sleep health monitoring

Ordinary healthy people do not need to pursue medical-grade monitoring accuracy. Monitoring methods suitable for their own needs + reasonable interpretation of trend data are far more valuable than anxiety about a single value.； People who are suspected of having sleep disorders must use the hospital’s professional monitoring results as the basis for diagnosis, and consumer-grade equipment can only be used as a preliminary screening reference.

Many friends around me have now formed muscle memory: the first thing they do when they wake up in the morning is not to touch their mobile phones to read news, but to open a sports app to check the previous day's sleep score - if the score is above 80, they will take a deep breath, and if the score is below 70, they will start to worry on the spot: "It's over, I only slept for an hour yesterday, and my brain will definitely not be able to move today."

There has been a lot of noise in the circle about the practicality of consumer-level sleep monitoring: Most sleep clinicians think this thing is an IQ tax. After all, polysomnography (PSG), the gold standard for sleep monitoring, requires EEG, EOG, EMG, ECG, and chest and abdominal straps. , blood oxygen probe with more than ten electrodes, it can even detect whether your eyeballs are turning or whether your legs are moving. To put it bluntly, the bracelet watch relies on the movement of your wrist and the blood oxygen on your fingertips to guess whether you have slept or not. When the error is large, it can count all the time you lay scrolling on your phone as deep sleep. The reference value is too low.； But practitioners in public health management find this thing of great significance: after all, you can’t go to the hospital to sleep in the monitoring room every day. Consumer-level equipment can record your sleep patterns for weeks or even months. Even if a single point of data is inaccurate, the trend cannot deceive people - for example, your sleep will plummet as soon as you stay up late and fall asleep, and it will take half an hour longer to fall asleep after drinking milk tea. These patterns are much more useful than a single accurate monitoring.

Both of these statements are actually correct, but the applicable scenarios are different. Last year, my mother always said that she had insomnia all night and felt unenergetic during the day. I first took her to the hospital for PSG. As a result, she lay on a bed full of electrodes and became stiff, and she didn't fall asleep until after two o'clock. The report showed that deep sleep accounted for 18%, which was actually in line with the normal level for her age. The doctor said that she was too anxious and scared herself. Later, I put an ordinary smart watch on her. I didn’t tell her that I wanted to measure her sleep, so I just let her wear it to check the time. After checking the data two weeks later, I found that on any day when she watched short videos of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law for two hours before going to bed, her sleep latency exceeded 40 minutes, and the duration of deep sleep was more than an hour shorter than the days when she listened to storytelling before going to bed. Later, she was forced to change her habit of checking her phone before going to bed. Within half a month, she said she was "sleeping much more deeply."

Oh, by the way, if you are wearing a smart mattress with a sleep monitoring function, don’t put too much faith in its deep sleep data. I have tried the same bed before. My 10-pound cat slept at my feet all night. It calculated that I did not fall into deep sleep all night long, which made me laugh.

There are situations that really require professional monitoring. For example, if you snore until you wake up, your head feels as heavy as lead when you wake up in the morning, you can doze off even while sitting in meetings during the day, or you have been lying in bed for two hours in a row and can't fall asleep. Don't waste it, and don't trust the blood oxygen and sleep scores given by the bracelet. Go directly to the hospital's sleep department to do PSG. If you need to check for sleep apnea, check it out, and if you need cognitive behavioral therapy, do it. I had a colleague who was always complained by his wife about his loud snoring, but he didn’t take it seriously until his wristband reminded him that his nighttime blood oxygen level was as low as 82% for three consecutive days. When he went to the hospital, he was diagnosed with moderate obstructive sleep apnea. After wearing a ventilator for less than a week, his mental state was completely different. He said that he had “not been so awake in years.”

Many people have now fallen into a misunderstanding: deep sleep must account for more than 20%, and REM sleep must account for 25%. They almost feel that there is a big problem with their sleep. In fact, it is completely unnecessary. The sleep structure of different age groups is inherently different. A 20-year-old boy can sleep 25% in deep sleep, and a 60-year-old man can sleep 10%. It is considered good. Applying the same standard to yourself is purely to make yourself unhappy. Now I simply turn off the sleep score notification. Only when I feel groggy when I wake up for three or four days in a row, I will look up the trend data of the past week and see: Oh, I have been drinking iced Americano before going to bed four days in the past week. No wonder the bedtime has been delayed until after 12 o'clock. ； Last week, I was on a business trip for three consecutive days and kept up with plans until the early hours of the morning. I lost almost half of my deep sleep time, so I will get off work early this week to catch up on my sleep.

There is another small detail that many people don’t know. Wearing a bracelet that is too loose can also lead to inaccurate data. Last time I was on a business trip and stayed in a hotel, I loosened the bracelet by two buckles because I was afraid that I would be strangled. When I woke up the next day, it recorded me waking up 8 times. I slept without even dreaming. After adjusting the tightness to the usual level, the data became normal.

To put it bluntly, sleep monitoring is never used to score your sleep quality and sentence you to death. It is more like a detective to help you find out bad habits. If you sleep for 7 hours a day and wake up refreshed, so what if the bracelet scores you 60 points? Just to get a high score, you can't lie still while you're awake to get points, right? After all, when we engage in monitoring, the ultimate goal is to sleep comfortably, not to post pretty numbers on WeChat Moments.