.

These studies, which piloted interventions to change the student-teacher relationship closer to Albert’s vision—a relationship where the student feels that a teacher believes in them—did not improve outcomes by a small percentage. In both cases, the increase was greater than 100 percent, more than doubling the positive effects.

“The only thing that matters is that the teacher believes in you. And that they act on that.”

Albert, who is now a professor and teacher himself, was not so far off in this bold statement. Many things matter in education, but perhaps none quite so much as the need for students to feel that their teachers believe in them and will honor them with high expectations and support.

Teachers Need to Sleep

Wendi Pillars, a national-board-certified teachers, has been teaching nearly three decades, both overseas and stateside, in grades K-12. She currently teaches biology and earth science and works with multilingual learners at the high school level. She is the author of Visual Impact: Quick, Easy Tools for Thinking in Pictures . Connect with her on Twitter @wendi322:

As teachers, sleep often takes a backseat to our daily commitments, leaving us feeling exhausted and mentally drained, so it’s crucial to recognize how important sleep is for maintaining our physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Want to snooze your way to success? Check out these scientifically backed tips to optimize your sleep habits and know that most people hugely underestimate their need for sleep. Michael Roizen, the chief wellness officer of the Cleveland Clinic, says, “Sleep is our most underrated health habit.” A National Sleep Foundation report backs this up: Two-thirds of Americans are not getting enough sleep on weeknights.

Prioritize Sleep for Improved Performance

Sleep expert Matthew Walker, in his book “Why We Sleep,” emphasizes the essential role of sleep in memory consolidation and learning. For teachers, a well-rested mind is more receptive to new information and can deliver lessons with enhanced clarity. Prioritizing sleep helps us to retain and recall information effectively, which in turn, leads to our improved performance both in the classroom and beyond.

Embrace the Power of Naps (don’t laugh!)

Late night gate duty? A second job? Grading 100 papers? We teachers often find ourselves juggling multiple responsibilities, which can lead to sleep deficits. To combat this, follow the advice of Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher and the author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life . She explains how a short power nap—even as little as six minutes(!!)—can enhance cognitive function, creativity, and productivity. Her research shows that “Learning after a nap is equal to learning after a full night of sleep.” Although not always possible, could you try to integrate a well-timed six-minute nap during the day knowing it could lead to a more engaging and effective teaching experience?

Create a Sleep-Inducing Environment

Shawn Stevenson, the author of Sleep Smarter, emphasizes the importance of optimizing your bedroom environment for getting a restful night’s sleep. As teachers, we can benefit from dimming the lights, reducing noise, shunning TVs and screens, and maintaining a comfortable room temperature (65, ideally). I realize many of us have kids and challenging circumstances, so how much of this can you do within the constraints of your reality? What’s just one thing you could tweak knowing these factors help us wake up ready to face the challenges of the day?

Set a Consistent Sleep Schedule

Inconsistent sleep schedules disrupt our internal circadian rhythm, also leading to sleep deprivation. Michael Breus, known as “the sleep doctor,” advises setting a consistent sleep schedule, even on weekends since regular sleep and wake-up times help synchronize our body’s internal clock, promoting better sleep patterns and overall well-being. Remember that your day actually begins the night before!

Limit Screen Time Before Bed

Excessive screen time before bedtime has become a ubiquitous sleep disruptor. Drawing from Arianna Huffington’s research in her book The Sleep Revolution, teachers must recognize the impact of electronic devices on sleep quality. Blue light emitted by screens interferes with the production of melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep. Establish a digital sunset before bedtime (start with 15 minutes, then make it longer, aiming for at least an hour with no screentime), to allow your mind to unwind naturally.

Your Overall Health Depends on Sleep

In 2015, experts from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society determined that a minimum of seven hours of sleep a night is essential for optimal health. Sleep deprivation has profound physiological consequences including hormone disruption, increased cortisol levels, impaired glucose metabolism, increased risk of obesity and diabetes, and a weakened immune system. Mentally, sleep deprivation impairs cognitive function, attention, and decisionmaking abilities. Teachers may experience difficulty processing information, leading to reduced teaching efficacy and especially patience. Emotionally, insufficient sleep can lead to mood swings, depression, irritability, and decreased emotional resilience, affecting our interactions with students and colleagues. We don’t need any of that!

Bonus Tip: Cortisol and Weight: The Sleep Connection

Lack of sleep also plays a significant role in weight management, with a crucial link between sleep deprivation, cortisol levels, and weight gain. Cortisol, aka, the “stress hormone,” is released in response to stressors, including sleep deprivation. When we don’t get enough sleep, our cortisol levels remain elevated, leading to increased feelings of stress and anxiety. Elevated cortisol levels in turn trigger cravings for high-calorie, sugary, and fatty foods.

Consequently, teachers who regularly experience sleep deprivation may find themselves reaching for unhealthy snacks to cope with fatigue and stress. Chronic sleep deprivation further disrupts the balance of hunger-regulating hormones, such as leptin and ghrelin, which leads to an increased appetite and reduced feelings of satiety. This combination of factors can contribute to weight gain over time. Prioritizing consistent sleep can help teachers regulate cortisol levels and hormonal balance to support weight-management goals.

An Obvious Conclusion

As educators, it’s a nonnegotiable to recognize quality sleep not as a luxury but as a necessity for thriving in our teacher roles with unique demands. Make sleep a priority . As we dial in our own seven hours of sleep, we can then model and teach these same ideas to our students to develop an incredibly engaged learning environment.

The Importance of Play

Marina Rodriguez is a 6th grade dual-language arts teacher at a Title I intermediate school in College Station, Texas. She has taught in a dual-language program for 17 years and is a former co-author of Two Writing Teachers . She can be reached through her website, marinarodz.com , or on Twitter @mrodz308 :

One research finding I think teachers should know more about is the importance of play in the classroom. Students who participate in play gain a learning advantage. It’s the reason many teachers often integrate play into academic practice, but what exactly is play? What is the impact of play on students? How can we add more play to our learning environments?

What exactly is play?

There are many ways to define play. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics 2018 clinical report on play, “ There is a growing consensus that it is an activity that is intrinsically motivated, entails active engagement, and results in joyful discovery. ”

Play can be physical, intellectual, or social/emotional. It can be guided, unstructured, or a combination of both. Regardless of the descriptive variations, play is foundational for learning.

What is the impact of play on students?

Play directly impacts cognitive and psychological development. According to a 2016 analysis by Cambridge University psychology and education researcher David Whitebread, “ Neuroscientific studies have shown that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for the uniquely human higher mental functions.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a clinical report in 2018 that noted: “ In the presence of childhood adversity, the role of play becomes even more important in that the mutual joy and shared attunement that parents and children can experience during play downregulates the body’s stress response. Hence, play may be an effective antidote to the changes in amygdala size, impulsivity, aggression, and uncontrolled emotion that result from significant childhood adversity and toxic stress. ”

For multilingual students, play leads to trust, and trust leads to language acquisition. The invisible rule I’ve learned as a classroom teacher is that trust comes before learning . Play-based practices help establish trust by increasing levels of serotonin, dopamine, GABA, and other feel-good hormones, resulting in a reduction of stress and anxiety. Reductions in stress and anxiety help open a student’s affective filter for language acquisition, according to American linguist, educational researcher, and professor of education Stephen Krashen’s “affective filter hypothesis.”

Students who play experience an improvement in memory, attention, and concentration. They are more able to stay on-task, demonstrate less disruptive behavior, and improve their social and emotional development. Play can undoubtedly make a significant impact on students.

How can we add more play to our learning environments?

There are endless ways to bring play into the classroom. Below are a few ways play and learning can join classroom practice:

• Number games
• Passion projects
• Hearing and telling stories
• Classroom discussions
• Any hands-on experiment or lesson led by the energy of a passionate teacher

We do not have to transform our classrooms into absolute play-based environments, but it is important to remember that adding a bit more play is not as hard as it might seem.

In Conclusion

The impact of play on memory, attention, concentration, and behavior is well-researched. The neurological stimulation that play creates in the brain is important for all ages, from early childhood to adulthood. While play is an important component of a healthy learning environment, it is usually the first to go when time is of the essence. The problem is that time is of the essence pretty much every single day in today’s classrooms.

The mental health issues exacerbated by the pandemic, ever-changing curriculum, and high-stakes testing leave little room for stressless spaces in the classroom. What remains of play is often minimal, placed into online platforms, or pushed into “ if we have extra time ” zones.

Play is essential for learning. The research is irrefutable. If we want students to thrive in school and in life, play must find a permanent place inside our classrooms.

Sahlberg, P. & Doyle, W. (2019). Let the Children Play. New York, NY: Oxford University Press

Freeman, D. & Freeman, Y. (2014). Essential Linguistics. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Thanks to Ron, Wendi, and Marina for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post began a series answering this question:

What are one to three research findings that you think teachers should know about but that you also think that many of them do not?

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email . And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 12 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list here .

