Dr. Morse Talks About the Significance of World Sleep Day 2025

Today, Friday, March 14, is World Sleep Day 2025, and this year’s theme is: Make Sleep Health a Priority. This day marks an opportunity to promote sleep health alongside thousands of sleep professionals and advocates. DocWire News spoke with our very own sleep professional, Dr. Anne Marie Morse, about the significance and theme of this year’s World Sleep Day and why sleep health matters for us all.

What is the theme for World Sleep Day 2025, and how does it highlight current global sleep health issues?

World Sleep Society has a proven track record in commitment to global equity and really trying to elevate the importance of sleep and circadian health across the globe. Now, when we’re looking at this, the slogan for 2025, which is “Make Sleep Health a Priority,” very much represents their ongoing commitment to the fact that sleep is not an option. Sleep is something that is a primary driver to overall health and wellness. We really now are seeing that the reflection of utilizing sleep health is really a critical tool to achieving the optimal version of who you are.

What is the genesis of World Sleep Day, and what does it mean to you as a physician?

I think it’s very important that we’re seeing the fact that there are more and more days being allocated to the recognition of the importance of overall sleep health. We’re seeing days, months, even weeks being dedicated to this. We have Student Sleep Awareness Weeks. We have Drowsy Driving Awareness Week. When you’re looking at World Sleep Day, this is really a global effort to being able to say, “We need to all align and really utilize sleep and circadian health in a way that is going to be monumental in being able to take control of what your days look like.” When you look historically at how most people on Earth have considered sleep, you can date it back to as far as 400 BC, when one of the initial medical descriptions of sleep’s relevance was that it was either a temporary coma or something to do when the person is inactive, and it’s important to recognize that this type of mindset was perpetuated until 1989 where some of the landmark studies were done demonstrating the critical importance of sleep health.

What I’m referencing is Dr. Rechtschaffen’s lab studies on animal models demonstrating the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation. However, in that same year in 1989, you still had alternative researchers like Dr. Horne perpetuating this idea of optional periods of sleep. This is where we see that mindset being perpetuated of, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” which most frequently I’m responding to, “Well, you’re just going to get there a lot sooner.”

When you look at Dr. Rechtschaffen’s studies, what he demonstrated is that sleep deprivation causes death. Depending on the variation of sleep deprivation, whether you’re doing absolute sleep deprivation, or potentially in one set of animal models, where he said, “We’re going to take a little bit of sleep away, and then a little bit more, and then a little bit more. So 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there. Oh, I’m just going to shortcut it an hour.” That is the global mindset: if I can get more done with less sleep.

But what did he find? He didn’t find that those animals were getting more done. He found that they instead had a slow and torturous death. First with experiencing that they can’t even control their body temperature. Then demonstrating that no matter what they ate, they tended to lose weight. And then demonstrating a progressive ulceration of their GI system and their skin, ultimately resulting in overwhelming infection, sepsis, and death. A slow and torturous death. When we look at that, we are subjecting ourselves on a daily basis to choosing a lesser version of who we can be, choosing to live unwell by not making sleep a health priority. This is the call to action today: for you to choose yourself and living the best version of who you can be by leaning into something that we all love to do anyway. Make sleep health a priority.