sleep health center

There is no unified golden sleep standard. As long as your schedule is in line with your own circadian rhythm and you do not feel persistent fatigue or dizziness within 30 minutes after waking up, even if you only sleep for 6 hours a day, or go to bed at 1 a.m. and start at 9 a.m. every day, it is a healthy sleep.

Believe it or not, I just met a post-95s e-commerce operator last month. He read the popular science that "not sleeping at 11 o'clock is a chronic suicide", so he forced himself to change his sleep schedule from 1 o'clock to 10 o'clock. As a result, he lay in bed tossing and turning until after 1 o'clock before falling asleep. The next day, he was even more tired than before, and a handful of hair fell out as soon as he combed his hair. After coming to us for two weeks of rhythm monitoring, we discovered that he was born with a late sleep phase. Melatonin does not start to be secreted in large quantities until 12:30. Forcing him to go to bed early is equivalent to forcing jet lag, which is completely against his nature. Later, he adjusted to going to bed at 12:30 and waking up at 7:30. In just one week, he said that the time he spent fishing at work was reduced by half.

Of course, there are different opinions on this conclusion in the industry. Many scholars who do research on elderly sleep still advocate that following the sun as much as possible, going to bed early and getting up early is more in line with the evolved rhythm of the human body. Especially for people over 40 years old and whose metabolism begins to slow down, long-term reversal of work and rest will indeed increase the risk of the three highs. Our point of view is also very practical: there is no need to mess with one's own nature. As long as young people have a stable work and rest schedule, even if they go to bed late and get up late, the harm will be much less than having a work schedule that fluctuates early and late, or forcibly adjusting the biological clock every three days.

In fact, the sleep problem we see most is not not getting enough sleep at all, but "anxiety about sleep" itself. Many people are obsessed with getting eight hours of sleep. If they miss half an hour of sleep, they start to panic. They lie in bed and scroll through their mobile phones and calculate, "I can still sleep for 6 hours now, but in half an hour I will only be able to sleep for 5 and a half hours." The more they count, the more awake they become, and their sleep is directly consumed by anxiety. There used to be a 62-year-old aunt who had nothing to do after she retired. She stared at the sleep app every day to count the hours. If she didn't sleep for 7 hours, she would sigh and feel that she would have some physical problems today. Later, we asked her to delete the app and go to bed when she was sleepy. If she couldn't sleep, she would get up and walk around the living room twice instead of lying on the bed "waiting for sleep." She basically slept for 6 hours a day, squinted on the sofa for 20 minutes at noon, and danced square dance with more energy than before.

By the way, some people asked if they could catch up on sleep over the weekend? This is also a topic that the industry has been arguing about for many years. A team doing metabolic research said that after short-term sleep deprivation, sleeping 1-2 hours more on weekends can indeed reduce the risk of some blood sugar abnormalities. ； Some scholars who have done long-term rhythm research say that catching up on sleep on weekends is equivalent to traveling across time zones. On the contrary, it will disrupt the rhythm that has been formed during the week, making it easier to suffer from insomnia next week. Our advice to users has always been very flexible: If you work overtime until 11 o'clock every day during the week, it's absolutely fine to sleep an extra hour and a half on weekends. Don't sleep for 12 hours at a time. Just get up and eat dinner directly - then you won't have to suffer from insomnia again next week.

Many people who come to consult want a "magic recipe for falling asleep quickly". We usually don't list "10 tips to help you sleep" right away. We first look at what your problem is. The young man who came here last week to work on game development had to lie in bed every day and watch short videos for 40 minutes before he could fall asleep. The more he watched, the more energetic he became. So we gave him a very simple suggestion: move all the charging sockets in the bedroom to the living room, put his mobile phone outside to charge before going to bed, and put the linear algebra textbook that was his most troublesome when he was in school next to his bed. Good guy, he reported back this week that he now feels sleepy after turning two pages of a book, and the time it takes to fall asleep has been reduced to 10 minutes. Of course, some people say that listening to white noise is helpful, and some say that drinking warm milk before going to bed is helpful. You can try these. If it doesn’t work, don’t worry about it. There is no universal trick.

There is also the issue of sleeping aids that everyone is most taboo about. Many people wave their hands when they hear that they need to take medicine, fearing that they will not be able to stop taking it. Let’s be honest here: the non-benzodiazepine short-acting sleep aids currently used clinically have very low dependence if taken according to the doctor’s instructions. If you have been lying down for more than half an hour for more than two weeks and still can’t fall asleep, or you wake up early more than three days a week and can’t fall asleep again, don’t take it hard. Go to the hospital for a polysomnography first. Take what you need to eat, which is much better than suffering from anxiety and depression every day. Of course, there are many supporters of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT-I) who believe that drugs only treat the symptoms, and adjusting cognition and work and rest is the root cause. We also agree that when intervention is given to users, drugs are usually combined with behavioral adjustments, which has the fastest and most stable effects.

I have been working in this industry for almost 6 years, and I feel more and more that sleep is something that people are born with. Don’t regard it as a KPI to be completed. If you are afraid of hurting your liver today and will become stupid tomorrow, you will put a lot of pressure on yourself when you lie down in bed, and you will not be able to sleep well. Think about when you were a child and fell asleep on the pillow. How many hours of sleep would you think you need today? If you really can't adjust, come to the center for chatting at any time, and you can always find a solution that suits you.