The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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The Importance Of Believing In Sleep

Show More I Believe in Sleep You are sitting at your desk at 2:00 P.M. The teacher is talking. You can barely keep your eyes open and are struggling to stay awake. Your eyes are squinty and you repetitively blink to try your hardest to stay awake. You are no longer processing the words the teacher is saying because all your focus is on being so tired. Your head is bobbing from you wanting to just fall into a deep sleep after a long day, and a short amount of sleep the night before due to sports and homework. The clock is moving very slowly, and because you are having so much trouble to stay awake your day is miserable. Getting enough sleep is vital to completing day to day tasks successfully and with more enjoyment. So many people, whether at work or at school suffer from being tired during the day. Being tired defects your performance in everything you do by you not completing tasks that you could normally complete to your full potential.This is because your mental capacity is strained from extreme tiredness.It is also very hard to …show more content… Most high schoolers are involved in very busy lives trying to balance a job, sports,and homework all in one day/night after school ends at 3 P.M. In order to complete all of these things in one night and still get to bed on time,you have to use time management skills. This involves planning in advance and knowing how long each activity will take you. If it is late one night or you know that you will be staying up late, you just have to cut something out of your schedule. Although this is very hard, and you want to try and get as much as you can in one day, this step is extremely necessary. This is because not only is a lack of sleep putting your learning in danger, but also your life. If you are tired and driving, this does not make for a good combination. Next time when you are awake when you should be sound asleep in bed, ask yourself “Is this really worth it?”, and then just go to

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According to recent studies, “…not sleeping for 24 hours is the equivalent of having a blood alcohol level of .10, the legal limit in most states” (Source 1). Because of this, “…drowsy drivers are responsible for at least 100,000 automobile crashes, 71,000 injuries, and 1,550 fatalities each year” (Source 2), as stated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Most of these problems are caused by a lack of sleep, or sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is the condition of not having an adequate amount of sleep. Although it is understandable to skip a couple hours of sleep once in a while, it is proven to be deleterious to one’s health and body if one has had a lack of sleep for a long period of time.…

Persuasive Essay: Fatigue Away !

Fatigue AWAY! Let's admit it, a lot of people don't have a lot of time throughout the day. Most of us have a lot to get done and it seems there just isn't enough hours in the day to accomplish all of our priorities. Have you been sacrificing hours of sleep in order to do so? Or guzzling ten cups of coffee a day just to keep your eyes open?…

What Is The Importance Of Sleep Deprivation Among College Students

What I Already Know. College kids and young adult strive for but ultimately underachieve, what is it? Sleep. Most people know that eight hours is the minimum amount of sleep that a college student must receive to be fully alert and ready to go. What really happens is that a lot of us don’t get all the sleep we strive for and forces the body to go into what scientist call “sleep debt.”…

Nap Persuasive Speech

Intro Attention Getter: You may think that sleep isn’t an important factor in your life, but you are wrong. Setting the Stage: For example, if you went to sleep late, and didn’t get enough sleep the day after, you could find it harder to sleep and harder to think clearly. Thesis Statement:…

Why Do High School Students Have A Lack Of Sleep Essay

As many high school students graduate from high school they don’t know how to survive in the real world or they don’t know how to apply to colleges. Many students also lack knowledge because they may have work after school, they have homework, and they have to take care of themselves, which causes their lack of sleep. Lack of sleep is also a big problem since schools start so early. Finally, going through high school and college many students have lack of sleep and it affects their learning, and in high school they don’t even learn how to cook or pay their own bill’s, many people have tried to fix these problems in the past and they still do but there have been many problems with it and some schools have just given up and decided not to teach them.…

Related Topics

• Sleep deprivation
• Sleep disorder
• Sleep medicine
• Sleep apnea
• High school

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The big idea: what if dreaming is the whole point of sleep?

Rather than being an optional extra, dreams might be vital to our functioning

E xposed, the undulating surface of the brain is shimmering and opalescent, punctuated with arteries and veins. Give any part of it the tiniest jolt of electricity with a pen-like probe and it will activate the neurons in that spot. Neurosurgeons use this technique during some types of brain surgery to locate the source of seizures, or to avoid damaging vital tissue.

While the procedure is happening, the patient is awake, but feels nothing, since the brain doesn’t have so-called nociceptors, or pain sensors . Because the thin, outermost layer is responsible for consciousness, language, perception, memory and thought, moving the probe from spot to spot can reveal quite a lot. It can trigger smells, memories of childhood – even nightmares. Use the probe to touch a particular part of the brain: nightmare on. Remove the probe: nightmare off. In this way, I’ve witnessed first-hand how dreams are truly part of the neural architecture. They’re very much built into our bodies.

I’ve also observed the power of dreams to persist in the face of terrible injury. I’ve seen how children who have had half their brains removed as a last-resort treatment for intractable seizures still report dreaming. I have come to realise that virtually everyone has dreams, though we often don’t remember them. And of course, people born blind dream. They make up for their lack of visual content by experiencing more sound, touch, taste and smell than sighted people.

Recent research suggests that dreams may also play a bigger role in our sleep than previously thought. For decades, scientists studying dreaming focused on only one stage of sleep, so-called rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep. They concluded that we spend about two hours a night dreaming, more or less. If you do the maths, this adds up to about a 12th of our lives immersed in dreams, a month out of every year. That would represent an enormous commitment to dreaming. But it turns out that even that may be a gross underestimate. When researchers at sleep labs wake up study participants at different points – not just during REM sleep – they find that dreaming is possible at any stage. It’s conceivable that we actually spend almost a third of our lives dreaming.

Dreams are the product of profound changes the brain automatically undergoes each night. The rational, executive network in the brain is switched off, and the imaginative, visual and emotional parts are dialled way up. As a result, the dreaming mind is given free rein in a way that has no parallel in our waking lives. We couldn’t think this way when we are awake even if we tried.

Far from being dormant, the sleeping brain burns glucose and pulses with electricity to produce dreams. But why devote this kind of energy to the creation of wildly imaginative and highly emotional nocturnal experiences for an audience of one – especially when they often seem nonsensical? I’m confident that we wouldn’t expend the resources required for dreaming, while leaving ourselves more vulnerable to predators, unless dreams were a vital feature of our minds.

There are a number of theories that attempt to explain the evolutionary benefits of dreaming. These include keeping our minds nimble while we sleep, making us more intuitive, giving us outrageous scenarios so we can better understand the everyday, serving as an overnight therapist, and rehearsing threats so that we’re better prepared. Evidence for the latter includes one study that showed prospective medical students who had dreamed about things going terribly wrong during their entrance exam tended to do better when they took it the following day.

I believe there may be some truth to all of these theories. As our brains have evolved over millions of years, it seems reasonable that the role of dreams has expanded and evolved with them. We don’t try to find a single evolutionary benefit for waking thought. Why should we attempt to constrain the purpose of dreams?

During my training, I spent some time in transplant surgery. When we put in hearts and lungs, kidneys and livers, we never connected the nerves. Give that some thought for a moment, as I have. What I realised was that our most vital organs are passive participants in the sleeping body. This suggests to me that it’s not so much the body that needs to sleep, but the brain. In fact, the dreaming brain shuts the body down through a form of chemical paralysis, liberating itself to fully experience the dream without risking bodily injury by it being acted out.

What should we conclude from all of this? Essentially, that dreaming is not some optional extra, a kind of decoration on top of the serious business of sleep. No, we need to dream. If we’re sleep deprived, the first thing we catch up on is dreaming. Spend a whole night awake, as I often did during training, and the next night of sleep explodes into vivid, REM dreaming, rather than following the normal 90-minute sleep cycle. And if you’ve had enough sleep but are dream deprived (something only possible because of interventions made in a sleep lab), you immediately start dreaming as soon as you fall asleep again.

Even in the total absence of sleep, vivid dreams can emerge. Among people with fatal familial insomnia , a rare and lethal genetic disease that makes sleep impossible, the need is so strong that dreams escape their normal confines, leaking into waking life.

There is so much focus these days on the benefits of sleep for our mental and physical health. That’s entirely justified. But given the many potential benefits of dreaming for our waking life, maybe it’s not the sleep we really need, but the dreams.

Rahul Jandial is a neuroscientist and author of  This Is Why You Dream ( Cornerstone ).

Further reading

Why We Sleep : The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker (Penguin, £10.99)

When Brains Dream : Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep by Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold (WW Norton, £13.99)

The Shapeless Unease : My Year in Search of Sleep by Samantha Harvey (Vintage, £9.99)

• Neuroscience
• The big idea
• Health & wellbeing
• Human biology

Most viewed

Essay on I Believe in Sleep

"If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters." - Author unknown, attributed to Jim Davis.

Hands down, the best part of the night. After those never-ending school days, any problems I had quickly become insignificant because you know that once your head touches crisp, cool pillow they magically fade away. Suddenly everything else in the world is miniscule compared to sleeping. I've been there with the gargantuan amounts of homework that just keep piling up, but trust me when you fall into a deep slumber nothing seems to matter anymore. When I get buried in the sheets and blankets it's like I'm in my world. The only thing that can detach for this rejuvenating world is — an alarm clock.

