Five manifestations of healthy sleep

The time it takes to fall asleep is stable and does not exceed 20 minutes, you can quickly fall back to sleep after waking up at night, the sleep duration is suitable for your age and is not deliberately compressed, there is no persistent feeling of drowsiness in the morning, and you have enough energy to support daily activities during the day without uncontrollable sleepiness.

Let’s first talk about the speed of falling asleep that everyone talks about most. Many people always think that lying down and falling asleep immediately is a good sleep. In fact, this is not the case. If you fall asleep with a pillow, it is most likely that you have been too sleepless in the past few days. There have always been subtle differences in the industry regarding the standards for how long it takes to fall asleep: the public guideline of the Chinese Sleep Research Association defines within 30 minutes as the normal range, but most front-line sleep intervention consultants recommend that young people try to control it within 20 minutes - I have previously contacted an Internet professional Visitors from the operation used to lie in bed and watch short videos for an hour before going to sleep. They would have to get up and take melatonin until they were no longer sleepy. Later, they moved electronic devices out of the bedroom and only read paper books for half an hour before going to bed. They basically fell asleep naturally after lying down for about 15 minutes. Even the melatonin they had been taking for half a year stopped. If you occasionally lie awake for 25 minutes at a time, don't worry. As long as it doesn't happen for a week or two in a row, it's not a problem.

In fact, many people are more concerned about how they feel when they wake up in the morning than whether they fall asleep quickly or not. When many people wake up, their heads are groggy and their whole body is stiff. Their first reaction is "I had a bad sleep last night." There is also a cognitive gap here: neurology doctors often remind that if you occasionally feel groggy in the morning, it is probably just that you were interrupted by an alarm clock during deep sleep or rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and it is not a problem with sleep itself. For example, if you didn't go to bed until 2 o'clock the day before and set the alarm for 8 o'clock, you were woken up just in the middle of a sweet dream. It's normal for you to faint for half an hour. Only those who have been sleeping for more than a week and still feel dazed and as if they have never slept even after waking up naturally should be alert to problems such as sleep apnea and insufficient deep sleep duration. Many office workers around me sleep in on weekends and wake up even more tired than during the working day. The essence is that their fixed sleep rhythm is disrupted and the complete sleep cycle is abruptly broken up.

Many people still have an obsession: to get good sleep, they need to sleep until dawn. This is really a misunderstanding. The latest sleep clinical research has long confirmed that adults wake up unconsciously 1-2 times at night, each time lasting no more than 5 minutes, and turn around to go back to sleep. This is a completely normal physiological phenomenon and does not need to be regarded as a sleep problem. I once met a mother who always felt that she had to wake up several times every night to tuck her baby in, and her sleep quality must be extremely poor. I ran for sleep monitoring and found that she only woke up for less than 2 minutes each time, and she was in deep sleep for 25% of the time. She didn't feel sleepy at work during the day, and she didn't need any intervention at all. She had been anxious for less than half a year. What you really need to pay attention to is the situation where you can't fall asleep after waking up, lie tossing and turning, thinking about work and troubles, and can't fall asleep for more than half an hour. Adjustment is needed only if the frequency is too many.

Let’s talk about the “8-hour sleep theory” that has been rumored to be magical. Now too many people are kidnapped by this standard and panic if they don't sleep for 8 hours. In fact, there is no unified standard for sleep duration: teenagers need 8-10 hours, and 7-9 hours is normal for adults. There are also natural short sleepers whose genes determine that they can only sleep 4-6 hours a day to be energetic. Such people account for about 1%-3% of the population. If they are forced to sleep for 8 hours, they will become more tired the more they sleep. Health accounts always say that "sleeping less than 8 hours will shorten your life", but in clinical practice, we pay more attention to the regularity of sleep: if you go to bed at 12 o'clock and start at 7 o'clock every day, even if you only sleep for 7 hours, you will not feel sleepy during the day, which is much healthier than if you sleep for 10 hours today and 5 hours tomorrow.

After all, in fact, the core judgment criterion is the energy state during the day. You don’t have to rely on more than two cups of coffee during the day to go to work, and your eyelids won’t fight uncontrollably after a long drive. You can still have the energy to take a walk and exercise after get off work. Even if you occasionally have a dream and wake up once or twice at night, it is not considered a sleep problem. I used to worry about whether the deep sleep time displayed on the sleep app was too short, and whether the quality of sleep was poor. After asking a familiar sleep doctor, I found out that the monitoring data from wearable devices can only be used as a reference. As long as you are not uncomfortable during the day, it doesn't matter even if you dream all night. Dreams in the REM period are originally part of the normal sleep cycle, but it shows that your sleep structure is complete.

Oh, by the way, you really don’t have to worry about which of these five standards is not up to standard. Sleep itself is a very individual matter. If you feel comfortable and have enough during the day, it is more accurate than any data. If you can't sleep well for more than a month and feel drowsy during the day, don't force yourself to buy a bunch of sleep-aid gummies and sleep-aid sprays. Go to the sleep department of a regular hospital for monitoring. It's more effective than anything else.