Sleep Health Center

Don’t cram 8 hours of sleep, don’t supplement melatonin randomly, and don’t treat sleep as a KPI. The root cause of most sleep problems is not that you don’t sleep hard enough, but that you haven’t figured out your sleep rhythm and found the wrong adjustment direction.

To be honest, I have seen the most outrageous customer. He painted his bedroom dark blue to help him sleep, bought a memory foam mattress worth tens of thousands of dollars, and changed seven or eight pillows. However, he still lay there until two or three o'clock every day with his eyes open and counting sheep. When I asked, I found out that he spends 2 hours every day reading industry reports and doing competitive product analysis before going to bed. His mind spins faster than during weekly meetings. What mattress can save him?

When it comes to adjusting the direction, there is actually no unified "standard answer" in the industry. The ideas of different schools are quite different. Our center will not just decide which one to use for you. We will first conduct a complete evaluation before selecting an adaptation plan. For example, CBT-I (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia), which is the most widely used nowadays, is essentially to help you get rid of the bad habits of "lying in bed and waiting to fall asleep" and "insomnia anxiety". It is suitable for people who have no organic problems, just have a disordered work and rest routine, can't do without their mobile phones before going to bed, and get nervous when they think about going to bed. There used to be a 27-year-old Internet operation girl who set an alarm clock to go to bed at 11 o'clock every day and wake up at 7 o'clock. She would lie tossing and turning until after 1 o'clock. She took melatonin from 1 pill to 3 pills and drank coffee during the day until she felt flustered. The intervention plan we gave her was very simple: get up immediately if she doesn't fall asleep after lying down for 20 minutes, sit on the sofa in the living room and read non-nutritious books, and never touch her mobile phone. At the beginning, she was only allowed to lie down for 6 hours a day, and she had to get up even if she didn't sleep enough. She was not allowed to enter the bedroom until she was so sleepy that she couldn't open her eyes. It was only about two weeks. When she came back for a follow-up check-up, she said that she could fall asleep in 15 minutes when she lay down, and she no longer had to drink two cups of coffee during the day.

If you wake up still groggy after eight hours of sleep and are too tired to walk, then CBT-I may not be of much help, and the idea of functional medicine may be more suitable. Most of these problems are caused by internal abnormalities in the body that affect the quality of sleep. For example, eating too many high-sugar foods before going to bed causes blood sugar fluctuations at night, vitamin D deficiency or lactose intolerance triggering cortisol secretion disorders, and even inconspicuous chronic inflammations such as rhinitis and periodontitis, which can cut your deep sleep time in half. I once had a client who was a teacher. He woke up at exactly 3 a.m. every day and couldn't fall back to sleep. I searched around and couldn't find the problem. Finally, I did a food intolerance test and found out that the problem was caused by the hot milk he drank before going to bed every day. After stopping the milk and taking some probiotics, he never woke up at the same time in less than a week. Oh, by the way, we will also refer to the Ziwu flow logic of traditional Chinese medicine. Many clients wake up between 1 and 3 in the morning with strong liver fire. If combined with liver-soothing nutrition or moxibustion, the improvement effect is also obvious. We will never say that a certain method is absolutely correct.

Oh, by the way, I need to correct a widely spread misunderstanding: adults must sleep for 8 hours. Really not. We once received a 62-year-old retired professor who was found to have a DEC2 gene mutation through genetic testing. He is a natural short sleeper. He is full of energy after sleeping for 4 and a half hours a day. Before, he listened to health rumors and forced himself to sleep for 8 hours. Instead, he suffered from insomnia every day. After adjusting his schedule, he had no problems and was able to play badminton for half an hour every morning. There is also melatonin. This thing is really not a magic drug to help you sleep. It is only suitable for the elderly who suffer from jet lag or insufficient melatonin secretion. Young people who take it for a long time will only suppress their own melatonin secretion. The more they take, the higher the dosage. In the end, they will not be able to sleep at all if they don’t take it. It is just drinking poison to quench their thirst.

We usually intervene with clients, and we don’t just let you eat and use that. First, change two small habits. 80% of people can feel the change in half a month: first, don’t stay in bed when you wake up in the morning. Even if you only slept for 3 hours the day before, set the alarm and get up at that time. Open the curtains and bask in the sun for 5 minutes. The sun can directly suppress Melatonin secretion helps you move your biological clock forward, and you will naturally feel sleepy at night; the other is not to take your mobile phone to bed. If you really need to do it, sit in the living room and do it. When you feel sleepy, go to the bedroom. This will slowly establish the conditioned reflex of the brain that "the bedroom is the place to sleep". It is much more effective than how much sleep aromatherapy you put on or how much white noise you listen to to aid sleep.

If you still can’t sleep well after changing these habits, or even snore loudly when you fall asleep, still have a headache when you wake up, or wake up at a fixed time in the morning every day for more than a month, then don’t force yourself to do it, and don’t buy those Internet celebrity sleep gummies and sleep aid sprays. First, do a polysomnography to see if there are organic problems such as sleep apnea and periodic leg movement. Find out the cause and make adjustments. Don’t make trial and error aggravate the problem.

Last week, the 27-year-old operations girl came for a follow-up visit and said that she and her friends climbed Mount Huangshan last week. She said that she was out of breath even climbing the third floor before, but now she feels more energetic. In fact, after doing sleep intervention for so long, my biggest feeling is that sleep is never a KPI that you need to "work hard to complete." It is the body's own instinct. You don't always want to control it, force it, give it some space, and most of the time it will get back on track.