Sleep health manager

90% of non-pathological insomnia does not need to be solved by drugs. You can see significant improvement by adjusting 2-3 daily behavioral habits. The remaining 10% require clinical intervention. Don't believe in the "universal sleep prescription" spread on the Internet. Only the one that suits you is useful.

I just received a girl who works in Internet operations last week. She is 27 years old. When she walked in, the dark bags under her eyes almost fell to her chin. She said that she had been taking melatonin for almost a year. At first, half a pill was effective. Now she takes 3 pills and lies down for 3 hours with her eyes open and counting the lines on the ceiling. All apps have been updated on her phone, and her mind is still clear enough to get up and do 3 pages of PPT immediately. I didn’t ask her to stop melatonin immediately. I first asked her to go home and keep a sleep diary for three days, writing down everything from getting off work to going to bed. As a result, I had fun looking through her diary. Every day when I got home from get off work, I would lie on the sofa and watch short videos until 12 o’clock. Then I would get up and wash my hair and take a shower. After blow-drying my hair, I would feel energetic. I would have to open a can of iced Coke and drink half a cup, and then lie down on the bed. It’s strange to be able to fall asleep.

When it comes to checking your phone before going to bed, this is a topic that our industry has been arguing about for several years. One group follows European and American research. Experimental data from the Harvard Sleep Center shows that exposure to blue light 1 hour before bedtime will inhibit the body's own melatonin secretion. Electronic devices should be placed at least 1 meter away from the bed, preferably directly in the living room. ； The other group is those of us who are front-line practitioners who deal with ordinary people every day. To be honest, nowadays young people have been busy all day and only hope to have some free time before going to bed. If you force them to throw away their mobile phones and close their eyes and lie down, their minds will be able to dig out all the plans that were not made last week and the meetings to be held tomorrow. The more they lie down, the more anxious they will become. My general advice to clients is to use it if you really want to, turn on the night mode, adjust the brightness to the lowest level, don’t watch work-related stuff, don’t watch cool suspense dramas with ups and downs in the plot, just watch some silly cat movies and food clips, and when you feel sleepy, naturally put down your phone and go to sleep, which is better than holding it on.

There is another question that people ask the most. Do we need to sleep 8 hours a day to be healthy? A university teacher also came to me before and said that he only slept 6 hours a day. He read popular science and said that not sleeping enough for 8 hours would lead to premature aging and Alzheimer's disease. He forced himself to lie in bed at 10 o'clock every day. As a result, he couldn't fall asleep until 1 o'clock, and instead suffered from insomnia. In fact, there is no unified conclusion in the industry about the standard of sleep duration. Traditional guidelines say that 7-9 hours is the appropriate range for adults. However, tracking studies by the Stanford Sleep Institute in recent years have also shown that 1%-3% of people are born short sleepers. They only need 4-6 hours of sleep a day to stay energetic throughout the day. As long as you do not yawn frequently during the day and cannot concentrate, sleeping for 6 hours is completely fine. There is no need to force yourself to get 8 hours, but it will put a psychological burden on yourself.

I usually adjust plans for clients, and rarely give them a list of 10 or 8 items. Most of them are one or two small changes that can be implemented immediately. People who have tried it say it works. For example, many people have cold feet and can't sleep in winter. Instead of buying a heated mattress that costs hundreds of dollars, just find a pair of clean thin cotton socks and put them on before going to bed. Once your feet are warm, you will relax very quickly. Many people said that they fell asleep 20 minutes earlier than usual on the day they tried it. Also, if you don’t feel sleepy at all after lying down for 20 minutes, don’t lie down hard. Get up and sit in the living room for a while, turn on a warm yellow night light, read two mindless picture books or essays, and then go back to bed when you feel sleepy. Don’t work, watch TV shows, or eat snacks on the bed. The brain forms a conditioned reflex of "the bed is for sleeping". This is actually the core logic of CBT-I (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia), the internationally recognized first-line non-pharmacological treatment for insomnia. It is not a metaphysics, and has been verified by a large number of clinical trials.

Let’s talk about the melatonin that everyone often takes. I don’t recommend that you take it when you can’t sleep. Currently, melatonin in China is regulated as a health product, not a drug. It is only suitable for people who suffer from jet lag, or who occasionally stay up late and need to adjust their work and rest. It can be used temporarily for three to five days. Long-term use (more than 3 months) will inhibit the secretion of melatonin. The more you take, the higher the dosage. It may also cause side effects such as dizziness and memory loss during the day. If you have difficulty falling asleep for more than 2 weeks in a row, or you always wake up after falling asleep, and you are completely lack of energy the next day, don’t take random medicines on your own. Go to the sleep department of a regular hospital to check whether there is a pathological problem. It is much more effective than buying health care products on your own.

After working in this industry for 6 years, I have seen too many people regard sleep as a KPI that must be completed. When they lie down in bed, they start to calculate, "I can sleep for 6 hours now, and in half an hour, I can only sleep for 5 and a half hours." To be honest, sleep is a human instinct. How could you worry about how long you slept today when you were a child? When you feel sleepy, you fall asleep, and when you wake up, you get up and play. It's really not a big deal to stay up late once in a while. When I'm working on a project, I'll stay up until one or two o'clock, and then I'll recover after taking a 20-minute nap at noon the next day. I never have the anxiety of "I stayed up late and my body is going to collapse." After all, good sleep is never achieved through force. Relaxing is more effective than any other method.