Sleep health knowledge

Fix the time for getting in and out of bed, avoid strong light sources one hour before going to bed, and don't lie down in bed with unfinished emotions.

When I received a sleep-related consultation before, I met a young girl who works in new media. She was anxious about the duration of the sleep app every day. She worked overtime until 1 o'clock to go to bed one day, and insisted on lying in bed until 8 o'clock the next day to get 7 hours. In fact, there is no unified standard answer for sleep duration. The recommended interval for adults given by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is 7-9 hours. As long as it fluctuates within this range, it is considered normal. Many schools of domestic traditional Chinese medicine sleep research also advocate "sleeping at midnight and taking a nap at noon." As long as you can ensure a deep sleep state from 23:00 to 1:00 am, even if the total duration is only 5-6 hours, it will not cause too much damage to the body. Both views are supported by clinical data. There is no need to stick to a certain standard to hinder yourself.

It seems that many people have sleep problems because of the "unfixed schedule". I have a programmer friend who always goes to bed at 12 a.m. and starts at 6 p.m. on weekdays. On weekends, he shuts down his computer and lies down until 2 p.m., euphemistically called "catching up on sleep." As a result, when he went to work on Monday, he was so dizzy that he felt like he had been on a 24-hour green train, and he couldn't recover for two consecutive days. In fact, this behavior is essentially forcing a jet lag on one's biological clock. Technically, it is called "sleep phase shift". The damage to sleep rhythm is more serious than staying up late all night. If you really want to catch up on sleep, you can get up an hour later than usual on weekends, have a hot breakfast and take a walk, which is much more effective than lying in bed and scrolling through your phone all morning.

As for avoiding strong light sources before going to bed, have you ever had the experience of lying down and watching short videos, becoming more energetic the more you watch them? Don’t blame it entirely on the attractive content. In fact, the blue light emitted by electronic devices such as mobile phones and tablets directly blocks the melatonin in the brain, which is responsible for secreting sleep signals. It doesn’t even know whether it is day or night, and of course it will not make you sleepy. As for whether you can turn on a night light, there is no unified conclusion in the industry: One group believes that as long as a warm light night light with a brightness of less than 5 lux has no effect, it is very friendly to the elderly and children who are afraid of the dark. The other group's long-term follow-up research has found that even a very weak light source will reduce the duration of deep sleep in the long run. You can try it for two weeks on your own, and choose whichever state is more comfortable. There is no need to listen to other people's instructions.

There are still many people who can't sleep. They are just lying in bed thinking too much. The KPIs during the day have not been completed, tomorrow's speech has not been written, and I just quarreled with my friends and did not perform well. All these bad things come up as soon as I lie in bed. The more I think about it, the more energetic I become, and it is useless to count thousands of sheep. I myself have committed this problem before, and then I tried a small method. I put a small notebook next to my bed and wrote down whatever I had not dealt with. It was like sending a message to my brain that "I have remembered this matter and will deal with it when I wake up tomorrow. I will never forget it." After writing, I put down the pen and fell asleep in ten minutes. It is more effective than any imported sleep-aid aromatherapy.

By the way, don’t think about taking melatonin or buying sleep-aid health products whenever you can’t sleep. It’s normal to have insomnia once or twice. Don’t label yourself “I am an insomniac”. On the contrary, it is easy to cause psychological implications. The more you think about sleeping, the more you can’t fall asleep. If you can't fall asleep after lying down for half an hour for more than two weeks in a row, or if you wake up very early in the morning and can't fall asleep anymore, it's much more cost-effective to go directly to the sleep department of the hospital to register than blindly buying those health care products that pay IQ tax.

In fact, sleep is really not that mysterious, and there is no need to worry about the deep sleep duration on the sleep app every day. After all, data is dead, and people are alive. You feel refreshed during the day, which is more accurate than any industry standard, don’t you think?