{"id":973,"date":"2010-01-24T20:44:09","date_gmt":"2010-01-24T20:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/?p=973"},"modified":"2010-01-24T20:44:09","modified_gmt":"2010-01-24T20:44:09","slug":"lights-out-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/24\/lights-out-book-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Lights Out &#8211; Book Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I can highly recommend Lights Out by T.S. Wiley, it is well worth reading&#8230; Chapter 9, Damage Control!<\/p>\n<p>To be honest, this is the hardest book I&#8217;ve read in the last 5 years.  I nearly put it down many times.  To get the full effect of this book, you really need to buy it its very own soap box to sit on.  I really don&#8217;t think I got anything out of chapters 1-8 except vitriol.  <\/p>\n<p>In summary the book is about why <strong>you should sleep at least 9.5 hours per day<\/strong>, especially during winter.  It works on the premise that we evolved on a planet with seasons and our bodies adapted to expect those seasons.  When we mess with our body&#8217;s interpretation of what season it is, by turning the lights on after dusk, <strong>we are screwing up a cycle seasonal process<\/strong> that&#8217;s fundamental to our well being and survival.  <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a reasonable premise, but what I found the most difficult about this book is that none of its assertions are backed up with specific references.  Oh sure, there is a plethora of &#8220;End Notes&#8221; at the back, but where it makes some statement, as if it&#8217;s fact, there&#8217;s no citation.  So you don&#8217;t know what to believe as scientific evidence and what is just conjecture of the author.  <\/p>\n<p>But more than that, it&#8217;s the tone of the book I also found hard to cope with.  Where the author agrees with a piece of prior research, it&#8217;s always stated as &#8220;They agree with us.&#8221; not the other way round.  The topics meander round, jumping from point to seemingly irrelevant example.<\/p>\n<p>However, <strong>Chapter 9 is great<\/strong>.  I&#8217;d read just this chapter alone to be honest.  It contains a wealth of great practical advice for improving your sleep and life and health.  If I&#8217;d just read chapter 9, I would still have gained everything I got out of this book, but saved myself 3 weeks of reading to boot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I can highly recommend Lights Out by T.S. Wiley, it is well worth reading&#8230; Chapter 9, Damage Control! To be honest, this is the hardest book I&#8217;ve read in the last 5 years. I nearly put it down many times. To get the full effect of this book, you really need to buy it its [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[186],"class_list":{"0":"post-973","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-books"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}