What is “sleep”?
According to the origin of Chinese characters, sleeping means sitting and sleeping, which means dozing off with eyes down. In ancient times, there were also Chinese characters such as “sleep”, “sleep”, “mian” and “lying” to indicate sleep. Today we refer to sleep, its meaning actually falls on the word “sleep”, and “sleep” specifically refers to lying down and sleeping. In traditional Chinese health-preserving culture, the emphasis is on conforming to the way of nature, working at sunrise and resting at sunset, which is recognized by everyone as a simple and high-quality sleep mode.
But such a basic life mode is a dream that many people can only hope for. The “Sleep Research Report in China (2022)” shows that in the past 10 years, people in the country have been sleeping more and more late and sleeping less and less. The average sleep duration has been reduced from 8.5 hours in 2012 to 7.06 hours. More than an hour, the wake-up time was 37 minutes later, and the sleep time was reduced by nearly 1.5 hours. As many as 64.75% of the respondents actually sleep less than 8 hours a day. Also in this report, 46% of college students fall asleep after midnight.
It can be seen from this report that on the one hand, people are anxious about sleep, but on the other hand, they continue to delay falling asleep. The overall delay of sleep time is actually the interference of the work and rest of modern society on the whole sleep process of human beings. In the era when we had no written records, our ancestors were in the period of hunters and gatherers. Their sleep pattern can be said to be the initial state of human sleep. They slept for 5 to 7 hours a day, usually falling asleep about 3 hours after sunset. Woke up before sunrise the next day. In addition, their sleep time in winter is about 1 hour longer than that in summer, which shows the influence of temperature on sleep in the natural state. Judging from the current research, our ancestors rarely suffered from insomnia in the era of hunter-gatherers. Compared with nearly 30% of the chronic insomniacs in modern society, the quality of sleep in the hunter-gatherer era can be described as quite high. How are we losing sleep in today’s society?
Hume said in “A Treatise of Human Nature” that sleep, together with mania and madness, constituted an obstacle to human pursuit of knowledge. The weekly production method established in modern society is not friendly to sleep. It can be said that sleep does not seem to bring benefits, but divides production time. For a long time, it was rejected by modern concepts that emphasize productivity . One of the characteristics of the development of modern society is the occupation of sleep time. Lighting technology and the never-ending pursuit of profit have reorganized the relationship between work and time. Metropolises, cities that never sleep, skyscrapers, non-closing supermarkets, 24-hour restaurants, and circular transportation systems allow producers to downplay the difference between day and night. This is even more obvious in the era of smartphones. There is no day and night and time difference in the virtual world, boundaries are disintegrating, and personal time and work time are no longer clearly distinguished. It is reported that Chinese users use mobile phones for an average of 3.3 hours a day, and spend more than 100 hours in front of mobile phone screens every month. Modern medicine has also confirmed that the impact of screen devices on sleep is becoming more and more serious.
Pursuing prosperity and prosperity, losing the natural way of life based on the alternation of day and night based on instinct, being with machines, and being separated from nature, under the impetus of GDP and the clarion call of urbanization, we have entered the era of the worst sleep, step by step Lost sleep.
