Sleep Health Day

There is never a one-size-fits-all gold standard. As long as it conforms to your circadian rhythm, does not feel persistently tired after waking up, and can stably support energy needs throughout the day, even if you only sleep for 6 hours a day or are used to staying up until the middle of the night, it is considered healthy sleep.

Last week, a young man who worked on the Internet backend came to my clinic. He was clutching a health post on his phone with an anxious look on his face. He said that he had set three bedtime reminders and seven wake-up alarms every day. He stuck to the standard schedule of going to bed at 11 a.m. and waking up at 7 a.m., and slept for a full eight hours. However, he still got distracted by the code every day when he came to the company and couldn't stop himself after drinking three cups of coffee. Later, I performed sleep monitoring on him and discovered that his 7 o'clock alarm clock happened to be stuck in the deep sleep stage of the third 90-minute sleep cycle, which is equivalent to being woken up by someone when he was sleeping soundly. Can he not faint? On the contrary, the 62-year-old Aunt Zhang downstairs in my house has been used to getting up at 5 o'clock to do Tai Chi all her life. She is too sleepy to keep her eyes open after 9 o'clock in the evening. She sleeps for less than 7 hours every day after doing Tai Chi every day. She can climb stairs faster than a 30-year-old like me. Last year, all the indicators in the physical examination were normal.

It is also interesting to say that in the past two years, the sleep science community had been arguing for a while about "unifying sleep duration standards." The mainstream consensus of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is that adults aged 18-64 should sleep 7-9 hours a day. This standard is still used by most popular science content today. However, researchers from the behavioral sleep school have long produced genetic evidence - born short sleepers carrying DEC2 gene mutations only need 4-6 hours of sleep a day to fully restore their energy. If they are forced to sleep for 7 hours, they will suffer the consequences. What’s more interesting is that scholars who study the history of modern human life have turned to European diaries from the 17th century and found that people before the Industrial Revolution generally slept in segments: going to bed at eight or nine o’clock in the evening, waking up around 12 o’clock in the middle of the night, reading for a while, chatting for a while, or even working for a while, and then sleeping for the second time after an hour or two. There was no so-called “insomnia” problem at all.

In the five years since I have been doing sleep intervention, the questions I have been asked the most are “Does staying up late definitely harm the body?” and “Is it necessary to take a nap at noon?” To be honest, there are really no standard answers to these two questions. Let’s talk about staying up late first. If you are engaged in a profession such as cross-border operations or screenwriting, which naturally requires a time difference with the domestic time, and you have a long-term schedule of going to bed at 2 a.m. and waking up at 10 a.m., with a regular schedule and rarely waking up during sleep, then it is really much healthier than the chaotic schedule of going to bed at 10 a.m. today and going to bed at 3 a.m. tomorrow - I used to have a customer who was an Amazon operator. He had to sleep at 11 o'clock to "keep in good health". He could not fall asleep even after lying in bed for two hours, and suffered from headaches for more than half a year. Later, he simply changed back to his habitual sleep time of 2 o'clock and then 10 o'clock. The headache was gone for half a month, and the melatonin secretion level was completely normal when checked.

As for "Zi Wu Na", this is a concept of health preservation in traditional Chinese medicine. There is indeed no corresponding concept in the Western medicine system, and there is no need to praise it. If you squint for 15-20 minutes at noon and feel refreshed in the afternoon, then you can definitely stick to it; but if you sleep for half an hour at noon and lie in bed tossing and turning until 1 o'clock at night, then there is really no need to force this "health KPI" - I am naturally unable to sleep at noon, and I can work efficiently with a glass of iced Americano in the afternoon, so there is no need to embarrass myself because of a rule.

Many people have difficulty falling asleep now. Their first reaction is to buy sleep-aid aromatherapy, listen to white noise, and take melatonin. In fact, there is really no need to try randomly. My own little habit is to put my phone in the living room 10 minutes before going to bed, flip through two pages of a prose book with no plot, and feel sleepy after flipping through it. It’s not the blue light that everyone thinks, but the gossip, funny jokes, and work news you get through short videos, which will keep the frontal lobe of your brain in a state of excitement. Just like you can’t lie down and fall asleep immediately after running 800 meters, you have to give your brain time to “slow down.” Oh, by the way, don’t take melatonin indiscriminately, especially for young people. Taking exogenous melatonin for a long time will inhibit your own melatonin secretion. When the time comes, you will really have to rely on eating to sleep, which is not worth the gain.

In fact, I have said so much today, and I just want to take advantage of Sleep Health Day to remind everyone: Don’t be bound by the “perfect sleep standards” on the Internet, and don’t set seven or eight alarm clocks to sleep and wake up just to get eight hours. Spend a week keeping track of your sleep status. If you feel relaxed every day when you wake up and can concentrate on work and school without fussing, even if you only sleep 6 hours a day and are used to going to bed at 1 a.m., that is completely healthy. If you really can't fall asleep after lying down for an hour or two for more than half a month, and you are still exhausted when you wake up, then seeing a professional sleep doctor will be much more useful than buying a bunch of sleep aid products.