Sleep health tips

To be honest, there is no need to stick to the general standard of "go to bed before 11 o'clock and sleep for 8 hours". As long as you do not feel persistently tired within half an hour after waking up and can concentrate on work and study normally during the day, your sleep is healthy - this is a core judgment standard generally recognized by the sleep medicine and health fields.

I met a friend who works in back-end development a while ago. In order to meet the "healthy sleep threshold" spread on the Internet, he forced himself to lie down at 11 o'clock every day. As a result, he could not fall asleep until after 1 o'clock in the morning. He got up when the alarm clock went off at 7 o'clock in the morning. After drinking two cups of coffee, he still couldn't open his eyes. He would often lose his mind and forget things. Later, he simply broke the pot and went to bed around 1 o'clock after finishing work. He woke up at 9 o'clock in the morning, but he even skipped coffee and didn't have to catch up on sleep in the afternoon. In fact, academic circles have long divided people into three categories: lark type (early to bed and early to rise), owl type (late to bed and late rise) and intermediate type. As long as your work and rest are stable for a long time, even if you go to bed at 2 am and wake up at 10 am, the impact on your health will be far less than if you have a "standard work and rest" with jet lag every day. Of course, the "midday nap" advocated by traditional Chinese medicine (try to ensure deep sleep between 11 pm and 3 am) has also been verified by a large number of practitioners to be effective. If you are used to going to bed early and getting up early, you can definitely follow this rule. There is no absolute right or wrong between the two views. The one that suits you is the best.

You must have had this experience: Sometimes you fall into a deep sleep for 10 hours on weekends, and when you wake up you are still light-headed and too lazy to even order takeout.； Sometimes I only sleep for five or six hours while working on a project, but I feel refreshed when I wake up, and my efficiency in coding and writing solutions skyrockets? The core difference lies in the proportion of deep sleep. Deep sleep for normal adults only accounts for 15%-25% of the total sleep duration. There is really no need to worry about the data on the smart bracelet - as everyone in the industry knows, the accuracy of deep sleep monitoring of consumer wearable devices is generally only about 60%. Many times it determines that when you are in deep sleep, you may be turning over and dreaming. There is no need to worry about that number.

Many people start to panic as soon as they can't fall asleep. They try various sleep-aid remedies, but the more anxious they become, the more awake they become. The different intervention ideas here are actually quite different: the current mainstream cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) advocates that if you don’t fall asleep after lying down for 20 minutes, stop lying on the bed, get up and do something boring, and then lie down again when you feel sleepy, so as to avoid binding the bed with "anxiety about not being able to sleep". ； However, some Chinese medicine practitioners believe that if you are a person with Qi and blood deficiency, don’t get up and mess around even if you can’t sleep. If you lie down with your eyes closed and rest your mind, you are also recuperating your Qi and blood, so there is no need to force yourself to get up and move. There are people around me who have tried both methods and they are effective. You can try both methods and use whichever one is more comfortable for you.

I rushed to report that I had suffered from insomnia for a week. I tried the 478 breathing method of the Internet celebrity. The more I counted, the clearer my mind became. Later, I simply threw my phone in the living room and took an ancient Chinese textbook that I couldn’t read before. After turning three pages, I was so sleepy that I couldn’t open my eyes. By the way, don’t believe the saying that “drinking helps you sleep”. Alcohol can indeed make people fall asleep quickly, but it will break up your deep sleep cycle. You will easily wake up frequently in the second half of the night, and you will be even more tired when you wake up. It is totally worth the loss.

In fact, there really aren't that many rules and regulations when it comes to sleep. Your own physical feelings are more reliable than any standard posted online. Don't make yourself anxious as soon as you go to bed just to make up for the so-called "healthy sleep KPI". That's really picking up sesame seeds and losing watermelons.