What are the contents of sleep health education？

The core of general sleep health education for the general public is actually the content developed in four directions: cognitive correction, habit adjustment, risk identification and adaptation to special people. There are no obscure academic terms, and most of them can directly fall into daily practical guidance. The core goal is to help everyone establish a healthy sleep rhythm that suits them, rather than rigidly setting uniform standards.

The first pit that many people step on is actually a cognitive misunderstanding. When I was giving a popular science lecture in the community last week, I met a 58-year-old aunt who said that she could only sleep for six hours a day, and she was so anxious that she even took antihypertensive drugs more frequently than usual that she was afraid that sleeping less would affect her health. In fact, according to her age, 6-7 hours a day was completely within the normal range. On the contrary, her mood fluctuation caused by sleep anxiety had a much greater impact on her health than sleeping for six hours itself. Nowadays, there is a particularly fierce argument on the Internet, "Do you have to go to bed early and get up early to be healthy?" At present, there is really no unified conclusion in the academic circles. The core criterion is actually whether the sleep rhythm is regular, whether the sleep cycle is complete, and whether you are full of energy after waking up. If you sleep from 2 am to 10 am all the year round, you will be refreshed every day, and you will not feel groggy during the day. That is actually not staying up late. Instead, forcing yourself to sleep at 11 am may lie down until the early morning.

Clear up the misunderstanding of cognition, and then the daily adjustment content that everyone is most concerned about. The advice we usually give you is not blunt "Don't play mobile phones before going to bed". After all, many people rely on the time before going to bed to relax after working overtime. Hard ring is easy to be anxious. It is more recommended to turn the mobile phone to the lowest brightness and turn on the warm color mode. Don't lie down and brush short videos and play competitive games. I have been in contact with a senior three child before. Every day before going to bed, I want to brush a funny short video for 10 minutes to relax. As a result, the more I brush, the more I feel. I don't feel sleepy until 1 o'clock. Later, I changed to listen to gentle white noise for 10 minutes before going to bed, and I adjusted my sleep time to 11: 30 in half a month. My spirits in class during the day are much better. The sleep needs of different age groups vary greatly. You can refer to the standard control adjustment issued by the China Sleep Research Association, which does not require hard card for 8 hours:

In addition to these daily adjustment tips, what we often emphasize when doing popular science is to let everyone learn to recognize the abnormal signals that need medical treatment, and don't blindly buy health care products. If it takes more than 30 minutes to fall asleep for more than 2 weeks in a row, wake up more than 2 times at night and can't fall asleep again after waking up for 20 minutes, wake up more than 2 hours earlier than scheduled in the morning, and at the same time, you can't go to work and school normally during the day, so don't check Baidu for yourself. Go to the sleep department to do a polysomnography to see what the problem is. Take melatonin, which people often buy now, as an example. At present, the academic views are not uniform. When the short-term jet lag and the temporary need to adjust the work and rest, eating low dose (less than 1mg per day) can really play an auxiliary role, but the safety of eating large dose for a long time is not supported by enough research data. We generally do not recommend that people take it continuously for more than one month, especially the developing teenagers. Eating indiscriminately may affect endocrine function.

Of course, different groups of people have different sleep characteristics, and popular science content will be adjusted accordingly, not a set of content for everyone. For example, when telling pregnant women, they will specifically emphasize lying on the left as much as possible in the middle and late pregnancy, and don't lie flat to avoid oppressing the uterus; When telling the old people, they will remind them not to lie hard in order to make up for sleep time. If they lie awake for 20 minutes, they will get up and sit for a while and read idle books. If they are sleepy, they will go back to bed. When telling teenagers, it will remind them that the difference between work and rest during the holiday is more than 2 hours, otherwise it will be particularly painful to adjust the work and rest at school.

I have been doing sleep science for almost three years, and my biggest feeling is that sleep health education has never set a dead rule for everyone, but it is more like giving everyone a set of reference guides that can be adjusted by themselves. After all, whether you sleep well or not is the most accurate feeling of your own body. There is no need to force yourself to stay in bed for eight hours, but it has added anxiety for no reason.