sleep hygienist

If you are troubled by the problems of difficulty falling asleep, easy waking up from light sleep, and daytime drowsiness, and have tried foot soaks, steam eye masks, and taking melatonin to no avail, then it is really not an IQ tax to find a regular sleep hygienist. I have been in this business for 6 years and have helped more than 300 clients get rid of the state of relying on drugs to help them sleep. I have also seen too many people regard sleep problems as "hypocrisy" and "just thinking too much", which eventually turned into a bunch of troubles such as chronic insomnia and metabolic disorders.

I just picked up a 27-year-old Internet operator last week. She carries melatonin in her bag all year round. After taking it for six months, she tripled the dose. She still has to lie down for two hours to fall asleep. The black and blue under her eyes are almost deeper than the eyeliner. She always felt that she had "irregular work and rest schedules" before. I asked her to keep a sleep diary for three consecutive days and did some sleep monitoring at home. Only then did I find out the problem: She always held her mobile phone to reply to work messages an hour before going to bed. Blue light stimulation and sympathetic nerves kept straining her brain. She was still thinking about plans when she lay in bed. In addition, she always slept until 1 pm on weekends to catch up on sleep, and her circadian rhythm was completely messed up.

It’s interesting to say that there is no standard answer to insomnia intervention in the industry. The current mainstream cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT-I, is really effective for most people with anxiety, insomnia and rhythm disorders. Significant improvement can usually be seen in 4-8 weeks. However, many colleagues with a background in traditional Chinese medicine prefer to adjust from the perspective of qi, blood and meridians. I was chatting with a sleep hygienist at a traditional Chinese medicine clinic a while ago. She met a menopausal aunt who still woke up early after 4 weeks of CBT-I. Later, she combined moxibustion at Yongquan point twice a week and drank jujube kernels and tuckahoe instead of tea every day. After 2 weeks, she could sleep until after 5 o'clock. No one is smarter than anyone else. It’s just that everyone’s triggers for insomnia are different, and the appropriate solutions are naturally different.

Let me talk about the default judgment standard in the industry: Whether you sleep well or not is never based on how long you slept, but on whether you can cheer up within 10 minutes after waking up, and whether you feel sleepy at all times during the day. I once had a visitor who was a freelance illustrator and only slept 5 hours a day. She came to ask me if she needed to catch up on her sleep. I looked at her monitoring data and found that deep sleep accounted for 28%, almost twice that of ordinary people. She could work on a manuscript during the day without feeling sleepy. This is the natural short-sleeping gene. There is no need to force yourself to sleep for 8 hours, but it is easy to suffer from anxiety insomnia. Just like everyone has different appetites, you can't ask everyone to eat two bowls of rice at one meal, right?

Regarding the controversy about whether melatonin can be taken, I have to argue with the visitors for a long time every time. In the Western medicine system, it is generally recommended to take small doses in the short term (no more than 3 months). It is perfectly fine to use it to relieve jet lag or adjust acute insomnia. However, long-term consumption may indeed inhibit the secretion of melatonin. ； The views of colleagues in traditional Chinese medicine are more direct: many people's insomnia is not due to insufficient melatonin, but to the inability of yang to enter yin. Taking melatonin is equivalent to borrowing external force to push it up. The root problem is not solved, but the more you eat, the more you eat. My general advice to clients is: within a week of insomnia, it’s okay to temporarily take a small dose of 1mg to relieve the problem. If it persists for more than 2 weeks, don’t force it or increase the dosage privately. The more serious thing is to find the reason first.

I sometimes chat with colleagues, and everyone complains that people nowadays are willing to spend thousands of dollars on skin care products and tens of thousands of dollars on fitness cards, but they are unwilling to spend a week keeping a sleep log to take a closer look at what is wrong with their sleep. There used to be a man who worked in foreign trade. He suffered from insomnia for three years and couldn’t help but think about orders while lying in bed. I chatted with him three times and found out that he didn’t dare to fall asleep at all for fear of missing news from overseas customers. The plan I gave him was very simple: put his work phone in the living room before going to bed, set up automatic replies, and clearly told customers his working hours. In the first week of trying it, the time it took him to fall asleep was reduced from 2 hours to 40 minutes. Many times it’s not that you can’t fall asleep, it’s that you haven’t given your brain the “allowance to sleep” signal at all.

Yesterday, the 27-year-old operations girl sent me a message, saying that when she got home from get off work, she would throw her work phone in the hallway, play with the cat for half an hour after dinner, take a shower, lie on the bed and read two pages of a book, and fall asleep in 15 minutes. The melatonin had stopped long ago. Last week, the team building team climbed a mountain for a day, and fell asleep when she came back. The next day I woke up feeling refreshed, and even the acne I had suffered for half a year had disappeared. In fact, as sleep hygienists, we never prescribe any magic pill for you, but just help you get your disrupted life rhythm back on track little by little. After all, sleeping well is a natural ability that everyone has.