What are the four types of sleep health

The current evaluation of sleep health in the field of sleep medicine can be classified into four core dimensions: sleep duration adapted to the individual, stable circadian sleep rhythm, low fragmentation of sleep quality, and good daytime functional status during the waking period.

When many people talk about sleep health, their first reaction is to stick to the 8-hour standard. In fact, it is really unnecessary. The adaptation time for different age groups is far different: school-age children need to sleep for 10 hours to meet their growth and development needs, 7-9 hours is considered normal for young adults, and older people are completely fine even if they only sleep 5-6 hours a day, as long as they don’t feel sleepy when they wake up. I have a friend who is a freelance illustrator. He has been a short-sleeper since he was a child. He sleeps for 6 hours a day and stays up for two days without feeling dizzy when working on a manuscript. Many scholars now point out that there is no need to set a uniform hard time standard for all age groups. The most important thing is to adapt to individual physiological habits.

If you still feel drowsy all day long after enough time, you need to see if there is something wrong with your sleep rhythm. It's like if you always water your succulents at noon, no matter how much water you water, the roots will easily rot. The rhythm is the body's own "work and rest schedule". When melatonin is secreted and when cortisol rises, they all follow this schedule. Many young people stay up until one or two o'clock to catch up on work during the week, and sleep until two or three o'clock in the afternoon on weekends to catch up on sleep. It seems that the average week is enough, but the rhythm is messed up. Even if they sleep for 10 hours, they still have a headache and feel confused. In the long run, it will also affect the normal levels of blood sugar and metabolism.

Some people have very regular schedules and just the right amount of sleep, but their sleep is as shallow as a layer of window paper. They can wake up if someone passes by in the corridor or the wind blows outside the window. They wake up three or four times in a night. This is a hindrance to the quality of their sleep. When we were doing community sleep science popularization, we met a mother who had just given birth to a baby. She had to get up two or three times at night to make milk and cover the baby for more than half a year. Her sleep was broken throughout the whole process. She went to the hospital for sleep monitoring and found that the proportion of deep sleep was less than 8%, less than one-third of the normal standard. During that time, she not only forgot her keys and misremembered her work schedule, but was also particularly prone to emotional breakdown. She shed tears at the smallest things. This means that the typical sleep structure is destroyed and the quality has not kept up.

In fact, the most intuitive reference for judging whether these four dimensions are up to standard is daytime functional status. As long as you can concentrate during work and study during the day, do not start to feel sleepy and yawn after sitting for half an hour, are emotionally stable, and do not become irritable and irritable over trivial things, then even if your sleep duration is a little less than the so-called "standard", or you occasionally stay up late, there is no need to be too anxious. Nowadays, there is a lot of controversy about the reference of sleep monitoring data. Many people get nervous when the deep sleep duration displayed by the bracelet is not enough. In fact, the monitoring data of most consumer-level devices can only be used as a reference. The real body feeling of an individual has a much higher priority than cold numbers.