Speaking of something that can disconnect me from the world of slumber is insomnia. I believe it's more deadly than a virus because at least a virus can be killed; insomnia just keeps coming back for more! In my opinion it's the worst thing that has ever existed! Nothing kills me more than when I know I lose time sleeping.

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How America Lost Sleep

Many Americans are reporting that they’d feel better if they slept more, but finding the right remedy isn’t always simple.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Over the past decade, sleep has become better understood as a core part of wellness. But the stressors of modern life mean that Americans are getting less of it.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic :

• The Supreme Court goes through the looking glass on presidential immunity.
• The inflation plateau
• The campus-left occupation that broke higher education

Sleep No More

In the 1980s, when Rafael Pelayo was a young medical student setting out in the field of sleep research, people thought he was wasting his time. At that point, our culture was not so obsessed with the subject of rest. Now, he told me, people acknowledge that he was onto something—and insomniacs circle him “like sharks to blood” when they hear what he does for a living. Pelayo, a clinical professor at the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center, says that the “tide is changing” in how society values sleep. Over the past decade, how, and how much, we sleep has become a major health and wellness concern.

It’s a subject on Americans’ minds: Late last year, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 2001, a majority of surveyed American adults said they would feel better if they slept more; 57 percent of people surveyed said that they need to get more sleep, up from 43 percent in 2013, when the data were last gathered.

People’s self-reported quantities of sleep are also on the decline. Compared with a decade ago, fewer people report getting eight hours or more of sleep, and more people say they get five hours or less. Just 36 percent of women report getting the sleep they need—down from more than half in 2013.

As anyone who has lain awake at night knows, anxiety can affect sleep. That Americans say they are not sleeping as well as they reported in 2013 likely can be blamed in part on the stresses of the pandemic, Brynn K. Dredla, a neurologist and sleep-medicine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, told me. “From a survival standpoint, if we’re under stress, our body thinks, Well, I have to be awake to deal with that stress ,” she explained. Our brains have trouble distinguishing between acute danger, such as a bear attack, and chronic stress. “For us to sleep, we need to have a physically and psychologically safe environment,” she said. (A cold, dark, quiet room—with Instagram and news apps far away from the bed and the mind—doesn’t hurt either.)

Teenagers aren’t sleeping enough, and they’re experiencing high levels of stress—particularly teen girls. Blaming the ubiquity of the smartphone for bad sleep would be easy, but Pelayo finds that too simplistic—after all, we “had sleep issues way before the phones came out,” he noted. Teens aren’t getting enough sleep, Pelayo argued, in part because school tends to start at such an ungodly hour (he has advocated for later start times, a legislative effort that has gained momentum in states including California and Florida). It doesn’t help that adolescents are generally not great at recognizing when they are sleepy. Teens need a lot of sleep, Dredla explained, and sleep deprivation often makes them frustrated, which in turn “will lead to behaviors that actually can start promoting wakefulness,” such as napping or drinking caffeine. It’s not just teens—anyone can build up “sleep debt” and get into a cycle of sleeping poorly, stimulating themselves to stay awake, having trouble sleeping at night, and doing it all over again.

As sleep has become more central to Americans’ conception of wellness, companies have swooped in to try to package sleep as a luxury good. A cottage industry of products , including specialized pillows, apps, and pills, has sprung up in recent years promising to help people sleep better. Some simple pieces of technology—better mattresses, better cooling systems—have indeed enhanced sleep over the decades. But you don’t necessarily need to buy more stuff in order to sleep better. Savvy marketing makes people think the solution is complex, but at its core, the human body wants to sleep. “You were sleeping in utero,” Pelayo reminded me.

Of course, knowing this is not always enough to help a person struggling to get solid sleep. Pelayo advises that a good step for people having trouble sleeping is to wake up at the same time every morning. Forcing yourself to fall asleep is nearly impossible; if someone offered you $1,000 to fall asleep immediately, it might get even harder. But, he said, you can make yourself wake up consistently.

A good night of sleep consists of four factors, Pelayo explained: amount of sleep, quality of sleep, timing of sleep, and state of mind. That last one is key, he said—if you don’t look forward to going to bed, or if you dread waking up in the morning, you may have a very hard time sleeping. People tend to blame themselves when they don’t sleep well. He suggests that a better route for such people is to try to move past “that self-blame, because it’s not helpful. We want to figure out what’s happening.” It could be that you have a sleep disorder; many women, for example, develop sleep apnea after menopause.

Over the decades, Pelayo has watched sleep wellness become more valued, in parallel to many Americans beginning to internalize the benefits of eating healthy foods. “Waking up tired is like leaving a restaurant hungry,” Pelayo said. Though many Americans seem to feel that way these days, he retains hope. The good news about sleep? Everyone can do it. “It’s a fun gig as a sleep doctor, because most patients get better.”

• The Protestant sleep ethic
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Today’s News

• An appeals court overturned Harvey Weinstein’s sex-crimes conviction in New York, where he has been serving his prison sentence. Since he was also convicted of sex offenses in Los Angeles, in 2022, his release is unlikely.
• The Supreme Court heard arguments in Donald Trump’s presidential-immunity case , addressing the question of whether a former president can enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct related to official acts that took place during their time in office.
• The Biden administration finalized a new regulation that would significantly reduce emissions and pollution from coal-fueled power plants by 2032.
• Time-Travel Thursdays : For centuries, Jews were accused of preparing their Passover food with Christian blood. Yair Rosenberg investigates the dark legacy and ongoing body count of this ancient anti-Semitic myth.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Why Your Vet Bill Is So High

By Helaine Olen

In the pandemic winter of 2020, Katie, my family’s 14-year-old miniature poodle, began coughing uncontrollably. After multiple vet visits, and more than $1,000 in bills, a veterinary cardiologist diagnosed her with heart failure. Our girl, a dog I loved so much that I wrote an essay about how I called her my “daughter,” would likely die within nine months. Katie survived for almost two years … [Her] extended life didn’t come cheap. There were repeated scans, echocardiograms, and blood work, and several trips to veterinary emergency rooms. One drug alone cost $300 a month, and that was after I shopped aggressively for discounts online. People like me have fueled the growth of what you might call Big Vet. As household pets have risen in status—from mere animals to bona fide family members—so, too, has owners’ willingness to spend money to ensure their well-being. Big-money investors have noticed.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic , Gary Shteyngart details his “seven agonizing nights” aboard the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever.

Analyze. In Taylor Swift’s “The Albatross”—a bonus track on her new album, The Tortured Poets Department —she identifies with the notorious bird from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem. Why does she see herself that way?

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

50 I Believe Essay Topics

To better train students on how to present their personal opinions on subjective matters, teachers will assign what is known as an “I Believe” or “This I Believe” essay writing assignment.

Designed to provide the reader with insight into the writer’s character, these essays are typically written in first-person point of view. The writer shares their beliefs on a particular topic – ranging from religion and politics to more personal subjects such as love and happiness – and offers supporting arguments for why they hold these beliefs.

The Challenges of Writing “I Believe” Essays

This type of essay prompt is a welcome break from more detail-oriented or researched-based writing assignments for many students. However, “I believe” essay writing assignments aren’t always easy.

It can be challenging for students to articulate their beliefs in a clear and concise way that isn’t argumentative or offensive to the reader. Students may also struggle to explain their reasoning behind these beliefs in a thorough and not overly simplistic way.

Despite these challenges, “I believe” essays can be an excellent opportunity for students to share their thoughts and feelings on important topics and learn more about themselves in the process.

Tips for Writing “I Believe” Essays

If you’re given an “I believe” essay assignment, here are a few tips to help you get started:

• Start by defining what it is that you believe. This may seem like a simple task, but it can be challenging to identify your core beliefs. If you’re struggling, start by jotting down a list of topics that are important to you – from politics and religion to family and friendship.
• Reflect on why each topic is important to you. Think about the reasoning behind your choices and how these reasons evolved over time. After all, your core beliefs are likely to have changed or grown since you reached adolescence.
• Determine which of your beliefs are the most important. Focusing on developing thought processes that support your beliefs. For extra help, consider sharing these thoughts with a trusted friend or family member for advice.

By reflecting upon your core beliefs and developing clear arguments to support them, you can craft a powerful “I believe” essay that will truly reflect your thoughts and feelings.

How to Write an “I Believe” Essay

To craft a well-written “I Believe” essay, students must forgo the typical essay structure of introduction, body, and conclusion.

Instead, the essay should be organized around a series of specific beliefs that the writer wishes to share. Each thought should be introduced with a clear thesis statement, followed by supporting arguments and examples.

The conclusion of the essay should wrap up the main points that have been made and leave the reader with a final thought to ponder.

Here is an example of how an “I Believe” essay might be structured:

Thesis: I believe that everyone has the right to love and be loved.

Argument: Everyone deserves to find love and experience happiness in their lives. This should not be limited by race, religion, socioeconomic status, or any other factor.

Example: I saw a video of a man proposing to his girlfriend at Fenway Park. She said yes and the crowd went wild! Now that is love. If they can find it, then so can we all!

