#Why we sleep

[agardenandlibrary]

Also currently reading:

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

I'm not very far in this book yet, but it's been really approachable! I'm learning a lot, like why jet lag is worse in certain directions! And that some guys* decided to stay in a cave for 6 weeks to figure out circadian rhythms!

[auliasbookcorner]

Review: Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, PhD

Book 3 of 2023

Start Reading Time: 3 February 2023

Finish reading Time: 30 March 2023

Page Count: 368 Pages

TRIGGER WARNINGS: DEATH, MEDICAL CONTENT, ANIMAL CRUELTY, CHRONIC ILLNESS, MENTAL ILLNESS

Hey, look! A nonfiction book! The first of the year!! Pretty big thing for me. Can you tell I struggled with this book by how long I spent reading it? It's been a while since I read a non-fiction book, but I hope I'll read more of it this year and it won't take as long.

I picked this book, of course, because I love sleep, but also because my Mom had trouble falling asleep and it negatively impacted her health. We even went to the doctor and she was prescribed some sleeping pills, which helped her sleep, but I don't know if it's good for her in the long run. So, I decided to read more about sleep, as I've never really got to know very much about it, and when you love something you'd make an effort to know more about it, right?

It just so happens that my uncle, my Mom's oldest brother, suffered a heart attack and a stroke earlier this month. When I went to visit him in the hospital he told me he could not get a wink of sleep since before the heart attack. I told him about this book I was reading at the time and gave him some tips to help him fall asleep from this book, and I think he really appreciated it. Now, I would recommend this book to all my loved ones or at least inform them of the importance of sleeping 7-8 hours every night.

I really do think that this needs to be taught in schools, as it is absolutely pivotal for everyone's health and all of our lives and the improvement of our society.

Some of the most fascinating things I learned from this book is about REM and NREM sleep, how and why we dream, how people have different circadian rhythms and that it is genetics, and basically just the amazing impacts on health that a sleep night could give us living beings. Even though I did find some of the parts of the book can be quite boring, it is still a really interesting and important book to read for everybody.

Also, some parts of the book can be quite grim and scary in the parts about the horrible things that come from lack of sleep. I felt personally attacked too, because I don't get 7+ hours of sleep regularly for no good reasons other than Netflix, Youtube, Twitter, and Tiktok exist. Also, sometimes it's because the books I'm reading were just so good that it makes me play this dangerous game of "just one more page" that could magically make 4+ hours of a few chapters feel like 5 minutes.

Overall, it's a great book that provides the readers with so much awesome knowledge about sleep, dreams, and just human health in general that could have greatly impacted the readers' health positively in the long run. Definitely an important read.

Here are my favorite quotes from the book:

"Hard problems care little about what motivates their interrogators; they meter out their lessons of difficulty all the same."

"The prefrontal cortex controls high-level thought and logical reasoning, and helps keep our emotions in check. When a night owl is forced to wake up too early, their prefrontal cortex remains in a disabled, “offline” state. Like a cold engine after an early-morning start, it takes a long time before it warms up to operating temperature, and before that will not function efficiently.

An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl. Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.

Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favor larks.Although the situation is improving, standard employment schedules force owls into an unnatural sleep-wake rhythm. Consequently, job performance of owls as a whole is far less optimal in the mornings, and they are further prevented from expressing their true performance potential in the late afternoon and early evening as standard work hours end prior to its arrival. Most unfortunately, owls are more chronically sleep-deprived, having to wake up with the larks, but not being able to fall asleep until far later in the evening. Owls are thus often forced to burn the proverbial candle at both ends. Greater ill health caused by a lack of sleep therefore befalls owls, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer, heart attack, and stroke.

In this regard, a societal change is needed, offering accommodations not dissimilar to those we make for other physically determined differences (e.g., sight impaired). We require more supple work schedules that better adapt to all chronotypes, and not just one in its extreme."

