Food Choices

 Food choices can be different when it comes to certain people, depending on what they like, how they eat it or how they taste it, all depends on the person. People sometimes or for the most cases avoid new food because they do not know if they might like it or not, so they tend to avoid things they have not tried before not knowing if they might actually like it or not. Different cultures have different ways of cooking something, or how it tastes like, and depending on how it tastes is what they might think of it. Sometimes the food being at isn't good though, like if you eat pizza everyday, that can cause you to gain weight or cause you to have poor eating habits. Having a bitter coffee might make you make a face because of how bitter it is, but if you add sugar, you will not be making that face. A lot can come from food choices, if you eat healthy that's good, but sometimes you are missing neutrons and if you eat poorly it is also bad because of how your health might worse.  

Procrastinating

Procrastinating is something we can all agree we have done it at least once. Either from saying you'll finish your homework the day before it's due but actually finish it an hour before it is due or getting through a whole list and having one more check off to do but you are too tired so you put it off for later or the next day; this can all be apart of procrastinating. Procrastination is a developed habit from putting off something you are supposed to do. In the article "Why We Procrastinate: The Psychology of Putting Things Off" talks about students procrastinating, "A 1997 study on student health found that students who procrastinated reported lower stress and less illness than peers early in the semester. As long as the deadline remained remote, the procrastinating students were better off. However, later in the semester, students who procrastinated experienced more stress and illness. They were sicker than their peers overall. The procrastinating students also received lower grades on all assignments." It mentions how student who procrastinate end up having lower stress and being less ill in someway, but this is only at the beginning of the semester. Towards the end of the semester, that is where the real stress began because of the lack of time they had. 

McLean Hospital. (2024, August 7). The real reason you’re procrastinating. McLean Hospital. https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/procrastination

Book Report on The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism by R Derek Black

The Klansman’s Son by R. Derek Black is a memoir that tells the life story of the author. Black was born surrounded by the hate of white nationalists in his community; Black’s own father was Don Black, a founder of the KKK linked organization, Stormfront. Black’s story describes their upbringing and how they turned their life around, becoming an activist for equality for all marginalized people. 

My favorite part of the book was Black’s college experience. Black went to the New College of Florida, which was a progressive school. This was an entirely different environment and community that Black was used to. I loved this part of Black’s memoir so emphatically because it truly showed Black’s progression and personal journey with their beliefs. In class, we learn about self-control, and I believe Black’s story is a perfect example of this. It is not Black’s fault that they were born into a community/ family that had such hate in their heart; however, despite this, Black took the responsibility upon themselves to change for the better. Black implemented immense self-control and willpower to change. 

Furthermore, it is within this section of the book that the audience truly sees Black’s psychological soft commitment; even when Black experienced setbacks and struggled with the fear of losing their identity and community by losing their learned hate, they stayed consistent with gradual change. Black’s memoir is extremely raw and vulnerable; they describe how it took years to renounce their old beliefs entirely, but they had “developed valuable patterns of behavior that bridge[d] over individual temptations” (Berg, 2025). 

In 2025, we are living in a time where so many people have dated mindsets that Black used to have. I so desperately wish more people could have the same self-reflection on the learned hate that they have within them and change like Black did. Ultimately, we all bleed the same color. We are all the same species. So why do we hate our own brothers and sisters when we should unite? Destruction and hate will never be the answer. 

Attached to this post is a link to a video that further delves into my opinion on learned bigotry and why Black’s conversion was successful. I would greatly appreciate it if you could all give my video a watch! Thank you all for an insightful semester; I have enjoyed reading your blog posts and responses. (:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BJUhuCytazzV1jGYu8zpfBRNUI0DiC-s/view?usp=drivesdk

Self-control

  Self-control can be different things, like being impulsive, your emotions, what you consume and what you do. Sometimes not making smart choices can lead to consequences, like if you rob a bank, you have self-control over that, to not do it. Rather than those who have self-control seem to be making better options for themselves because they know what are bad decisions. You also have self-control over your emotions or how you feel about something because nobody is controlling you. Consuming a lot of alcohol or junk food can be bad for your health because of the bad toxicants. Everyone has self-control, it's only a matter of controlling yourself in certain aspects. 

In an article called "control" by Psychology Today, it tells us, "The richness of nerve connections in the prefrontal cortex enables people to plan, evaluate alternative actions, and ideally avoid doing things they'll later regret, rather than immediately respond to every impulse as it arises." This just means trying not to regret things you could do today or right now rather than waiting for the future and maybe not even end up doing it because you are trying to have self-control with what you want to do.  Personally, I try to have self-control with spending money, but I love going to concerts, but I also know I sometimes spend more than I'm supposed to and that is when I have self-control.

