Sleep Health APP

For the vast majority of ordinary users who have irregular schedules and mild to moderate difficulty falling asleep, choosing and using the right sleep health APP can indeed effectively improve sleep quality; but if clinical-level sleep disorders have occurred (such as taking more than 2 hours to fall asleep for more than two consecutive weeks, frequent snoring and waking up, and daytime sleepiness that affects normal work and life), such APPs can only be used as auxiliary monitoring tools and cannot replace diagnosis or treatment.

Last week, I helped a 98-year-old girl in the same department deal with this problem. She downloaded four sleep apps at once in order to adjust her work schedule. She also had to fill in a 10-question sleep diary before going to bed, and was also asked to wear a smart watch close to her wrist to measure her heart rate. As a result, when she was lying in bed, all she could think about was "Will the APP record me as a light sleeper before I even fall asleep?" Instead, she lay down for an hour longer than before before falling asleep. The more anxious she became, the more awake she became.

It is quite interesting to say that now, whether it is the user circle or the medical circle, there is no unified conclusion on the attitude towards this type of APP. I know a few friends who work in new media. They always follow hot spots and have day and night problems. They rely on the scheduled lock screen function of the APP. When the time comes, they directly lock all Weibo and TikTok. They can only listen to the preset white noise, and abruptly change the "sleep until dawn" schedule to sleep before 12 o'clock. There is also a little cousin who is taking the postgraduate entrance examination. She has combined the APP's sleep reminder with the review Pomodoro for three months in a row. During the preparation period, her schedule is more regular than mine, which is a working person, and there are no problems in the physical examination.

But the objections are entirely valid. Dr. Li from the sleep department of a tertiary hospital with whom I am familiar received last month a young man who came for consultation with an APP report. He said that he had been in deep sleep for less than 30 minutes for a month and felt that he was about to die suddenly. As a result, he did a gold standard polysomnography and found that the duration of deep sleep was 2.5 hours, which was completely within the normal range. He was purely frightened by the inaccurate data of the APP. Instead, he was so anxious that he did not sleep well for half a month. After all, civilian equipment, whether it relies on microphones to pick up sound or acceleration sensors to sense movements, cannot compare with the professional equipment in hospitals that are covered with EEG and EMG electrodes. If you lie in bed and read a novel for half an hour, it can easily be judged as light sleep. If you turn over and wake up for two or three seconds, it may not recognize it. The data can only be used as a rough reference. It would be silly to really use it as a basis for diagnosis.

If you ask me, don’t make it so complicated when using this kind of APP. Just understand your needs first. If you just scroll through your phone every day until you forget to sleep, and you wake up when there is any movement when you fall asleep, then choose one with an app lock and a full white noise library. I was so nervous after working on a project for more than half a month. I turned on the old radio station in the app and I fell asleep in ten minutes. It was much more useful than drinking hot milk before. If you often have headaches when you sleep, and you suspect that you are snoring or waking up unconsciously in the middle of the night, choose a smart bracelet that can be linked. If the data shows abnormality for a week in a row, go to the hospital for a checkup. Don't blindly check Baidu with the APP report, the more you check, the more panic you will get.

Oh, by the way, there is another pitfall to remind you, don’t put too much trust in the sleep scores given by those apps. My mother used to use a certain APP, and she would stare at the score every day. If the score fell below 8, she would become extremely worried. She would change memory pillows and drink sleep-aid tea. But one day, she went out with her old best friend to square dance and got high. She lay in bed for half an hour and fell asleep. She slept better than she had ever slept. As a result, the APP gave a score of 6.8, saying that she did not have enough deep sleep. She was so angry that she immediately uninstalled the APP. In fact, everyone's sleep needs are different. Some people are naturally short sleepers and can still feel energetic during the day after sleeping for 5 hours. Some people need to sleep for 9 hours to feel comfortable. Is there any unified standard for perfect scores? Many apps provide ratings, which are essentially designed to promote ads for sleep aid products. Don’t be fooled by them.

To put it bluntly, this thing is just like the reminders and fitness bracelets you usually use. It is a tool to help you save energy. You cannot expect to have a good sleep automatically after downloading an APP. The real core is that you have to develop a regular schedule. Don’t watch short videos for half an hour before going to bed and blame the APP for being useless. Of course, if you have been lying in bed for half a month and have been tossing and turning for two hours without being able to fall asleep, and you can doze off even if you stand during the day, don’t hesitate and go directly to the hospital to see the sleep department. It will be more useful than downloading ten apps.