Conclusion: Society should not stand in the way of love. Love is the most powerful force in the world, and we should all embrace it.

As you can see, the “I Believe” essay structure allows for a great deal of flexibility. Students can choose to focus on a variety of topics and can organize their essays in different ways. An “I Believe” essay can be an excellent opportunity for students to present their thoughts on important issues under a few simple guidelines. With a bit of planning and organization, this type of essay writing assignment can be a breeze!

What You Shouldn’t Do When Writing an “I Believe” Essay

To ensure that you are writing an “I Believe” essay and not another form of an argumentative or persuasive essay, avoid doing the following:

• Don’t provide evidence or use statistics to support your position – this is not an essay that calls for research.
• Don’t attack or criticize the beliefs of others – your goal is to share your own opinions, not to tear down those of others.
• Don’t go off on tangents – stay focused on the main points you want to make.
• Don’t speak objectively or in the third person – for example, don’t say “people believe that” or “studies show.”
• Don’t use filler words and phrases such as “I think,” “I feel,” and “it seems like.”

Use any of these 50 “I Believe” essay topics to help you brainstorm ideas for your essay!

I Believe Essay Topics About Life

• I believe that life is too short to spend time with people who bring you down.
• I believe that laughter is the best medicine
• I believe that we should make time for quiet reflection every day.
• I believe that the only thing that matters in life is love.
• I believe that we are all capable of change.
• I believe that it is never too late to learn and grow.
• I believe in the power of positive thinking.
• I believe that we should always be kind, even when it is difficult.
• I believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence.
• I believe in the saying “what goes around, comes around.”
• I believe that we are all responsible for our own happiness.
• I believe that the best things in life are free.
• I believe that it is essential to be grateful for what we have.
• I believe that it is never too late to achieve our dreams.
• I believe that we should surround ourselves with people who make us better.
• I believe that you can either love or hate something; there is no in-between.

I Believe Essay Topics About Education & School

• I believe that education is the key to a bright future
• I believe that children are our future and should be treasured as such.
• I believe that there is no such thing as a dumb question.
• I believe that schools should do more to celebrate diversity.
• I believe that homework is essential, but it should not be excessive.
• I believe in the importance of having a strong support system while attending school.
• I believe that standardized tests are not an accurate measure of a student’s knowledge.
• I believe that it is vital to find a balance between work and play while in school.
• I believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn how to swim.
• I believe in the importance of recess and physical activity in students’ lives.
• I believe that there is no such thing as a bad grade.
• I believe that teachers deserve more respect and better pay.
• I believe that it is never too early to learn a foreign language.
• I believe that education should be free for everyone.

I Believe Essay Topics About Friends & Family

• I believe that family is the most important thing in life.
• I believe that friends are the family we choose for ourselves.
• I believe that it is essential to maintain close relationships with friends and family.
• I believe that there is no substitute for quality time spent with loved ones.
• I believe that family is not defined by blood but by love and commitment.
• I believe that we should spend more time with the people we care about and less time worrying about material things.
• I believe that it is better to have a few close friends than many superficial ones.
• I believe that it is healthy for friends to grow apart.
• I believe that competition between friends is healthy.

I Believe Essay Topics About Money

• I believe that money cannot buy happiness.
• I believe that it is essential to be happy with what you have, not what you want.
• I believe that people are more important than things.
• I believe that it is okay to splurge on something even if it means going into debt.
• I believe that it is better to give than to receive.
• I believe that money can’t buy everything.
• I believe that the love of money is the root of all evil.
• I believe in saving for a rainy day.
• I believe in investing in oneself.
• I believe in the saying, “money doesn’t grow on trees.”
• I believe that rich people should be forced to pay more taxes.

These 50 I Believe essay topics are sure to inspire your own original beliefs and help you create a powerful and unique essay. When writing your I Believe essay, be sure to focus on the beliefs that are most important to you and that you feel passionate about discussing. The best I Believe essays are the ones that are personal and reflective, so don’t be afraid to share your own thoughts and experiences.

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19 Other Ways to Say “I Believe” in an Essay

If you’re wondering how to say “I believe” in an essay without using first-person phrasing, you’ve come to the right place!

In this article, we’ve compiled a list of synonyms that you can use instead of saying “I believe” in an essay. We’ll also discuss whether you should use the original phrase at all.

Other Ways to Say “I Believe”

• One might argue
• It would seem
• This suggests
• It is my belief
• As I see it
• From my perspective
• It could be argued
• I would argue
• This illustrates
• This evidences
• In my opinion
• This proves
• In the author’s opinion

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• It’s okay to use “I believe” in an essay if the person grading your paper permits you to use personal pronouns.
• You can say “one might argue” if you want to use a more formal alternative in the third person.
• “It appears” is another good option that removes the personal pronoun “I.”

Don’t go anywhere! In the next section, we’ll discuss two great alternatives for the phrase “I believe” that you can use in your academic writing.

Moreover, we’ll provide some helpful examples and discuss whether it’s a bad idea to use “I believe” in your essay.

One Might Argue

If you’re wondering what to say instead of “I believe” in an essay, a great choice is “one might argue.”

Some academics may view this alternative as superior to the original phrase. After all, it is written in the third person. Therefore, you can get the same point across without using “I.” In some formal academic essays , it is expected by markers that personal pronouns should be avoided.

Additionally, this alternative makes it clear that your statement isn’t certain, just like the original. The word “might” implies that you are expressing an opinion or making just a potential argument.

Finally, let’s see how one might use this phrase in a few examples:

One might argue that the individual responsibility of consumers to buy sustainable products is far less than the responsibility that should be placed on large industries.

Although our findings show that fewer children are taking an interest in mathematics, one might argue that this has more to do with the teaching style of educators rather than the content of the subject itself.

Another way to say “I believe” without using the first person is “it appears.”

Like the original phrase, this one indicates that the statement following it is not certain. In fact, it is simply an observation .

Although this phrase is not necessarily superior to “I believe,” it does remove the personal pronoun “I,” which is often seen as preferable by teachers and professors.

It also has the benefit of using the same number of words as “I believe.” Therefore, it won’t increase your word count , unlike some of the other synonyms on our list.

To see this phrase in action, have a look at the examples below:

It appears that several of the mice in our experiment exhibited empathy when faced with one of their fellows trapped in a cage.

Although Otis Blackwell was a clear stylistic inspiration to Elvis, in addition to being the writer of many of his popular songs, it appears that only a small minority of the public is privy to this truth.

Can I Use “I Believe” in an Essay?

Whether it is okay to use “I believe” in an essay greatly depends on context .

There are some academics and writers out there who think using phrases like “I believe” is bad writing . Firstly, they argue that it is redundant . Obviously, you believe the statement you’re making, or you wouldn’t be making it in the first place!

Secondly, some academics think that personal pronouns should be avoided in academic writing . Therefore, it’s no good to start your statements with “I.”

On the other hand, in recent times, many academics have argued that all forms of education and information should be accessible. This means that everyone should be able to follow and understand them – not just people who were privileged enough to get a university education!

People who hold this opinion say that a phrase like “I believe” is perfectly effective. After all, it lets the reader know that you are expressing an opinion and not a fact. Additionally, it is straightforward and easy for any reader to follow.

Therefore, as a rule of thumb, we would always recommend speaking to the person who is going to grade your essay before you start . If they are a traditionalist and would prefer very formal writing, use one of our alternatives.

If they are happy to read a paper with personal pronouns and straightforward writing in it, go ahead and use “I believe.”

In conclusion, it’s okay to use “I believe” if the person marking your essay is okay with it!

We hope you found this article helpful. If you did, why not bookmark this page so you can come back whenever you like? 

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11 Other Ways To Say “I Think” And “I Believe” In An Essay

It can be tempting to say “I think” or “I believe” in an essay, especially when writing a personal narrative or opinion-based essay. The issue with this phrase is they tend to read as informal and weak. This article will explore some stronger alternatives that are worth considering.

What Can I Say Instead Of “I Think” And “I Believe”?

There are many different ways to express that what you’re saying is an opinion or a conclusion you have drawn using stronger wording than “I think” and “I believe.” Here are some options:

• In my opinion
• It could be argued
• Many believe
• This suggests
• It can be concluded
• It makes sense
• This proves
• This supports the idea
• X makes a strong case

The preferred option is “in my opinion.” “In my opinion” is clear and direct, and sounds more formal than “I believe” and “I think.” It’s a good way to make it clear that what you’re saying is your personal opinion while still sounding credible.

In My Opinion

“In my opinion” is a good choice when you’re writing a first-person essay. “Opinion” implies more fact-based consideration than “believe” and more depth than “think.” “Opinion” also comes off as more confident than both “think” and “believe.”

“In my opinion” sounds formal enough to be appropriate in an essay, but can still maintain the conversational tone that is typically expected in first-person essays.

Here’s what “in my opinion” looks like in context:

• In my opinion, every public school student should be offered a free lunch option.
• Reading through this book was challenging not for the content but for the dull writing style. In my opinion, it shouldn’t be upheld as a classic.
• In my opinion, neither argument was particularly convincing.