Psychology Today. (2019). Self-Control | Psychology Today. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/self-control

The Influential Mind- Book Report

The nature of influence is a powerful dynamic between the influencer and the influenced. Shaping behavior either in negative or positive ways, value outweighs volume. Tali Sharot’s The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others is a reminder of the natural psychological traits ingrained within us. The idea of loss aversion is deceptively simple with profound implications. Strictly avoiding loss, individuals will conform to influence when it aligns with their beliefs and values as well as serve their interests. The power of influence enables individuals to be locked within one perspective known as confirmation bias. Typically seen within politics, having a closed mind and only searching for information to support pre-existing beliefs and hypotheses is essentially what separates individuals. Overall Sharot beautifully describes that influence is not reduced to manipulation, but how to integrate the basic human brain mechanisms and ensuring the influencing reflects those qualities.  

My favorite part of The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others, is the human brain’s ability to be extremely stubborn at times. When a decision is made, that decision is upheld. Sharot states “when an established belief is difficult to weed out, seeding a new one may be the answer”. The brain naturally seeks out information that relates strongly to our beliefs, values, and pertains to our individual autonomy. Information asymmetry does not necessarily lead to belief convergence, but rather exacerbates one’s beliefs. 

When drawing a connection between The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others, I chose to relate it to the generalization of motivation. Change is generally more effective when redirected, rather than contradicted. By motivating someone with a new belief to replace a limiting belief, the old belief can eventually be overridden. An example of this can be found in Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. The original motivator that was hard to detach from was the goal to complete a historic Antarctic expedition. Rather quickly, Shackleton reframed that motivator into survival. Instead of succumbing to the disappointment of failing a goal, he repurposed that motivation to a more suitable goal. 

Sharot mentions the power of emotion and how positive emotions are more impactful at swaying opinions than negative emotions. This connects strongly with our country's political climate. By using emotional charged messages, politicians connect with their demographic on a visceral level. Also widespread within political parties, confirmation bias is extreme. If not worse when in the context of politics, confirmation bias leads to political polarization and allows for little to no common ground. 

The video below shows how powerful belief is within the human mind.

Incentives

     We learned about incentives and different incentives, and how they work, where we see them in our daily lives, and how they affect us. The interesting thing to me is how one incentive can work for one person and not another. I was working in a preschool, and I mainly worked with special education students, and incentives were a big part of trying to teach them a routine and how to communicate. When I started thinking about he different incentives we used, I wondered if we were just doing what we could think of or if there was a way to better project which incentive would work for a specific student. I could not find any article that strictly researched this, but I did find multiple articles that I thought were very interesting. I linked one below that I feel fits this question the best. 

Incentives

Food Neophobia

     Food Neophobia is a fear of trying new foods or foods that are unfamiliar to you. This is a pretty common fear. When I read about it in the slideshow, I decided to do a little digging on it. There are a few factors that can contribute to this, like trying a new food when you were younger and throwing up. Now you are scared to try new foods. How your family acts to trying new foods can also affect your view. Now, a lot of articles I read were about how to get a child out of food phobia and not adults, so that is a question to answer: Is there a way to change an adult's perspective of food, or is it too late? I have linked an article below that explains it further. 

Article- Food Neophobia

Procrastination

 Procrastination is something we distract ourselves with instead of doing a task we need to do.  Whether that task be folding laundry,  returning a library book, or doing school work. A lot of people suffer from procrastination, and most people do not have the self-control to take control and do what they need to do. I suffer from procrastination, and it feels as if I am stuck and there's no way I will ever beat procrastination. I came across this article by Fuschia Sirois called "Two Counterintuitive Ways to Stop Procrastinating". The two main ways are self-compassion and forgiveness. This was interesting for me because I never thought that first I need to understand and forgive myself for procrastinating, not punish myself. I have linked the article below if anyone would like to read it!

Article- Fuschia Sirois

Book Report

     I chose to read "The Influential Mind" by Tali Sharot. This is a seven-chapter book that delves into topics such as confirmation bias,  emotion, persuasion, and curiosity.  The main idea of this book is to see how our brain can change or influence others' brains. This means affecting their beliefs, actions, and thoughts. Now this can be done multiple ways, and can be done consciously and unconsciously. This book not only explains the reasons why we are persuaded but also how and where it stems from. It gives you an in-depth perspective and knowledge as to why our brain does what it does in these situations. 

