Tony Cunningham

Yeah.... a few good points but most are debatable and that's the issue. Sleep is complicated and if you listed every exception in sleep research it'd be unreadable and if you waited until there aren't any you'd be waiting a long time. For almost every finding in sleep you can 1/

find a citation that says the complete opposite. I've read most of Matt's work and one of his greatest strengths is that he is such a compelling writer and great storyteller, but if I were to list a flaw I'd say it's that to tell such compelling stories, he doesn't always 2/

provide all sides of the argument (reviewers are partly to blame for not calling him on that). But his efforts to translate a complicated topic for a lay audience is commendable with a basic message of "Sleep is Good", (I don't buy the harm done by the book argument at all) 3/

I won't argue he oversimplified, but I agree with the morale of the story. My bigger issue is the tone of the blog. This is clearly not written to engage in a scientific discussion of debatable points (which is what they are). It's interesting he uses the term "scaremongering" 4/

hi! I'm the author of that essay. I'm down to engage in a scientific discussion of debatable points. Let me know if I got anything wrong in my essay, I will correct it.

I'll start with sleep deprivation does cause death as made evident by animal models (obviously can't test this experimentally in humans) Everson, C. A., Bergmann, B. M., & Rechtschaffen, A. (1989). Sleep deprivation in the rat: III. Total sleep deprivation. Sleep, 12(1), 13-21.

If I get a chance I'll try to take a look back through and highlight other things, but as a sleep researcher and clinical psychologist, I would say TSD is last resort, not a first line treatment. We don't know how it works, so we don't know what it does long term. Obviously, some

sleep researchers and clinicians might disagree with me on that one, hence the debate.