It Could Be Argued

This sort of hypothetical phrasing isn’t always considered strong, but “it could be argued” is still a solid choice for third-person essays that require you to explore various arguments.

“It could be argued” is useful when you need to analyze multiple arguments or look at something from multiple angles. It allows you to point out some arguments or thoughts people might have in general to develop your argument.

Here are some ways you can use “it could be argued”:

• It could be argued that teaching Shakespeare in school only serves to confuse students due to the extremely antiquated language.
• It could be argued that the color blue represents sadness, but there are many examples in the text that point to blue instead representing loneliness.
• The bird could be a representation of her fear. Conversely, it could be argued that the bird is there simply because the lead character loves birds.

Many Believe

“Many believe” is useful when you want to discuss widely held beliefs and the fact that these beliefs are widely held is common knowledge. You can also use “many believe” when you have a statistic to back up the claim.

“Many believe” is better than “I think” and “I believe” in those sorts of situations because it creates a less personal statement. That helps it feel more formal and makes the argument feel more expansive.

Here’s how you can use “many believe”:

• Many believe that eating any kind of fat is unhealthy, but nutritionists disagree.
• According to the poll, many believe that doing yoga and drinking enough water will cure certain mental illnesses.

This Suggests

“This suggests” is a great choice for drawing a conclusion based on the evidence you’ve presented. It’s stronger than “I think” and “I believe” because it explicitly ties your ideas to other ideas.

You’ll typically use “this suggests” after presenting some evidence or an argument. “This suggests” introduces your analysis and often your argument.

For example:

• The flowers in the vase didn’t die until after Ashley fought with her mother. This suggests that the state of the perpetually near-death flowers was serving as a metaphor for the state of Ashley’s relationship with her mother.
• Jodi’s favorite color was green. This suggests some part of her was tied to everything green represented in the novel, even if she denied it.

It Can Be Concluded

“It can be concluded” is a good replacement for “I think” and “I believe” in third-person writing. It emphasizes the conclusions you’re drawing based on previously detailed evidence.

Like “this suggests,” “it can be concluded” comes after you present some evidence or ideas. It directly connects your thinking to the evidence, which supports a strong argument.

 Here are some examples:

• As such, it can be concluded that the core message of the story is the real reward was the friendships we made on the journey.
• It can be concluded that he never knew what happened to his father and was simply making up different versions of the story as the subject was too difficult for him to discuss directly.

It Makes Sense

“It makes sense” is a phrase can use to introduce a thought or insight you have. It’s subtly persuasive and can fit into both formal and informal essay styles.

“It makes sense” is deceptively strong wording. While it may seem soft at first, it can be used to make some really strong statements.

Here’s how that could look in practice:

• It makes sense that the school wouldn’t provide free lunches for students. It’s a costly plan, and the school district has a long track record of investing in administration before investing in student welfare.
• It makes sense that the play’s love story ended tragically. The playwright was newly divorced when she penned it, and her poetry from this time shows a similar disillusionment with romantic relationships.

This Proves

“This proves” is a strong way to connect your conclusions and arguments to previously presented evidence. This phrase is a good choice when you’re confident in your evidence and your argument, as using it after shaky evidence can harm your credibility.

Here’s what this might look like in context:

• The students who got more recess time did better on tests than children who had more quiet study time. This proves that children need more playtime throughout the day.
• This proves my original hypothesis, though not in the way I expected.

This Supports The Idea

This is another useful phrase for directly tying previously stated evidence to your arguments and conclusions. Once you provide your evidence, you can go into your argument by saying “this supports the idea that…”

“This supports the idea” is a deeply academic phrase. It doesn’t come off too strong, nor does it read as personal or informal. It reads as objective, which can support your credibility in the eyes of the reader.

Here are some examples:

• Lisa ultimately gave the flower to Joan. This supports the idea that the flower was representative of trust.
• In this scene, the characters’ loyalties are made clear by where they are standing in relation to the protagonist. John is standing next to the protagonist. This supports the idea that, despite what he says, he truly was loyal to the protagonist.

X Makes A Strong Case

“X makes a strong case” is a phrase when you want to specifically tie in an argument someone else has made. It emphasizes the person who made the argument rather than what you think about the argument.

For example, if you wanted to say “I think Rodney is right about the dress code,” a stronger way to word that in an essay would be “Rodney makes a strong case about the dress code.”

Both sentences communicate that you think Rodney’s argument has merit, but using the “X makes a strong case” format emphasizes Rodney’s arguments rather than your evaluation of them.

This less-personal writing is generally considered to be more formal and thus more appropriate for academic writing.

Here are some more examples of how to use this phrase:

• The author makes a strong case in favor of the motion.
• In the novel, Susie’s father makes a strong case against the idea of Susie marrying a stranger.

“In my mind” is a strong phrase that is perfect for first-person narrative essays. It’s engaging, conversational wording that still maintains the formality expected in essays.

“In my mind” is a good way to word more personally held thoughts and beliefs without saying “I think” or “I believe.”

Here are some ways you could use “in my mind”:

• In my mind, nothing mattered more than the championship.
• In my mind, there was no way any of this could have a good outcome. I just didn’t see how it would work out.

Sometimes the best alternative to “I believe” and “I think” is simply to cut the phrase without providing a replacement. This makes your writing more succinct and straightforward and less informal.

Replacing “I think” and “I believe” can support the style and flow of your writing, but deleting the lead-in entirely is common advice. The argument is that since you wrote the essay, “I think” and “I believe” are implied. It’s redundant to include them.

Take a look at these sentences:

• I think the power outage was caused by the wind storm.
• I believe students should have mentors throughout their time in school.

Here’s what they look like if you remove the lead-in:

• The power outage was caused by the wind storm.
• Students should have mentors throughout their time in school.

In these instances, removing the phrases entirely without replacing them made for stronger statements.

Martin holds a Master’s degree in Finance and International Business. He has six years of experience in professional communication with clients, executives, and colleagues. Furthermore, he has teaching experience from Aarhus University. Martin has been featured as an expert in communication and teaching on Forbes and Shopify. Read more about Martin here .

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• Can An Opinion Be Wrong Or Right? Full Explanation

It’s Time to Treat Sugar Like Cigarettes

T he food we eat impacts every aspect of our lives and our bodies: our hormones, brain chemistry, immune system, microbiome; the list goes on. As consumers, we deserve the right to easily understand our foods’ nutritional value in order to make informed decisions about what we consume and how that will impact our health and well being. This is especially important when it comes to ingredients that are detrimental when eaten in excess, such as sugar. As researchers in functional medicine, longevity, AI, and nutrition, as well as inventors of health-enhancing and life-saving solutions, we have dedicated our professional lives to improving the health and well-being of millions everywhere. And while we applaud the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) taking important strides to pass mandatory front-of-package labeling for packaged foods in the U.S., this is a change that cannot come soon enough. Everyone’s health depends on it. 

The FDA recommends adults consume no more than 50 grams of added sugar per day (based on a 2,000 calorie diet), but the average American consumes closer to one-third of a pound of sugar daily, more than three times the recommended amount. To put that into perspective, the average American consumes over 100 pounds of sugar per person per year. With that much sugar consumption, it is no wonder that 49% of American adults are diabetic or pre-diabetic. What’s worse is that much of the sugar we consume occurs without our even realizing it. There are over 60 different ways sugar is identified on nutrition labels, making a consumer’s attempt to regulate their sugar intake unfairly complicated.

Extensive academic research published in medical peer-reviewed journals backs common knowledge that excess sugar consumption can lead to serious chronic conditions , as well as fatigue , anxiety , memory loss , ADHD , and even to a shorter life .

Seventy four percent of packaged foods in the U.S. contain added sugar, including seemingly healthy foods, such as salad dressing, coleslaw, and even baked beans, marinades, and yogurt; some sweetened yogurts contain more sugar than a can of soda. The fact that sugar is so biologically addictive — studies indicate it is eight times more addictive than cocaine — makes the reality that it’s hidden in so many foods even more harmful. Most of us are addicted to sugar and we don’t even know it.

This cycle of addiction is relentless and hard to break: we eat food with sugar, which then triggers a blood sugar spike, which lights up the pleasure center in our brain. When the inevitable sugar crash comes, we seek that spike again in the form of craving more sugar. Without easily discernible food labeling, shoppers unknowingly create this cycle inside their own bodies, even while they erroneously think the food they’re buying is healthy.

Read More: How the World Got Hooked on Sugar

In many countries, labels on packaged foods serve a similar function to labels on cigarette cartons: to warn consumers of risk. In Chile , a policy of “high in” labels on the front of sugary drinks dramatically reduced the consumption of those beverages. In Israel, a front-of-package labelling system , wherein a red label indicates an item high in sugar, has led to significant positive changes in 76% of the population’s food buying habits. We’re excited to see what a similar program in the U.S. would yield.

