Sleep health reference is here

Stop believing in the nonsense that "you must sleep 8 hours a day to be healthy" - this is the conclusion I want to tell you most after helping more than 30 ordinary people who have long been troubled by insomnia and light sleep adjust their sleeping habits. There is no unified standard for sleep health. As long as you don’t have persistent fatigue, inattention, irritability and other problems during the day after waking up, you are healthy even if you only sleep 5 hours or 10 hours a day.

I once met a young girl who works in Internet operations. She stares at the backend data until 1 a.m. every day. She lies down and scrolls through her phone for 20 minutes. She falls asleep before 2 a.m. and wakes up at 7:30 a.m. She drinks a cup of Americano every day and feels very energetic. She read countless popular science articles saying that staying up late hurts her liver and kidneys. She was so scared that she forced herself to lie down at 10 a.m. and couldn't fall asleep until 1 a.m. On the contrary, her hair loss became more serious. She made mistakes at work for half a month. I asked her to return to her original routine first, and not to forcefully change it as long as her regular physical examination indicators were fine. Half a month later, she told me that her condition had returned.

The reason why I mention this example is that too many people are kidnapped by the unified sleep standards, and instead develop sleep anxiety. 80% of the reasons for poor sleep are not the schedule itself, but the psychological burden of "I will definitely collapse if I don't sleep at this point." At present, there is no completely unified conclusion about healthy sleep in the academic circles. The traditional school of sleep medicine emphasizes that circadian rhythm should be synchronized with natural light. It is believed that going to bed early and getting up early is the optimal solution, which can better match the laws of human hormone secretion. ； However, many studies on chronobiology in recent years have also suggested that people's sleep patterns are written in genes. There are indeed born "larks" (early to bed and early to rise) and "night owls" (late to bed and late to rise). If you insist on changing the natural rhythm, it will break the sleep homeostasis, which is not worth the gain.

Having said this is not to let everyone stay up late casually, but to first get rid of the obsession that "only 8 hours of early sleep is healthy", and then talk about a few practical questions that everyone often asks. Oh, by the way, many people have asked how long a nap is appropriate for a lunch break. Most people on the Internet say it should not exceed 20 minutes. In fact, it depends on the situation. I myself only slept more than 4 hours a day for a week in a row while working on a project. I still felt drowsy when I woke up from a 20-minute nap at noon. After sleeping for 40 minutes, my efficiency in making plans in the afternoon was immediately maxed out. Existing research actually has supporting evidence: For people who get enough sleep at night, a 20-minute light lunch break can indeed prevent drowsiness after waking up and will not affect night sleep. ； But if you didn’t get enough sleep the day before, a 40-minute lunch break can effectively make up for the cognitive decline caused by lack of sleep, as long as you don’t sleep for more than an hour. Otherwise, the deep sleep stage will be interrupted, your head will hit the wall when you get up, and it will be easy to toss and turn at night and not fall asleep.

There are also many people who stock up on various sleep-aid products when they have trouble sleeping. I have to mention a few words here, don’t eat them blindly. The most common melatonin is really not suitable for everyone. It regulates rhythm in nature, and is only suitable for the elderly who suffer from jet lag or insufficient melatonin secretion. Young people who eat large amounts for a long time will inhibit their own melatonin secretion, and the more they eat, the more they cannot sleep. Most of the active ingredients in those popular sleep-aid gummies are gamma-aminobutyric acid. Taking a small amount can indeed help relax your nerves. However, if you take three or four gummies at a time, you will easily feel dizzy and nauseated, and you will feel confused when you wake up the next day. If you occasionally can't sleep for two or three days in a row, it's okay to take it once or twice. If you really have long-term insomnia, don't expect to rely on health products to solve it. Go to the sleep department of a regular hospital to do a polysomnography, which is much more useful than buying a sleep aid product worth thousands of dollars.

I also experienced insomnia for a month in the past two years. The more I forced myself to sleep, the more awake I became. Later, I simply couldn't sleep, so I got up and sat in the living room to read obscure anthropology monographs. After reading for more than 10 minutes, I became so sleepy that I couldn't keep my eyes open. I fell asleep after lying down for 5 minutes. In fact, I used the idea of ​​​​sleep restriction therapy: don't associate the bed with "anxiety" and "tossing and turning". The bed can only be used for sleeping and resting. Don't lie down to consume it if you can't fall asleep.

Of course, I’m not asking everyone to completely let themselves go and stay up late. If you wake up feeling heavy all over for a week or two in a row, get distracted easily during meetings, or explode after just a few words with your colleagues, then there must be something wrong with your sleep. Don’t frighten yourself by blindly searching for popular science. First try to dim the lights in the bedroom, and don’t touch anything with a screen an hour before going to bed. If it doesn’t work, go to the hospital to see a professional. After all, when it comes to sleeping, your own body feelings are more accurate than all standard answers.