"You can, however, artificially mute the sleep signal of adenosine by using a chemical that makes you feel more alert and awake: caffeine. Caffeine is not a food supplement. Rather, caffeine is the most widely used (and abused) psychoactive stimulant in the world. It is the second most traded commodity on the planet, after oil. The consumption of caffeine represents one of the longest and largest unsupervised drug studies ever conducted on the human race, perhaps rivaled only by alcohol, and it continues to this day."

"Levels of circulating caffeine peak approximately thirty minutes after oral administration. What is problematic, though, is the persistence of caffeine in your system. In pharmacology, we use the term “half-life” when discussing a drug’s efficacy. This simply refers to the length of time it takes for the body to remove 50 percent of a drug’s concentration. Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours. Let’s say that you have a cup of coffee after your evening dinner, around 7:30 p.m. This means that by 1:30 a.m., 50 percent of that caffeine may still be active and circulating throughout your brain tissue. In other words, by 1:30 a.m., you’re only halfway to completing the job of cleansing your brain of the caffeine you drank after dinner.

There’s nothing benign about that 50 percent mark, either. Half a shot of caffeine is still plenty powerful, and much more decomposition work lies ahead throughout the night before caffeine disappears. Sleep will not come easily or be smooth throughout the night as your brain continues its battle against the opposing force of caffeine. Most people do not realize how long it takes to overcome a single dose of caffeine, and therefore fail to make the link between the bad night of sleep we wake from in the morning and the cup of coffee we had ten hours earlier with dinner."

"It is worth pointing out that caffeine is a stimulant drug. Caffeine is also the only addictive substance that we readily give to our children and teens"

"Similar to an unbalanced diet in which you only eat carbohydrates and are left malnourished by the absence of protein, short-changing the brain of either NREM or REM sleep—both of which serve critical, though different, brain and body functions—results in a myriad of physical and mental ill health, as we will see in later chapters. When it comes to sleep, there is no such thing as burning the candle at both ends—or even at one end—and getting away with it."

"Many of the explanations for why we sleep circle around a common, and perhaps erroneous, idea: sleep is the state we must enter in order to fix that which has been upset by wake."

"But what if we turned this argument on its head? What if sleep is so useful—so physiologically beneficial to every aspect of our being—that the real question is: Why did life ever bother to wake up? Considering how biologically damaging the state of wakefulness can often be, that is the true evolutionary puzzle here, not sleep. Adopt this perspective, and we can pose a very different theory: sleep was the first state of life on this planet, and it was from sleep that wakefulness emerged."

"Humans are not sleeping the way nature intended. The number of sleep bouts, the duration of sleep, and when sleep occurs have all been comprehensively distorted by modernity."

"Have you ever wondered about the meaning of the term “midnight”? It of course means the middle of the night, or, more technically, the middle point of the solar cycle. And so it is for the sleep cycle of hunter-gatherer cultures, and presumably all those that came before. Now consider our cultural sleep norms. Midnight is no longer “mid night.” For many of us, midnight is usually the time when we consider checking our email one last time—and we know what often happens in the protracted thereafter. Compounding the problem, we do not then sleep any longer into the morning hours to accommodate these later sleep-onset times. We cannot. Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need. At one time we went to bed in the hours after dusk and woke up with the chickens. Now many of us are still waking up with the chickens, but dusk is simply the time we are finishing up at the office, with much of the waking night to go. Moreover, few of us enjoy a full afternoon nap, further contributing to our state of sleep bankruptcy."

"Related, the REM-sleep gift of facilitating accurate recognition and comprehension allows us to make more intelligent decisions and actions as a consequence. More specifically, the coolheaded ability to regulate our emotions each day—a key to what we call emotional IQ—depends on getting sufficient REM sleep night after night. (If your mind immediately jumped to particular colleagues, friends, and public figures who lack these traits, you may well wonder about how much sleep, especially late-morning REM-rich sleep, they are getting.)