Those in the U.S. lobbying against this front-of-package change, unsurprisingly, have an interest in the continued popularity of their products. In a February 2023 joint filing , the nation’s largest cereal producers threatened a lawsuit after proposed changes would not allow them to label products as “healthy” if they didn’t meet nutritional standards. The front-of-package suggested change would rightfully prevent many cereals on the market with excess sugar from calling themselves “healthy.”

This dynamic is similar to changes made in cigarette advertising in the 20th century. In the 1940s, a famous Camel cigarettes campaign featured the slogan , “More doctors smoke Camels.” By 1969, a mandatory warning label was added to cigarettes, giving consumers clearer access to information about risks, allowing them to make more informed choices about their health. Today the percentage of Americans who smoke is 11% compared to nearly 50% back in the day when “more doctors smoked Camels”. Life expectancy rose nearly 11 years in that span of time too, and the decrease in smoking certainly contributed.

While front-of-package labeling on packaged foods is a crucial first step towards a healthier society, education and awareness alone will only get us so far. To drive even more significant change in the way most Americans eat, a change that will lead to a healthier population, we must also incentivize the production and widespread distribution of healthier alternatives. These alternatives—a packaged cookie with healthier ingredients, for instance—must be just as delicious, and readily available as those loaded with sugar. The recently announced new standards by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that will limit added sugars in school meals can greatly help with the availability of healthier alternatives, especially when children form their eating habits. For the rest of us, though, front-of-package labeling is an important step one in this journey towards national wellness and it will also encourage producers to create healthier options for consumers; readily available healthier alternatives is step two.

FDA leadership ensuring labeling of high contents of sugar in packaged foods could increase awareness and reduce the negative impacts of sugar and help millions live healthier longer lives. This change would help us make more informed choices about our food and our health. We believe it is our right, and every American’s right, to have clear and visible information about the sugar content of the foods we are eating in order to make more informed decisions.

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‘Education has definitely been impacted’: Hoax bomb threats plague Nebo school after ‘furry’ outrage

The threats started april 19, two days after video of mt. nebo middle schoolers protesting “furries” began spreading in conservative social media circles..

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Nebo School District spokesperson Seth Sorensen speaks during a news conference at the Payson Police Department to address recent hoax bomb threats targeting Mt. Nebo Middle School in Payson on Wednesday, May 1, 2024.

In the two weeks since video of a student-led “furry” protest at Mt. Nebo Middle School spread in conservative social media circles , the school has received multiple hoax bomb threats that officials believe are tied to viral “furry outrage” stoked by the posts.

“Students’ education has definitely been impacted,” said Nebo School District spokesperson Seth Sorenson during a joint news conference Wednesday with Payson police. “However, we’re committed as a district to maintain a stable situation for all of our students.”

That’s why district officials announced Wednesday that they intend to keep the school open for the remainder of the academic year, despite the significant learning disruptions.

The bogus threats started April 19, two days after video depicting Mt. Nebo middle schoolers walking out of school began to circulate on far-right social media, with posts claiming the students were protesting because the district was allowing student “furries” to “terrorize” other students.

“Students claim that the furries bite them, bark at them, and pounce on them without repercussion,” one post read from Libs of TikTok , an account on X that shares anti-LGBTQ posts and other clips geared at generating right-wing outrage. “However, if they defend themselves in any way, they get in trouble.”

Sorenson asserted those claims were false, explaining that the student protest seemed to be organized after a message the school sent to families was misinterpreted. Sorenson has also said students at the middle school are not wearing full-body animal costumes to class, as “furries” — part of a subculture of people who sometimes dress up like animal characters but act like humans — are known to do.

(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Mt. Nebo Middle School in Payson on Thursday, April 18, 2024.

Two other subsequent hoax threats came to the school on April 23 and April 30, police said Wednesday. The Payson Police Department canvased the school with bomb detection dogs but found no devices or other materials.

After the April 30 threat was cleared, school officials allowed families to pick up their children early from Mt. Nebo. About 70% of students were picked up early that day, Sorenson said.

Payson police alongside federal law enforcement continue to investigate the hoax threats but have not yet identified who may be behind them.

“If we identify suspects, they will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Payson police Sgt. Scott Hall said Wednesday.

That could include charging perpetrators with a second-degree felony after HB14 passed during this year’s legislative session, making falsely reporting an emergency at school a felony. If the perpetrator is found to be a public school student, the law mandates that they be suspended or expelled.

The district in the meantime has employed additional counseling resources for students who may be experiencing increased anxiety due to the threats, Sorenson said. More adult supervisors are also patrolling the school’s hallways, and extra police will remain on campus for the rest of the school year.

“Student safety is our top priority,” Sorenson said. “We want students to be safe and secure. And we want parents to feel confident sending their students to our schools, knowing that they’re going to be safe and protected.”

What led to the ‘furry’ protest, outrage

The message that Sorenson believes led to the April 17 student protest came after a group of students had been targeting another group of students at the school, saying things “that were overheard by others that the administration felt were inappropriate and shouldn’t be said,” Sorenson has said.

The group of students being targeted, he said, sometimes come to school wearing headbands “that may have ears on them.” He said he doesn’t think the targeted students necessarily refer to themselves as “furries.”

In one specific instance, the targeted students “were sitting in a corner of the lunchroom, eating as a group of friends” when others began calling them names and throwing food at them “because they were dressed differently,” Sorenson told The Salt Lake Tribune.

After word of the altercation spread, the initial message sent to families stated, “We expect ALL students to be respectful towards each other while we are here at school.”

“We hope you will treat others how you would like to be treated,” the message stated. “Outstanding behavior might demonstrate curiosity, understanding, patience and tolerance.”

The message also reiterated the school’s dress code policy as well as the school’s policy against written, verbal, or physical acts that stand to threaten, humiliate or abuse others.

But Sorenson said he thinks some parents misinterpreted the note, incorrectly taking it as a message that the school was “taking the side of a single group, saying, ‘We want you to be kind to this group, but they don’t have to be kind to anyone else.’”

“Nobody was taking the side of one group or another,” he said. “What we were saying is everyone needs to treat everyone else with respect.”

A few days later, the school sent another message to parents, trying to clarify its original note.

“We have had several parents reach out to us over the past few days, regarding rumors that are being spread about behaviors of a small group of students at our school,” the message read. “We hoped our efforts to clarify misconceptions would be sufficient, but it seems we still have some misunderstandings.”

The note concluded with an acknowledgement of rumored plans of the April 17 walkout protest.

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David Wallace-Wells

Are smartphones driving our teens to depression.

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

Here is a story. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone, initiating the smartphone revolution that would quickly transform the world. In 2010, it added a front-facing camera, helping shift the social-media landscape toward images, especially selfies. Partly as a result, in the five years that followed, the nature of childhood and especially adolescence was fundamentally changed — a “great rewiring,” in the words of the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt — such that between 2010 and 2015 mental health and well-being plummeted and suffering and despair exploded, particularly among teenage girls.

For young women, rates of hospitalization for nonfatal self-harm in the United States, which had bottomed out in 2009, started to rise again, according to data reported to the C.D.C., taking a leap beginning in 2012 and another beginning in 2016, and producing , over about a decade, an alarming 48 percent increase in such emergency room visits among American girls ages 15 to 19 and a shocking 188 percent increase among girls ages 10 to14.

Here is another story. In 2011, as part of the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new set of guidelines that recommended that teenage girls should be screened annually for depression by their primary care physicians and that same year required that insurance providers cover such screenings in full. In 2015, H.H.S. finally mandated a coding change, proposed by the World Health Organization almost two decades before, that required hospitals to record whether an injury was self-inflicted or accidental — and which seemingly overnight nearly doubled rates for self-harm across all demographic groups. Soon thereafter, the coding of suicidal ideation was also updated. The effect of these bureaucratic changes on hospitalization data presumably varied from place to place. But in one place where it has been studied systematically, New Jersey, where 90 percent of children had health coverage even before the A.C.A., researchers have found that the changes explain nearly all of the state’s apparent upward trend in suicide-related hospital visits, turning what were “essentially flat” trendlines into something that looked like a youth mental health “crisis.”

Could both of these stories be partially true? Of course: Emotional distress among teenagers may be genuinely growing while simultaneous bureaucratic and cultural changes — more focus on mental health, destigmatization, growing comfort with therapy and medication — exaggerate the underlying trends. (This is what Adriana Corredor-Waldron, a co-author of the New Jersey study, believes — that suicidal behavior is distressingly high among teenagers in the United States and that many of our conventional measures are not very reliable to assess changes in suicidal behavior over time.) But over the past several years, Americans worrying over the well-being of teenagers have heard much less about that second story, which emphasizes changes in the broader culture of mental illness, screening guidelines and treatment, than the first one, which suggests smartphones and social-media use explain a whole raft of concerns about the well-being of the country’s youth.

