Short tips on sleep health

You don’t need to follow the trend and buy hundreds or even thousands of sleep aid products. As long as you do these three things: "fix the time for getting in and out of bed, only use the bedroom as a place to sleep, and never go to bed when you wake up." 90% of mild sleep problems can be solved.

To be honest, many friends around me complained that they couldn’t sleep well. If I asked them carefully, they all stepped on the most basic pitfalls. For example, if you set an alarm at 7 o'clock on weekdays and get up to catch the subway, then sleep until noon on weekends, you will feel top-heavy and think you haven't slept enough. In fact, this is what the sleep science community often calls "social jet lag," which is equivalent to giving yourself two jet lags every week. It's strange that your rhythm is not disordered. Many people here have different opinions: I am a night owl. I am naturally sleepy at two o'clock in the morning. I force myself to go to bed at 10 o'clock and stay awake until dawn. This statement is actually correct. Nowadays, the sleep science community has long stopped advocating that "early to bed and early to get up are healthy." I used to help a friend who worked in operations adjust her schedule. She used to stay up until three or four o'clock and get up at one or two o'clock in the afternoon. Later, she set her alarm clock at 10 o'clock every day, no matter what time she went to bed the day before. After two weeks, she was naturally sleepy at around 12 o'clock, and she didn't have to stay up or sleep hard at all.

Many people also have the habit of using the bed as a second living room, where they can lie on it to watch TV shows, change plans, or even eat takeout. The bed has almost become a multi-functional console. Don't believe it, the brain has conditioned reflexes. If you are doing things that excite you every time you lie in bed, when you really want to sleep, your brain will not be able to turn around, and it will not know whether you want to work, have fun, or sleep. If you really haven't fallen asleep after lying down for 15 minutes, don't lie down and count sheep. Get up and go to the living room to sit for a while, read two less interesting books, or stand in a daze for a while, and then go back to bed when you feel sleepy. Of course, many people think that "lying with your eyes closed means resting." This is true. However, if you are a person with long-term insomnia, lying hard will strengthen the "lying in bed = insomnia and anxiety" reflex. On the contrary, it is easier to fall into a vicious cycle of wanting to sleep more and being unable to fall asleep. This has been verified by many clinical controlled experiments.

There is also a bad habit that many people don't take seriously - staying in bed and checking their phones for half an hour and forty minutes after waking up. You must know that the human sleep cycle is about 90 minutes. The little sleep you lie down to catch up after waking up is all fragmented light sleep, which has no restorative effect at all. On the contrary, it will disrupt your biological clock of the day, making you groggy in the morning, and not sleepy when it is time to sleep again at night. There was a time when I liked to lie down in bed and watch short videos when I woke up. As a result, I often ended up being late and yawning all morning during meetings. Later, I forced myself to sit up and drink half a glass of warm water when I woke up. I had to get out of bed within 5 minutes. My condition in the morning was really much better.

As for melatonin, sleep-aid aromatherapy, and sleep devices that are currently very popular on the Internet, there is no need to kill them all by saying that they are all IQ taxes. Melatonin is only suitable for people with jet lag or those over 60 years old who have insufficient melatonin secretion. Healthy young people who take it for a long time may suppress their own melatonin secretion. The more they take, the more they need to increase the amount. Those sleep devices with sleep-aid music and aromatherapy functions are basically psychological effects. Currently, the only clinically proven effective ones are CES micro-current stimulation type, and they are only useful for insomnia caused by mild anxiety. But if you really feel relaxed by lighting up aromatherapy or listening to white noise, then it’s totally fine to use it. After all, relaxing your mood is the prerequisite for good sleep. There’s no need to worry about whether there is a “scientific basis” for it.

Actually, many people don't sleep well. It's not a physical problem at all, but they take "getting a good night's sleep" too seriously. When lying in bed, they start to worry about "Am I going to have insomnia again today?" "I'm going to collapse tomorrow if I don't sleep enough for 8 hours." The more anxious you are, the more awake you will be. It's really not a big deal if you don't sleep well occasionally. Don't drink coffee or take a nap the next day. You will naturally feel sleepy at night. You really don't need to do so many complicated tricks to sleep.