Second, and more critical, if you multiply these individual benefits within and across groups and tribes, all of which are experiencing an ever-increasing intensity and richness of REM sleep over millennia, we can start to see how this nightly REM-sleep recalibration of our emotional brains could have scaled rapidly and exponentially. From this REM-sleep-enhanced emotional IQ emerged a new and far more sophisticated form of hominid socioecology across vast collectives, one that helped enable the creation of large, emotionally astute, stable, highly bonded, and intensely social communities of humans."

"As this positive feedback loop took hold in exponential fashion, we formed, organized, maintained, and deliberatively shaped ever larger social groups. The rapidly increasing creative abilities could thus be spread more efficiently and rapidly, and even improved by that ever-increasing amount of hominid REM-sleep that enhances emotional and social sophistication. REM-sleep dreaming therefore represents a tenable new contributing factor, among others, that led to our astonishingly rapid evolutionary rise to power, for better and worse—a new (sleep-fueled), globally dominant social superclass."

"To be clear, not all medical problems of aging are attributable to poor sleep. But far more of our age-related physical and mental health ailments are related to sleep impairment than either we, or many doctors, truly realize or treat seriously."

"It was a saddening confirmation of my theory: the parts of our brain that ignite healthy deep sleep at night are the very same areas that degenerate, or atrophy, earliest and most severely as we age."

"I believe we should recognize and treat sleep impairments in the elderly with a similar regard and compassion, recognizing that they do, in fact, need just as much sleep as other adults."

"However, the capacity to forget can, in certain contexts, be as important as the need for remembering, both in day-to-day life (e.g., forgetting last week’s parking spot in preference for today’s) and clinically (e.g., in excising painful, disabling memories, or in extinguishing craving in addiction disorders). Moreover, forgetting is not just beneficial to delete stored information we no longer need. It also lowers the brain resources required for retrieving those memories we want to retain, similar to the ease of finding important documents on a neatly organized, clutter-free desk. In this way, sleep helps you retain everything you need and nothing that you don’t, improving the ease of memory recollection. Said another way, forgetting is the price we pay for remembering."

"Standing in front of the manager, staff, and players, I tell them about one of the most sophisticated, potent, and powerful—not to mention legal—performance enhancers that has real game-winning potential: sleep."

"A final benefit of sleep for memory is arguably the most remarkable of all: creativity. Sleep provides a nighttime theater in which your brain tests out and builds connections between vast stores of information. This task is accomplished using a bizarre algorithm that is biased toward seeking out the most distant, nonobvious associations, rather like a backward Google search. In ways your waking brain would never attempt, the sleeping brain fuses together disparate sets of knowledge that foster impressive problem-solving abilities. If you ponder the type of conscious experience such outlandish memory blending would produce, you may not be surprised to learn that it happens during the dreaming state—REM sleep. ... such informational alchemy conjured by REM-sleep dreaming has led to some of the greatest feats of transformative thinking in the history of the human race."

"No facet of the human body is spared the crippling, noxious harm of sleep loss. We are, as you will see, socially, organizationally, economically, physically, behaviorally, nutritionally, linguistically, cognitively, and emotionally dependent upon sleep."

"After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived."

"There are many things that I hope readers take away from this book. This is one of the most important: if you are drowsy while driving, please, please stop. It is lethal. To carry the burden of another’s death on your shoulders is a terrible thing. Don’t be misled by the many ineffective tactics people will tell you can battle back against drowsiness while driving."

"Insufficient sleep does not, therefore, push the brain into a negative mood state and hold it there. Rather, the under-slept brain swings excessively to both extremes of emotional valence, positive and negative.

You may think that the former counter-balances the latter, thereby neutralizing the problem. Sadly, emotions, and their guiding of optimal decision and actions, do not work this way. Extremity is often dangerous. Depression and extreme negative mood can, for example, infuse an individual with a sense of worthlessness, together with ideas of questioning life’s value. There is now clearer evidence of this concern. Studies of adolescents have identified a link between sleep disruption and suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, and, tragically, suicide completion in the days after. One more reason for society and parents to value plentiful sleep in teens rather than chastise it, especially considering that suicide is the second-leading cause of death in young adults in developed nations after car accidents."

