Sleep health is suspected to be moderate

This is not a diagnosis of sleep disease, it is just a "yellow card warning" sent by your body - a critical state between health and clinical sleep disorder. There is no need to rush to prescribe sleep aids, or even buy expensive sleep aid products. As long as you adjust 3-4 lifestyle habits immediately, 90% of people can return to normal within 1-2 months.

Last week, I helped my cousin who works in Internet operations read her smart watch sleep report, and this was the result. Her first reaction was to search "Can moderate sleep disorders cause sudden death", and she was so frightened that she didn't fall asleep until three o'clock that night. In fact, there is really no need to panic. This status is just like the low battery reminder that pops up when your phone has 20% left. It’s not that the battery is broken, it just reminds you that it’s time to charge. Don’t force it to shut down automatically.

Oh, by the way, don’t put too much faith in the monitoring results of smart watches worth hundreds of dollars. When I was following up at a sleep clinic, I saw someone wearing a watch to take a nap, and the results showed that deep sleep accounted for 30%. If you wake up with soreness all over after this number, you still have to go to the hospital for polysomnography. It is the kind of report that is measured by attaching several electrodes to the body and sleeping for a night, and then a professional judgment of "suspected moderate" will be given. According to the standards of Western medicine sleep department, this conclusion generally corresponds to several indicators: sleep efficiency is less than 70%, deep sleep accounts for less than 10%, and rapid eye movement sleep accounts for less than 15%. However, it does not reach the diagnosis threshold of clinical diseases such as sleep apnea and narcolepsy, so the word "suspected" is added. There is actually no such statement in traditional Chinese medicine. Most people classify this situation as "mild syndrome of insomnia". Either it is due to recent stress and liver stagnation turning into fire, and the mind is spinning while lying in bed, or it is due to spleen deficiency and insufficient qi and blood. After sleeping for seven or eight hours, you are still tired when you wake up. The logic of judgment is different, but the adjustment direction is actually different.

Speaking of this, some people may ask, should I take melatonin, which is very popular now? Hey, the two sides have really been arguing about this for a long time. The view of the evidence-based medicine school is very clear: only people with jet lag or long-term shifts can take melatonin to have a clear effect. Ordinary people who take exogenous melatonin for a long time will suppress their own secretion. The more they take the final dose, the more it will become harder to sleep. However, some supporters of natural therapy believe that using a small dose of plant-derived melatonin within 1 mg together with magnesium glycinate can be very helpful in adjusting disordered sleep cycles and has almost no side effects. In the cases I have come across, there are two situations. Some people actually sleep more soundly after taking it, while some people have a terrible headache the next day after taking it. If you really want to try it, it is recommended to start with the smallest dose. If it doesn’t work after three days, stop. Don’t bear it.

I met a 40-year-old man in the outpatient clinic before. When he got this result, he insisted on the doctor prescribing alprazolam. He said that he woke up every day after sleeping for 5 hours and was not energetic at work. The doctor persuaded him to go back and asked him to do three things: first, replace the mobile phone on the bedside table with a prose book, and do not touch electronic devices half an hour before going to bed; second, instead of drinking cold beer at night, replace it with warm milk; third, walk 20 minutes home from get off work every day instead of driving directly to the sofa. He dubiously tried it for half a month and came back for a review. The proportion of deep sleep rose directly to 18%. He said that when he woke up in the morning, his mind was no longer confused, and he even smoked half a pack less cigarettes.

In fact, many people have this result because they either have a sudden increase in stress in the past three months, or their work and rest have been disrupted for three months, or they have just moved and there is noise around them. It is rarely a natural problem. I have a friend who is a designer who used to stay up late every day to change the plan. After getting this report, he deliberately changed the curtains to fully blackout ones. He used to be woken up by the sun at 5 a.m., but now he can sleep until 7 a.m., and his sleep efficiency has increased by 12%. There is also a friend who is a teacher. He soaks his feet for 10 minutes before going to bed every day. The water temperature is controlled at 40 degrees, so as not to burn the feet red. After half a month, he said that he rarely has messy dreams.

The stupidest person I have met who got this result was that they were anxious about the report for several days and stayed up later. The smartest person was that they changed the habit of watching short videos before going to bed to listening to 10 minutes of white noise that day, and came back to me in half a month to report that they no longer had a headache when they woke up in the morning. To put it bluntly, if you can catch the warning when your body sends you a warning, you will not actually go to the stage of taking medicine and seeing a doctor.