    My favorite section of the book was on confirmation bias. This is a subsection in chapter 1.  This chapter delves into the question of whether or not evidence can change a person's beliefs. The conclusion of this chapter is that just evidence is probably not enough for reasons like confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is something that I have found draws me in in every class I have taken. The idea that you could go your whole life believing one thing because it was all that you saw, because you never went searching for more. Now, whether that is because of ignorance or just not knowing is a different story. This is my favorite because it made me sit and ponder the most. Because confirmation bias practically answers the question, if a person wants to believe something, they will always find the information and knowledge they want and ignore the rest. So the mind is always influenced, and depending on what you get caught in, it can be very hard to ever steer away from that. My mind goes to our section of reproduction, and a woman looking for a certain man, and vice versa. This makes me think of confirmation bias. They have in mind what the perfect man or woman is, and when they have that idea in their head, it is hard to change that. For a woman, it's a man with a good job, good money, etc... 

    Beyond this class, I think that this book is very helpful in understanding why changing one person's or a group of people's or an entire world's perspective is so difficult. Not only are we all unique, but we might not fully comprehend why we think or believe what we do. However, I think for all who are interested, it is a good read, it made me really think about why I believe what I believe, where it stems from, and how it can change. 

    Below, I have attached two videos. The first is an interview by the author where she talks a little about influencing others. The second video is more of an in-depth explanation of confirmation bias. 

                                           https://youtu.be/p-pRAxrc1vM?si=inrBktslHAndySqP 
    

https://youtu.be/Kho5KvPBDSw?si=aqYVs-jD4g7eHh4V 

Book Report

 The book that I read for this book report was, "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. The book is laid out to inform us about any crucial or good reasonings that sleeping has. This book describes what it is to sleep, from the mental health problems, to the immune system and the coolest part to me which was the cardiovascular system. From learning the meaning of sleeping a little to sleeping more than we should, it was all fascinating to understand because of the many reasons we did not know how sleep can either affect us or be a good thing for us. Dreaming is something we all do, even if it was at least once in your life, everyone has had a dream before; the book talks about how dreams work. There are many details like we all think sleeping is to feel better the next morning and not wake up tired.In this book Matthew actually explains how sleeping is used to control how we feel, fight sickness and I feel like that is something I do when I'm sick or I'm not feeling great and my sleep fights it off in someway.

  My favorite part of this book has to be about dreaming. I did not know that being able to dream would provide a unique way we all get to experience. When you dream you're sometimes thinking you have been dreaming for hours from everything that might have been going on in the dream, but then you get woken up to. I also did not know that seconds before dreaming you will get completely paralyzed. As well as the reason your muscle activity is being eliminated at the time of you having your dream is because it will stop you from acting out, or doing something that is happening in your dream which is something I never knew.

   In the rewards lecture slides, it talks about the reinforcements there are for the effect on behaviors and the part that was mentioned about being paralyzed so you don’t do something that is happening in your sleep. The book as well as the lecture slides have a lot of information that has to do with us making our poor choices, like getting a little bit of sleep and being sleep deprived, that is an option, not a choice. 

Allure of Recognition

An extremely strong theme in the book was the allure of recognition. Recognition as a motivator has the ability to guide people to continue positive actions as well as lead people towards positive growth. In the case of Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, the crew's power of human spirit and adventurous purpose, they were able to overcome limitations in some of the harshest environments. However, one could think of the allure of recognition possessing certain drawbacks. The crew knew the expedition would be challenging with a high potential of being put in harm's way. The allure of recognition can drive someone to make irrational decisions and lead an individual to take excessive risks. 

 The final and interesting law regarding motivation that I found in the slides is the law of hedonic contrast, which explains how a person’s subjective emotions directly correlate with an incentive they’re doing. A great example of this could be a person who studies for an exam is more likely to be looking forward to it (at least just getting it done), and a person who procrastinates studying will most likely feel an abrasion towards completing the test. An interesting article that explored this topic deeper had also found data supporting the idea that humans tend to be more focused on their mistakes and unfavorable incentives than favorable ones, which could be a means of survival. In the experiment run on two groups of people, both were given the same hypothetical situation of a hospital either opening or closing during a pandemic, and whether or not the people would allow it to happen. The results had found that, “Our findings do not imply that people do not experience hedonic contrast for positive outcomes. Indeed, two of our studies (Studies 1b and 3a) found hedonic contrast for positive outcomes, even when attention was not experimentally drawn to a reference point. Our findings suggest only that people experience stronger hedonic contrast for negative than for positive outcomes.” Although this was one singular study to observe one behavioral law, this tactic could arguably be used quite often especially in politics to convince people that the hedonic value of something, in this case, a hospital, means that many people's lives and livelihoods depend on whether or not the majority crowd that funds them believes to have an intrinsic positive value. 