"If you were one of the individuals who were obtaining just five to six hours each night or less, you were 200 to 300 percent more likely to suffer calcification of your coronary arteries over the next five years, relative to those individuals sleeping seven to eight hours. The deficient sleep of those individuals was associated with a closing off of the critical passageways that should otherwise be wide open and feeding the heart with blood, starving it and significantly increasing the risk of a coronary heart attack."

"short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting."

"As the theory predicted, it was the dreaming state of REM sleep—and specific patterns of electrical activity that reflected the drop in stress-related brain chemistry during the dream state—that determined the success of overnight therapy from one individual to the next. It was not, therefore, time per se that healed all wounds, but instead it was time spent in dream sleep that was providing emotional convalescence. To sleep, perchance to heal.

Sleep, and specifically REM sleep, was clearly needed in order for us to heal emotional wounds."

"Using LED devices at night impacts our natural sleep rhythms, the quality of our sleep, and how alert we feel during the day. The societal and public health ramifications, discussed in the penultimate chapter, are not small. I, like many of you, have seen young children using electronic tablets at every opportunity throughout the day . . . and evening. The devices are a wonderful piece of technology. They enrich the lives and education of our youth. But such technology is also enriching their eyes and brains with powerful blue light that has a damaging effect on sleep—the sleep that young, developing brains so desperately need in order to flourish."

"The obvious methods involve reducing caffeine and alcohol intake, removing screen technology from the bedroom, and having a cool bedroom. In addition, patients must (1) establish a regular bedtime and wake-up time, even on weekends, (2) go to bed only when sleepy and avoid sleeping on the couch early/mid-evenings, (3) never lie awake in bed for a significant time period; rather, get out of bed and do something quiet and relaxing until the urge to sleep returns, (4) avoid daytime napping if you are having difficulty sleeping at night, (5) reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts and worries by learning to mentally decelerate before bed, and (6) remove visible clockfaces from view in the bedroom, preventing clock-watching anxiety at night."

"The loud-and-proud corporate mentality of sleeplessness as the model for success is evidentially wrong at every level of analysis we have explored. Sound sleep is clearly sound business. Nevertheless, many companies remain deliberately antisleep in their structured practices. Like flies set in amber, this attitude keeps their businesses in a similarly frozen state of stagnation, lacking in innovation and productivity, and breeding employee unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and ill health."

"It is clear that a tired, under-slept brain is little more than a leaky memory sieve, in no state to receive, absorb, or efficiently retain an education. To persist in this way is to handicap our children with partial amnesia. Forcing youthful brains to become early birds will guarantee that they do not catch the worm, if the worm in question is knowledge or good grades. We are, therefore, creating a generation of disadvantaged children, hamstrung by a privation of sleep. Later school start times are clearly, and literally, the smart choice.

One of the most troubling trends emerging in this area of sleep and brain development concerns low-income families—a trend that has direct relevance to education. Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to be taken to school in a car, in part because their parents often have jobs in the service industry demanding work start times at or before six a.m. Such children therefore rely on school buses for transit, and must wake up earlier than those taken to school by their parents. As a result, those already disadvantaged children become even more so because they routinely obtain less sleep than children from more affluent families. The upshot is a vicious cycle that perpetuates from one generation to the next—a closed-loop system that is very difficult to break out of. We desperately need active intervention methods to shatter this cycle, and soon."

"We can scale this solution globally: anywhere there is immunization and the opportunity to track an individual’s sleep, there is the chance for marked cost savings to health-care systems, governments, and businesses, all with the motivated goal of trying to help people live healthier lives."

"This silent sleep loss epidemic is the greatest public health challenge we face in the twenty-first century in developed nations. If we wish to avoid the suffocating noose of sleep neglect, the premature death it inflicts, and the sickening health it invites, a radical shift in our personal, cultural, professional, and societal appreciation of sleep must occur.

