Sleep health recommended standards

Rhythm stability>State after waking up>Sleep duration. The recommended duration for each age group is only a reference value. There is no unified standard that applies to everyone.

I received a consultation from an Internet operator a while ago. She goes to bed at 11 a.m. and starts at 5:30 a.m. every day, and only sleeps for 6 and a half hours. Friends around her always say that she will collapse sooner or later after staying up late. As a result, she went for a clinical polysomnography and found that her sleep efficiency was 92% and deep sleep accounted for 28%. All indicators were excellent. She is much more energetic at work than her colleagues who stay up until 2 a.m. every day and sleep until 12 a.m. on weekends. She even catches fewer colds during seasonal changes.

Many people’s misunderstanding of sleep standards is that they regard “8 hours” as an iron rule. In fact, this statement itself does not have sufficient clinical support. Of course, this does not mean that the time reference is completely useless. The most common time benchmark in the academic world is the version released by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society: adults aged 18-64 recommend 7-9 hours, seniors over 65 years old 7-8 hours, teenagers 8-10 hours, school-age children 9-12 hours, and preschoolers 10-13 hours. This data is based on the survey results of a large sample of healthy people and has reference significance for most people, but there is really no need to use a stopwatch to calculate the time.

Interestingly, more and more clinical data have been revising this standard in the past two years. Scholars in the field of behavioral sleep medicine have repeatedly proposed that the reference value of duration should be ranked behind rhythm and sleep quality. Don't tell me, I actually met a programmer who was born with a short sleep in the past two years. He was born with a DEC2 gene mutation. He slept for 5 hours a day. He never drank coffee in 8 years of work. His physical examination was all normal. He had more energy than those of us who sleep for 7 hours. This kind of natural short sleepers account for 1%-3% of the population. If you force yourself to sleep for 8 hours, you will get headaches and fatigue. There is no need to follow the public standards.

In fact, most people are still tired after getting enough sleep. The problem is basically that their rhythm is disrupted. Just like your home refrigerator, it switches to refrigeration and freezing. It’s not surprising that the compressor is not broken. The same principle applies to the biological clock: staying up until 1 o’clock and going to bed at 7 o’clock from Monday to Friday, and catching up on sleep until 12 o’clock on weekends is equivalent to giving yourself two jet lags a week. Even if you sleep for 8 hours a day on average during the week, you will still feel groggy when you wake up. In the long run, it will also affect blood sugar and metabolic levels. On the contrary, it is not as healthy as someone who sleeps for 6 and a half hours a day and never has an irregular schedule.

I have been doing sleep intervention for five or six years, and I generally recommend that you don’t go out of your way to buy thousands of monitoring equipment, but just look at three feelings: don’t toss and turn when you lie down and stay awake for more than an hour. If you can fall asleep in 15 to 20 minutes, you are considered a pass; waking up once or twice during the night is very important. Normally, don’t wake up and just touch your phone for half an hour. If you can go back to sleep within 5 minutes, you’ll be fine. When you wake up in the morning, don’t lie in bed for half an hour and be unable to get up. After you wake up, you don’t have to rely on three or four cups of coffee to stay alive throughout the day. If you don’t yawn while sitting, then your sleep is definitely up to standard.

Oh, by the way, there is another controversial point: Do you have to go to bed early and get up early to be healthy? In fact, no, about 10% of the population are naturally "night people". The peak of melatonin secretion is 2-3 hours later than ordinary people. If you force yourself to go to bed at 10 o'clock, you will lie in bed tossing and turning and suffer from insomnia. In the long run, it will cause sleep anxiety. As long as these people can maintain a fixed schedule, such as going to bed at 2 a.m. and waking up at 10 a.m. every day, and getting enough sleep, they will not have health problems, and there is no need to force themselves to conform to the "public schedule".

To be honest, I have seen too many people make sleep a KPI. They set more than a dozen alarm clocks to force themselves to sleep and wake up. They stare at the deep sleep duration of their sleep bracelets every day and worry about it. They think that if deep sleep accounts for less than 20%, it is unhealthy. There was a previous user who was frightened to take melatonin every day when his bracelet measured that only 10% of his sleep was in deep sleep. As a result, his insomnia became more severe half a month later. He went to the hospital for polysomnography and found that 27% of his sleep was in deep sleep, which was completely normal. It was all caused by errors in civilian equipment.

Sleep is inherently a very personal matter, and there is never any standard that must be met. Don’t be kidnapped by various “sleep self-discipline” claims on the Internet. If you sleep comfortably and have enough energy during the day, even if you only sleep 6 hours a day, it is your healthy sleep standard.