References: Voichek, G., & Novemsky, N. (2021). Asymmetric Hedonic Contrast: Pain Is More Contrast Dependent Than Pleasure. Psychological science, 32(7), 1038–1046. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621991140

Why We Sleep | Book Report

 For my book report, I choose the book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. The book generally talks about how important sleep is for us and how essential it is for our physical and mental health. Sleep contributes to so many aspects of our lives that we don't even know or realize. Without sleep or lowered sleep, it can significantly decrease one's health in many different ways. Walker stresses within this book that sleep is the most effective thing we can do for our brains and health each day to rest it.   

    Some eye-opening information I learned from this book is sleep actually strengthens your memories and ability to obtain new information. Your brain's ability to obtain new information could actually drop by 40% without sleep. I found this interesting as I used to stay up late in high school and would always have trouble in class the next day. I always thought it was my ADHD at fault, but I now learned it was probably due to my poor sleeping habits.

    My favorite part was learning about REM sleep vs deep NREM sleep. I learned that Deep NREM Sleep is the sleep where you are not dreaming. Its benefits are that it strengthens your long-term memory, ability to retain new information, and can clear your brain waste. REM Sleep is when you are dreaming as you sleep. It is a lighter sleep that helps process your emotions, boosts your creativity, and increases your emotional memories. I thought this was insightful to learn about as I did not know there was a difference in what each kind of sleeping can do for your body.

     This connects to the class lecture slides about Impulsivity as sleep deprivation could make you more impulsive. We as humans make poor decisions sometimes for a short-term reward mostly when we're tired, stress, or emotional. With less sleep, our prefrontal cortex becomes weak and makes it harder for us to fight impulsive decisions. Walker talks about how sleep is what fuels the brain and if we do not get the right amount, our brains are physically unable to make good decisions. 

The Willpower Instinct Book Report

    “The Willpower Instinct” by Kelly McGonigal helps explain the science between willpower. The author uses a combination of medicine, neuroscience, and psychology to explain how we can increase our willpower to break habits and to create new and healthier habits. Willpower affects just about every aspect of our lives and it is important to understand what we can do to strengthen willpower. In the beginning, the author introduces the concept of the ‘I will, I won’t, and the I want power challenge. It was suggested to pick one of these challenges and apply it to each idea introduced in the book. She would continue to introduce topics that would help come up with strategies to develop self control and to further understand willpower. McGonigal not only gives us strategies to increase willpower, but she also helps us recognize how we lose willpower and being aware of that will further allow yourself to be prepared rather than giving into temptations and traps. Knowing how you fail, can help you prevent it from happening and prepare you for if failures of willpower do happen. This book emphasized the importance of being aware of your self control and willpower and how important it is to implement strategies to improve this strength.

    There were two parts of this book that I found interesting. First was the introduction of the power challenges and the way the author suggested using these to apply to the topics throughout the book. I found that this was a personal touch where I could pick one of these challenges and directly apply it to myself and how each of the topics would correlate with what I picked. This also made the book feel more interactive as I was constantly thinking about how each topic would help my power challenge. My other favorite part of the book were the willpower experiments at the conclusion of a topic. This challenges the reader to take what they just learned and try to implement in a small way in their life. One that I really liked was the  “Dopaminize Your I Will Power Challenge.” This introduced the concept of trying to make something that is unpleasant or something that you don’t want to do more motivating by doing an activity that triggers dopamine. The combination of an undesirable activity mixed with something that triggers dopamine may help make a positive connection to this activity. For example, my undesirable activity was exercising, but when I paired it with listening to music and reading a book, it made me want to exercise more. These willpower experiments really helped me come up with my own scenarios and allowed me to further understand the topic that was just introduced.