I believe it is time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep, without embarrassment or the damaging stigma of laziness. In doing so, we can be reunited with that most powerful elixir of wellness and vitality, dispensed through every conceivable biological pathway. Then we may remember what it feels like to be truly awake during the day, infused with the very deepest plenitude of being."

I highly recommend this book for everybody. We all deserve to get a good 7+ hours of sleep every night, and it helps so much to know the great health benefits of sleep too. So, please read this book, and please get more sleep if you don't regularly get 7+ hours of sleep every night. This year, I wanna invest in a sleep tracker and try to get a regular 7+ hours of sleep every night too. LET’S GET THOSE ZZZZ’S, PEOPLE.

WRITING STYLE - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

ENTERTAINMENT LEVEL - 💔💔💔

BOOK COVER DESIGN - ⭐⭐⭐

OVERALL BOOK RATING - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

[ridleymocki]

Folks this book was thoroughly debunked by Alexey Guzey, https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

The saga was covered in a wonderful episode of the Maintenance Phase podcast with Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes (highly recommend).

Cliff notes: The book is littered with factual inaccuracies, most of the studies Walker cited he misrepresented or their efficacy was greatly overstated. In general, exercise caution around pop-sci literature that makes sweeping statements or claims breakthrough, enlightenment answers.

There is evidence that lack of sleep affects cognitive performance. However, the ideal amount of sleep for any one individual person (from which missed sleep is 'lacking') depends hugely on physical factors unique to that person: genetics, nutrition, fitness, location, health conditions, age, etc. It is affected again by the quality of sleep: how long, spent in which cycles, with how many disturbances. I.e.: there is no justifiably universal recommendation for sleep quantity. As usual, you have to figure out what works for you.

“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”

— Matthew Walker PhD, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (via themedicalstate)

[imnotsorryanymore5]

I’m so behind on adding books I’ve been reading!

I love how he asks so many answers and then loads you up on information in the coming pages. Haven’t finished yet!

[mariafraniayu]

"Unlocking the Night: A Deep Dive into the Power and Necessity of Sleep"

Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams” explores one of the most fundamental yet mysterious aspects of human existence: sleep. Walker, a renowned neuroscientist and sleep expert, meticulously presents a wealth of scientific research to illuminate the critical role of sleep in our lives. This book is not just an academic treatise but a clarion call for a societal…

[nyxwolph]

It's okay if you couldn't cut it as a doctor. No sober human was ever meant to.

how cocaine created the residency programs of today

Why did we ever force doctors to learn their profession in this exhausting, sleepless way? The answer originates with the esteemed physician William Stewart Halsted, MD. 

Halsted founded the surgical training program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in May 1889. As chief of the Department of Surgery, his influence was considerable, and his beliefs about how young doctors must apply themselves to medicine, formidable. The term “residency” came from Halsted’s belief that doctors must live in the hospital for much of their training, allowing them to be truly committed in their learning of surgical skills and medical knowledge. 

Halsted’s mentality was difficult to argue with, since he himself practiced what he preached, being renowned for a seemingly superhuman ability to stay awake for apparently days on end without any fatigue. But Halsted had a dirty secret that only came to light years after his death, and helped explain both the maniacal structure of his residency program and his ability to forgo sleep. Halsted was a cocaine addict. 

Early in his career, Halsted was conducting research on the nerve-blocking abilities of drugs that could be used as anesthetics to dull pain in surgical procedures. One of those drugs was cocaine, which prevents electrical impulse waves from shooting down the length of the nerves in the body, including those that transmit pain. Addicts of the drug know this all too well, as their nose, and often their entire face, will become numb after snorting several lines of the substance, almost like having been injected with too much anesthetic by an overly enthusiastic dentist. 