When the smartphone thesis first came to prominence more than six years ago, advanced by Haidt’s sometime collaborator Jean Twenge, there was a fair amount of skepticism from scientists and social scientists and other commentators: Were teenagers really suffering that much? they asked. How much in this messy world could you pin on one piece of technology anyway? But some things have changed since then, including the conventional liberal perspective on the virtues of Big Tech, and, in the past few years, as more data has rolled in and more red flags have been raised about American teenagers — about the culture of college campuses, about the political hopelessness or neuroticism or radicalism or fatalism of teenagers, about a growing political gender divide, about how often they socialize or drink or have sex — a two-part conventional wisdom has taken hold across the pundit class. First, that American teenagers are experiencing a mental health crisis; second, that it is the fault of phones.

“Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health,” the Financial Times declared last spring. This spring, Haidt’s new book on the subject, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. In its review of the book, The Guardian described the smartphone as “a pocket full of poison,” and in an essay , The New Yorker accepted as a given that Gen Z was in the midst of a “mental health emergency” and that “social media is bad for young people.” “Parents could see their phone-obsessed children changing and succumbing to distress,” The Wall Street Journal reflected . “Now we know the true horror of what happened.”

But, well, do we? Over the past five years, “Is it the phones?” has become “It’s probably the phones,” particularly among an anxious older generation processing bleak-looking charts of teenage mental health on social media as they are scrolling on their own phones. But however much we may think we know about how corrosive screen time is to mental health, the data looks murkier and more ambiguous than the headlines suggest — or than our own private anxieties, as parents and smartphone addicts, seem to tell us.

What do we really know about the state of mental health among teenagers today? Suicide offers the most concrete measure of emotional distress, and rates among American teenagers ages 15 to 19 have indeed risen over the past decade or so, to about 11.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2021 from about 7.5 deaths per 100,000 in 2009. But the American suicide epidemic is not confined to teenagers. In 2022, the rate had increased roughly as much since 2000 for the country as a whole, suggesting a national story both broader and more complicated than one focused on the emotional vulnerabilities of teenagers to Instagram. And among the teenagers of other rich countries, there is essentially no sign of a similar pattern. As Max Roser of Our World in Data recently documented , suicide rates among older teenagers and young adults have held roughly steady or declined over the same time period in France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Greece, Poland, Norway and Belgium. In Sweden there were only very small increases.

Is there a stronger distress signal in the data for young women? Yes, somewhat. According to an international analysis by The Economist, suicide rates among young women in 17 wealthy countries have grown since 2003, by about 17 percent, to a 2020 rate of 3.5 suicides per 100,000 people. The rate among young women has always been low, compared with other groups, and among the countries in the Economist data set, the rate among male teenagers, which has hardly grown at all, remains almost twice as high. Among men in their 50s, the rate is more than seven times as high.

In some countries, we see concerning signs of convergence by gender and age, with suicide rates among young women growing closer to other demographic groups. But the pattern, across countries, is quite varied. In Denmark, where smartphone penetration was the highest in the world in 2017, rates of hospitalization for self-harm among 10- to 19-year-olds fell by more than 40 percent between 2008 and 2016. In Germany, there are today barely one-quarter as many suicides among women between 15 and 20 as there were in the early 1980s, and the number has been remarkably flat for more than two decades. In the United States, suicide rates for young men are still three and a half times as high as for young women, the recent increases have been larger in absolute terms among young men than among young women, and suicide rates for all teenagers have been gradually declining since 2018. In 2022, the latest year for which C.D.C. data is available, suicide declined by 18 percent for Americans ages 10 to 14 and 9 percent for those ages 15 to 24.

None of this is to say that everything is fine — that the kids are perfectly all right, that there is no sign at all of worsening mental health among teenagers, or that there isn’t something significant and even potentially damaging about smartphone use and social media. Phones have changed us, and are still changing us, as anyone using one or observing the world through them knows well. But are they generating an obvious mental health crisis?

The picture that emerges from the suicide data is mixed and complicated to parse. Suicide is the hardest-to-dispute measure of despair, but not the most capacious. But while rates of depression and anxiety have grown strikingly for teenagers in certain parts of the world, including the U.S., it’s tricky to disentangle those increases from growing mental-health awareness and destigmatization, and attempts to measure the phenomenon in different ways can yield very different results.

According to data Haidt uses, from the U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the percent of teenage girls reporting major depressive episodes in the last year grew by about 50 percent between 2005 and 2017, for instance, during which time the share of teenage boys reporting the same grew by roughly 75 percent from a lower level. But in a biannual C.D.C. survey of teenage mental health, the share of teenagers reporting that they had been persistently sad for a period of at least two weeks in the past year grew from only 28.5 percent in 2005 to 31.5 percent in 2017. Two different surveys tracked exactly the same period, and one showed an enormous increase in depression while the other showed almost no change at all.

And if the rise of mood disorders were a straightforward effect of the smartphone, you’d expect to see it everywhere smartphones were, and, as with suicide, you don’t. In Britain, the share of young people who reported “feeling down” or experiencing depression grew from 31 percent in 2012 to 38 percent on the eve of the pandemic and to 41 percent in 2021. That is significant, though by other measures British teenagers appear, if more depressed than they were in the 2000s, not much more depressed than they were in the 1990s.

Overall, when you dig into the country-by-country data, many places seem to be registering increases in depression among teenagers, particularly among the countries of Western Europe and North America. But the trends are hard to disentangle from changes in diagnostic patterns and the medicalization of sadness, as Lucy Foulkes has argued , and the picture varies considerably from country to country. In Canada , for instance, surveys of teenagers’ well-being show a significant decline between 2015 and 2021, particularly among young women; in South Korea rates of depressive episodes among teenagers fell by 35 percent between 2006 and 2018.

Because much of our sense of teenage well-being comes from self-reported surveys, when you ask questions in different ways, the answers vary enormously. Haidt likes to cite data collected as part of an international standardized test program called PISA, which adds a few questions about loneliness at school to its sections covering progress in math, science and reading, and has found a pattern of increasing loneliness over the past decade. But according to the World Happiness Report , life satisfaction among those ages 15 to 24 around the world has been improving pretty steadily since 2013, with more significant gains among women, as the smartphone completed its global takeover, with a slight dip during the first two years of the pandemic. An international review published in 2020, examining more than 900,000 adolescents in 36 countries, showed no change in life satisfaction between 2002 and 2018.

“It doesn’t look like there’s one big uniform thing happening to people’s mental health,” said Andrew Przybylski, a professor at Oxford. “In some particular places, there are some measures moving in the wrong direction. But if I had to describe the global trend over the last decade, I would say there is no uniform trend showing a global crisis, and, where things are getting worse for teenagers, no evidence that it is the result of the spread of technology.”

If Haidt is the public face of worry about teenagers and phones, Przybylski is probably the most prominent skeptic of the thesis. Others include Amy Orben, at the University of Cambridge, who in January told The Guardian, “I think the concern about phones as a singular entity are overblown”; Chris Ferguson, at Stetson University, who is about to publish a new meta-analysis showing no relationship between smartphone use and well-being; and Candice Odgers, of the University of California, Irvine, who published a much-debated review of Haidt in Nature, in which she declared “the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.”

Does that overstate the case? In a technical sense, I think, no: There may be some concerning changes in the underlying incidence of certain mood disorders among American teenagers over the past couple of decades, but they are hard to separate from changing methods of measuring and addressing mental health and mental illness. There isn’t great data on international trends in teenage suicide — but in those places with good reporting, the rates are generally not worsening — and the trends around anxiety, depression and well-being are ambiguous elsewhere in the world. And the association of those local increases with the rise of the smartphone, while now almost conventional wisdom among people like me, is, among specialists, very much a contested claim. Indeed, even Haidt, who has also emphasized broader changes to the culture of childhood , estimated that social media use is responsible for only about 10 percent to 15 percent of the variation in teenage well-being — which would be a significant correlation, given the complexities of adolescent life and of social science, but is also a much more measured estimate than you tend to see in headlines trumpeting the connection. And many others have arrived at much smaller estimates still.

But this all also raises the complicated question of what exactly we mean by “science,” in the context of social phenomena like these, and what standard of evidence we should be applying when asking whether something qualifies as a “crisis” or “emergency” and what we know about what may have caused it. There is a reason we rarely reduce broad social changes to monocausal explanations, whether we’re talking about the rapid decline of teenage pregnancy in the 2000s, or the spike in youth suicide in the late ’80s and early 1990s, or the rise in crime that began in the 1960s: Lives are far too complex to easily reduce to the influence of single factors, whether the factor is a recession or political conditions or, for that matter, climate breakdown.

To me, the number of places where rates of depression among teenagers are markedly on the rise is a legitimate cause for concern. But it is also worth remembering that, for instance, between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, diagnoses of American youth for bipolar disorder grew about 40-fold , and it is hard to find anyone who believes that change was a true reflection of underlying incidence. And when we find ourselves panicking over charts showing rapid increases in, say, the number of British girls who say they’re often unhappy or feel they are a failure, it’s worth keeping in mind that the charts were probably zoomed in to emphasize the spike, and the increase is only from about 5 percent of teenagers to about 10 percent in the first case, or from about 15 percent to about 20 percent in the second. It may also be the case, as Orben has emphasized , that smartphones and social media may be problematic for some teenagers without doing emotional damage to a majority of them. That’s not to say that in taking in the full scope of the problem, there is nothing there. But overall it is probably less than meets the eye.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Further reading (and listening):

On Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel Substack , a series of admirable responses to critics of “The Anxious Generation” and the smartphone thesis by Haidt, his lead researcher Zach Rausch, and his sometime collaborator Jean Twenge.