(Implementing the Willpower Experiment)

In our class, we have learned about self-control and impulsivity and how these may influence procrastination. This class explained procrastination in a theory where we tend to choose activities that guarantee an immediate reward or outcome. This means pushing off the activities that may seem daunting or boring, hence being named procrastination. McGonigal also described why we procrastinate as wanting to feel good right now rather than wait longer. With school assignments, a lot of us would rather be doing something social or entertaining, which satisfies the present self, but will leave the future self scrambling. She gave some strategies that include your self control in order to help limit procrastination and help you notice when it’s happening. One of these was to imagine how your future self would feel if you don’t complete the task. This helps put the task into perspective. If you visualize that your future self is going to be stressed that the task wasn’t done sooner, then you would be more willing to get it done now so you are not stressed in the future. I think the strategies for self control in relation to procrastination can help a lot of high school and college students get assignments done more efficiently. Rather than waiting to do assignments until the last minute and then feeling guilty, we can introduce these self control strategies for procrastination to help students realize there are ways for daunting and boring tasks to feel rewarding, and this would be helping them in the future. 

Reference

McGonigal, K. (2013). The willpower instinct: How self-control works, why it matters, and what you can do to get more of it. Avery.

Book Report

The book I read was "Why We Sleep" by Mathew Walker. I chose this book because as I read the back it seemed appealing to me because it explained how sleeping impacts our lives emotionally, way of learning, our immune system and our memory. As someone who loves to sleep I loved reading and learning about the different stages of sleep and what their roles are as well as how to improve our sleep and ways that poor sleeping habits can affect us physically and mentally.

 My favorite part was the roles of dreams. I know that dreams are very powerful with the unconscious mind and I have also kept a dream journal that helped me unfold what my dreams really meant. The neurosurgeon in the book explained that dreams act as overnight emotional therapy that helps our brain overcome worries. Dreams can also help with mood regulations because (and you may notice) that when you wake up you feel calm and less anxious as when you went to bed. Whenever I am having a bad night and I'm overthinking or stressed I always tell myself to go to bed because whenever I wake up it's like all of those overwhelming emotions are gone. Relating to our lecture slides, having good sleep makes your performance the best. So, when I am getting ready to go to sleep, I try to make sure I am calm and happy so I have good dreams and a full potential sleep so I have 100% effort and feel good the next day. 

I have read many books in my life and there is one that I am currently reading that reminds to of dreams and nightmares. In the book, the character has schizophrenia and while that is not completely all because of her mood (more of a disorder), the way she feels determines on wether she has a good night or not. If she is calm and happy, the monsters are gone when she goes to sleep but when she is angry and frustrated, the monsters come back and she gets a lot of heavy emotions that affect her mood and performance in everything she does. 

   

Book Report

        The book I chose for my book report is The Klansman’s Son by R. Derek Black. It is a 14-chapter book that follows the life of the author R. Derek Black as he is raised with the ideology of White Nationalism. The book discusses how Black feels as he is raised to be a leader in the white nationalist movement by his father, Don Black a former member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). He attends a liberal arts college, where he is exposed to different backgrounds and beliefs. As his worldview is challenged, especially by his peers, he begins to have an internal conflict centered around his beliefs. Black is conflicted about his identity and how changing will affect his life. Ultimately, Black renounces white nationalism publicly. The book focuses on themes like identity, indoctrination, social influence, and the power of empathy in overcoming hate.

        My favorite part of the book is when Black begins to have an honest and respectful conversation with a fellow student named Allison. Instead of shutting him down or calling him out about why his beliefs are wrong. Allison takes the time to listen to his view and then presents thoughtful research and counterarguments. What really stood out to me was how Black was willing to engage in conversation with her. These discussions didn’t immediately change his perspective, but instead, he began seeing how his ideology was flawed. As he begins to confront the flaws in his ideology, he starts to have an internal struggle about his identity. Black starts to distance himself from the white nationalist movement but is hesitant to speak out publicly. Fearing that he would lose his family and his community. His journey can be understood through his motivations.  At first, strong extrinsic motivation, like family approval and fear of rejection kept him loyal to the movement. However, over time, his intrinsic desire for freedom and authenticity grew stronger, ultimately leading to his rejection of the movement.

        This book is very relevant today. It shows how white nationalist ideology can be passed down like a family tradition. But it also demonstrates how deeply ingrained hate can be challenged and replaced by real-life experiences and meaningful relationships. Black recognized the flaws in his beliefs not because someone attacked him but because someone listened. Instead of responding with hate or judgment, Allison met him with empathy. Sometimes, just having one person willing to listen can have a greater impact than we realize. One quote from Allison stood out to me, “I believe the way to impact a specific person is to be a specific person in their world” (Black p. 270). It reminds me that real change often starts with something simple, like personal human connection.