Working with cocaine in the laboratory, it didn’t take long before Halsted was experimenting on himself. If you read Halsted’s academic report of his research findings in the New York Medical Journal from September 12, 1885, you’d be hard pressed to comprehend it. Several medical historians have suggested that the writing is so discombobulated and frenetic that he undoubtedly wrote the piece when high on cocaine. 

Colleagues noticed Halsted’s odd and disturbing behaviors in the years before and after his arrival at Johns Hopkins. This included excusing himself from the operating theater while he was supervising residents during surgical procedures, leaving the young doctors to complete the operation on their own. At other times, Halsted was not able to operate himself because his hands were shaking so much, the cause of which he tried to pass off as a cigarette addiction. 

Ashamed and nervous that his colleagues would discover the truth, he entered a rehabilitation clinic under his first and middle name, rather than using his surname. It was the first of many unsuccessful attempts at kicking his habit. For one stay at Butler Psychiatric Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, Halsted was given a rehabilitation program of exercise, a healthy diet, fresh air, and, to help with the pain and discomfort of cocaine withdrawal, morphine. Halsted subsequently emerged from the “rehabilitation” program with both a cocaine addiction and a morphine addiction. 

Halsted inserted his cocaine-infused wakefulness into the heart of Johns Hopkins’s surgical program. The exhausting residency program, which persists in one form or another throughout all US medical schools to this day, has left countless patients hurt or dead in its wake—and likely residents, too. Many medical schools used to require residents to work thirty hours. You may think that’s short, since I’m sure you work at least forty hours a week. But for residents, that was thirty hours all in one go. Worse, they often had to do two of these thirty-hour continuous shifts within a week, combined with several twelve-hour shifts scattered in between.

— Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD 

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF movie Vanessa was out of pocket for this one..

[checkadii]

too lazy to grab a ref whatever girl

[ritik3630a]

What is the role of sleep in weight loss and gain?

Are you getting enough sleep at night? If not, you may be putting your health at risk without even realizing it. Studies have shown that routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night can demolish your immune system and increase your risk of cancer. That’s a scary thought, isn’t it? But that’s not all – not getting enough sleep can also make you feel hungry all the time, leading to…

[twice-in-a-blue-moon]

when solomon has sex with you for the first time, he makes sure to absolutely worship your body. during the first kiss scene with him, he said he's been waiting for a chance to do it. so with this, he's going to make sure his patience will pay off. not an inch of your skin will be unloved by him. it may have taken so long, but the end result will be perfect as the two of you are satisfied, love growing by the second

(Ooh, thank you for the food, anon!! Solomon's first kiss scene will forever have my heart) Reader is GN! :)

Minors DNI!

"Why don't you come just a little closer?"

You shift a little closer until there's no space between you two on the bed, and his lips are back on yours. His hand comes up to cradle your jaw, softly rubbing his thumb along to solidify in his mind that you are here and that this is happening.

Somehow, miraculously, he finally got you alone...and you want him too.

Though he fears he'll get too eager and move too fast for your liking, leading to crossing a boundary or scaring you away. So, he's careful, treating you as if you were glass, slow to do anything more than kiss you like this. Truthfully, he could just do this all night and he'd still be over the moon. But he can't deny in his heart the need for more.

His hand on your jaw slowly slides down your neck, simply letting his fingertips brush against the sensitive skin. It's warm, and he can feel your pulse thrumming just beneath. He wonders how it would feel against his lips.

Solomon reluctantly pulls away from your lips, leaning down to instead kiss along the column of your neck. It elicits a soft gasp, and he feels giddy that he can get such a cute response from you. It only serves him to want to hear more. A secondary motive.

With each article of clothing he removes from your body, he falls deeper in love as he sees his person bared completely to him. It signifies the trust you've built together. And he'll do everything to never lose it - a promise he quietly makes to himself.

From your neck, he lavishes kisses along your collarbones, down both of your arms, your shallowly rising and falling chest, your soft stomach, all the way down to your naval. Any further is iffy territory and he wants explicit permission before he does anything more.