In Vox, Eric Levitz weighs the body of evidence for and against the thesis.

Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie deliver a useful overview of the evidence and its limitations on the Studies Show podcast.

Five experts review the evidence for the smartphone hypothesis in The Guardian.

A Substack survey of “diagnostic inflation” and teenage mental health.

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The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us

There will be no more self-soothing after this..

For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts , the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.

On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States , the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.

However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S. , the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice . This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row , as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims.

We got an early taste of this minimization in Trump v. Anderson , the Colorado case about removing Trump from the ballot. The court didn’t have the stomach to discuss the violence at the Capitol in its sharply divided decision, which found for Trump ; indeed, the majority barely mentioned the events of Jan. 6 at all when rejecting Colorado’s effort to bar from the ballot an insurrectionist who tried to steal our democracy. But we let that one be, because we figured special counsel Jack Smith would ride to the rescue. Smith has indicted Trump on election subversion charges related to Jan. 6, and the biggest obstacle standing between the special counsel and a trial has been the former president’s outlandish claim that he has absolute immunity from criminal charges as a result of his having been president at the time. Specifically, Trump alleges that his crusade to overturn the election constituted “official acts” that are immune from criminal liability under a heretofore unknown constitutional principle that the chief executive is quite literally above the law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held in February that the president does not have blanket or absolute immunity for all actions taken in office, including “official” acts performed under the guise of executing the law (for example, Trump’s attempt to weaponize the DOJ against election results under the pretense of investigating fraud). The D.C. Circuit’s emphatic, cross-ideological decision should have been summarily affirmed by SCOTUS within days. Instead, the justices set it for arguments two months down the road—a bad omen, to put it mildly . Even then, many court watchers held out hope that Thursday morning’s oral arguments were to be the moment for the nine justices of the Supreme Court to finally indicate their readiness to take on Trump, Trumpism, illiberalism, and slouching fascism.

It was not to be. Justice Samuel Alito best captured the spirit of arguments when he asked gravely “what is required for the functioning of a stable democratic society” (good start!), then answered his own question: total immunity for criminal presidents (oh, dear). Indeed, anything but immunity would, he suggested, encourage presidents to commit more crimes to stay in office: “Now, if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Never mind that the president in question did not leave office peacefully and is not sitting quietly in retirement but is instead running for presidential office once again. No, if we want criminal presidents to leave office when they lose, we have to let them commit crimes scot-free. If ever a better articulation of the legal principle “Don’t make me hit you again” has been proffered at an oral argument, it’s hard to imagine it.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke to this absurdity when she responded in what could only be heard as a cri de coeur: “Stable democratic society needs good faith of public officials,” she said. “That good faith assumes that they will follow the law.” The justice noted that despite all the protections in place, a democracy can sometimes “potentially fail.” She concluded: “In the end, if it fails completely, it’s because we destroyed our democracy on our own, isn’t it?”

But it was probably too late to make this plea, because by that point we had heard both Alito and Gorsuch opine that presidents must be protected at all costs from the whims of overzealous deep state prosecutors brandishing “vague” criminal statutes. We heard Kavanaugh opine mindlessly on the independent counsel statute and how mean it is to presidents, reading extensively from Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in a case arguing that independent counsels are unconstitutional. (Yes, Kavanaugh worked for Ken Starr , the independent counsel.) If you’re clocking a trend here, it’s gender. Just as was the case in Anderson , it’s the women justices doing the second-shift work here: both probing the thorny constitutional and criminal questions and signaling a refusal to tank democracy over abstractions and deflections. As was the case in the EMTALA arguments, it’s the women who understand what it looks like to cheat death.

Is the president, Sotomayor asked, immune from prosecution if he orders the military to assassinate a political rival? Yes, said John Sauer, who represented Trump—though it “depends on the circumstances.” Could the president, Justice Elena Kagan asked, order the military to stage a coup? Yes, Sauer said again, depending on the circumstances. To which Kagan tartly replied that Sauer’s insistence on specifying the “circumstances” boiled down to “Under my test, it’s an official act, but that sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” (Cue polite laughter in the chamber.)

This shameless, maximalist approach should have drawn anger from the conservative justices—indignation, at least, that Sauer took them for such easy marks. But it turns out that he calibrated his terrible arguments just right. The cynicism on display was truly breathtaking: Alito winkingly implied to Michael Dreeben, representing Smith, that we all know that Justice Department lawyers are political hacks, right? Roberts mocked Dreeben for saying “There’s no reason to worry because the prosecutor will act in good faith.”

The conservative justices are so in love with their own voices and so convinced of their own rectitude that they monologued about how improper it was for Dreeben to keep talking about the facts of this case, as opposed to the “abstract” principles at play. “I’m talking about the future!” Kavanaugh declared at one point to Dreeben, pitching himself not as Trump’s human shield but as a principled defender of the treasured constitutional right of all presidents to do crime. (We’re sure whatever rule he cooks up will apply equally to Democratic presidents, right?) Kavanaugh eventually landed on the proposition that prosecutors may charge presidents only under criminal statutes that explicitly state they can be applied to the president. Which, as Sotomayor pointed out, would mean no charges everywhere, because just a tiny handful of statutes are stamped with the label “CAN BE APPLIED TO PRESIDENT.”

The words bold and fearless action were repeated on a loop today, as a kind of mantra of how effective presidents must be free to act quickly and decisively to save democracy from the many unanticipated threats it faces. And yet the court—which has been asked to take bold and fearless action to deter the person who called Georgia’s secretary of state to demand that he alter the vote count, and threatened to fire DOJ officials who would not help steal an election—is backing away from its own duty. The prospect of a criminal trial for a criminal president shocked and appalled five men: Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch suggested that Smith’s entire prosecution is unconstitutional; meanwhile, Roberts sounded eager at times to handle the case just a hair more gracefully: by cutting out its heart by preventing the jury from hearing about “official acts” (which lie at the center of the alleged conspiracy). Justice Amy Coney Barrett was far more measured, teasing out a compromise with Dreeben that would compel the trial court to tell the jury it could not impose criminal liability for these “official” acts, only “private ones.” Remember, drawing that line would require months of hearings and appeals, pushing any trial into 2025 or beyond. The president who tried to steal the most recent election is running in the next one, which is happening in mere months.

The liberal justices tried their best to make the case that justice required denying Trump’s sweeping immunity claim, permitting the trial to move forward, and sorting out lingering constitutional issues afterward, as virtually all other criminal defendants must do. They got little traction. Everyone on that bench was well aware that the entire nation was listening to arguments; that the whole nation wants to understand whether Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election was an existential threat to democracy or a lark. Five justices sent the message, loud and clear, that they are far more worried about Trump’s prosecution at the hands of the deep-state DOJ than about his alleged crimes, which were barely mentioned. This trial will almost certainly face yet more delays. These delays might mean that its subject could win back the presidency in the meantime and render the trial moot. But the court has now signaled that nothing he did was all that serious and that the danger he may pose is not worth reining in. The real threats they see are the ones Trump himself shouts from the rooftops: witch hunts and partisan Biden prosecutors. These men have picked their team. The rest hardly matters.

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Sophia bush reflects on her “journey” following revealing essay: “it took a long time and a lot of work to get here”.

The 'One Tree Hill' alum shares she "couldn't believe" that she's reached self-acceptance after writing about her divorce and coming out as queer in a recent 'Glamour' cover story.

By Tatiana Tenreyro

Tatiana Tenreyro

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Following her personal essay in Glamour , Sophia Bush reflected on her decision to share insight into her private life.

In her essay, Bush revealed what led to her split from Grant Hughes and confirmed her relationship with Ashlyn Harris . The One Tree Hill alum shared that by changing the course of her life and making the difficult decision to divorce Hughes and come out as queer, she found true happiness.

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Days after her essay was published, Bush explained what she meant with her birthday realization in an Instagram post shared on Sunday . “I feel like last summer I had my very first birthday. My own. And last summer Maggie Smith’s words helped me begin to understand why. From afar, she helped me put myself back together,” she wrote.

Bush included a poem from the You Could Make This Place Beautiful author, which explained Bush’s own emotions: “How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves — all of our selves — wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was … I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sophia Bush (@sophiabush)

Looking back at why it was important to shed light on her personal life on her own terms, the actress wrote, “This week I got to share my own words, that I wrote down from the bottom of my ever-evolving heart.”

She recognized her joy at self-acceptance, writing, “When I uttered ‘I really love who I am, at this age, and in this moment’ I sort of couldn’t believe it. It just fell out of me. Simple. But profound. I’ve always wanted to feel that in my bones. Suddenly I do. It took a long time and a lot of work to get here.”

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