        To demonstrate how empathy scales beyond a one-on-one conversation, I recommend the TED Talk “How to fight hate without being hateful” by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson. In her talk, McDonald-Gibson discusses real-world examples of how listening without judgment defuses situations and builds bridges between people. This is like what Allison did with Black, she was willing to step into his world without condemning him. 

procrastination

Reading the slides of procrastination make me think about how people that know that delaying an assignment or activity made least to a bad outcome but they still do it. I also find myself delaying all sorts of things to the latest I can possibly do it even though the outcome won't be as good as if I didn't. Learning about the Temporal Motivation Theory helped me understand that the reason I do procrastinate is because I would much rather do something I enjoy. When I sit doesn't to do an assignment, if there is something else I would rather do, I do it. I also found that because I am an artsy person, if I have an assignment that involves any art I do it straight away because it involves something I enjoy doing. I also notice I put way more effort into assignments that I enjoy no matter what it is. I do not necessarily have a motivation to get the assignments done besides that I don't have a choice because it is due that day or night. It is definitely something I want to work on this year and semester. 

Reproduction

 I never thought about reproduction as such scientific reasoning behind it. I think what surprised me was that when you look at someone for the first time, your mind subconsciously is thinking about babies and health in the future. I feel like I don't find myself thinking about those things but maybe deep down I am I just haven't realized it. Mate poaching was also interesting because it kind of explains why other people find people who are in a relationship more attractive in a way. I am not surprised that for both men and women , attractiveness is key because that is more of just common sense. The reason people go up to someone that they don't know to strike up a conversation is based on their attractiveness to them not their personality. I know that personally I would rather try to pursue something more with someone because of their looks rather than their personality. 

Food

 Going through the slides about how your preference in food developed over time from when before you were born was very interesting. Reading about how when a pregnant mother eats carrots, the baby then tastes the carrot flavor through the breast milk changed my perspective on eating while pregnant. In my theory, I would assume that whatever you eat, the baby becomes familiar with and ends up liking it too. For example, if a pregnant mother were to eat pickles all the time, the baby would love pickles as well as they grew older and began to eat. Now I feel that mothers should be careful about what they consume in their bodies while pregnant. 

I also find that the food that you eat while you are hungry can be trained into craving healthy foods when hungry because the foods you eat while you are hungry are more preferred than the foods you eat when aren't as hungry. So when I feel like I'm starving and I think about how I want to eat a burger or McDonalds, I can eat something healthier instead so my cravings for the fast food aren't as strong for when I'm starving in the future. 

Book Report 2025

 Book Report on Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

"Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker, dives deep into the science behind sleep and why it’s so essential to human life. Walker, a neuroscientist and sleep expert, breaks down how sleep impacts our physical and mental health, learning, memory, emotional stability, immune system, and even lifespan. The book doesn’t just explain what sleep does, it emphasizes what happens when we don’t get enough of it. One of the most surprising takeaways was how consistently bad sleep is linked to things like Alzheimer’s, heart disease, weight gain, and anxiety. Throughout the chapters, Walker uses relatable stories, research, and stats to show just how powerful sleep is, and how our society has completely undervalued it.

Favorite Part
My favorite part of the book was Chapter 6: "Your Mother and Shakespeare Knew." This chapter really stuck with me because it focused on the role of sleep in learning and memory; something that hits close to home as a student. Walker explains how sleep before learning helps the brain prepare to absorb new information, while sleep after learning helps “cement” that info into long-term memory. He compared it to hitting the "save" button on your brain. This reminded me of topics in our lectures about cognitive performance and self-control especially how lack of sleep can lead to impulsive decisions or poor academic habits. It also made me rethink the way I cram late at night. Turns out, pulling all-nighters can actually make you forget more than you learn.

Connection to Class Concepts
This ties in perfectly with our class discussions around self-regulation, reward systems, and procrastination. Sleep deprivation reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for decision-making and self-control. That explains why we procrastinate more, make worse decisions, and are drawn to instant rewards when we’re tired. I noticed this in myself on days I get less sleep, I tend to eat less weirdly, work less hard and push off tasks. The book backs this with science, which made me feel seen and also a bit exposed, in a good way.

Real-World Extension                                                                                                                           Reading this made me think about the way sleep is treated in our culture, especially in schools and work. It’s almost praised to be sleep-deprived, like it means you’re grinding harder than everyone else. But that mindset is draining us. If schools started later and employers prioritized rest, it could improve mental health, productivity, and even reduce diseases. Honestly, I think "Why We Sleep" should be required reading in high schools and colleges, it’s that important.