Through a husky tone, he asks, "is this okay? Can I continue?"

Your approval and reassurance are resounding. The weight of worry eases a little, but he's still tentative to continue. He wants you to feel good. He wants this first time with you to be perfect. He can't help it, he's an ancient sorcerer in love for the first time in a very long time...if ever.

So, slowly, he ventures onward to where he sees the obvious impact he's had on you tonight. His talented silver tongue makes you squirm on the bed, your hands tangling in his soft locks as his name tumbles out of your mouth like a prayer. The taste of your sweet arousal is something he fears he could get addicted to.

Solomon can feel his own arousal growing past anything he's ever experienced before. He didn't know he had the capacity to feel so needy for someone else. Good lord, just what are you doing to him?

Once he feels he's prepped and pleasured you enough with his tongue and dexterous fingers, he pulls away to finally undress and bare himself to you. His eyes shift away nervously as he feels you studying his body now. He knows his skin is marred from centuries of living; the countless pact marks, scars he doesn't remember the stories of, and burns from experiments gone wrong. He's never felt self-conscious like this before, but it's another product of what you do to him.

When you sit up on the bed, crawling to him to brush your fingers along his skin, it takes his breath away. You aren't afraid to explore him. Tracing his pact marks, kissing his imperfections, never once showing disgust like he might've thought.

No, only care.

Solomon gently chases you back down onto the bed, crawling over your excited form with smiles and giggles exchanged in the otherwise quiet room. Once again, he gets your staunch permission before continuing. And once again, you reassure him that this is what you want. Any lingering doubt subsides, and with that, he lines himself up with your entrance and slowly slides in, letting you adjust once he's fully settled within you.

"D-Deus meus..."

His forehead rests against yours as his breathing turns ragged, reveling in how goddamn good you feel around him. It takes all of him to be patient, but he waits for your signal, and once he has it, he doesn't hesitate to start moving.

His hips snap against yours in deep, measured thrusts. Passionate kisses are shared, soft moans and grunts fill your ears, and his hands never once stop exploring your body. The love he gave it earlier wasn't nearly enough.

There's no rush. It's not frantic - it's not even desperate. It's slow and intimate as he guarantees you both feel good in this one moment of solitude.

Solomon isn't even thinking about afterwards or what those brothers might say. He's fully entranced by you. He makes love to you as if it's the last time he ever will.

Soon he brings you both to a mind-shattering orgasm. His body shudders above yours as he buries his face in your neck. The way you clench around him makes him consider asking for a second round. Though, he wants to take a break more - to love and care for you as needed. As carefully as he can, he pulls out, already missing being enveloped by you and your sweet body. The second his fatigued self hits the bed, you instantly cuddle up to him, locking him in place for the foreseeable future.

To say he's a little shocked is an understatement. Sure, you both just shared a moment of passion and pleasure, but there was still some part of him that wondered if you really wanted him. For you to take the initiative to cuddle up to him in the afterglow touches his heart. Solomon wraps his arms around you, humming at the shared warmth between your sweaty bodies and shielding you from the world outside of this room.

Tonight you're his. And he knows he'll always be yours.

[illmoraineakoi]

ARE YOU SLEEPING DURING THE LEAD-UP TO YOUR OWN FUCKING EPISODE?!

[cowboyfatgum]

MC: *accidentally bumping into mammon and putting on a British accent* My fault original gangster

Mammon *also putting on a British accent* No, this cannot be forgiven, now empty the compartments of your pantaloons

MC: For what purpose?🥺

Mammon: And discard all of your footwear as well

MC: For what purpose?😭😭😭

[hazieash]

It’s a Ratatouille situation

[turtledotjpeg]

much art has been made of kurapika leaning/napping on melody and i love all of that art. so much. but i also wanted him to return the favor :)

he is doing his best to be a comforting presence in his own way (◡‿◡)

[hipsternumbertwo]

why are some people like this????