Source 丨21 Healthnews21 original work
Author 丨 Zhu Ping Intern Wang Xinyi
Editor 丨Xu Xu
Picture | figure worm
On February 8, in the final of the freestyle ski women's big jump at the Beijing Winter Olympics, Gu Ailing successfully won the first gold of the Winter Olympics. Afterwards, Gu Ailing shared a secret weapon of his victory: "I grew up sleeping enough for 10 hours every night. Sleeping promotes the growth of the body and brain, and sleeping is also a review time, so let me review all the things I learned that day. ”
On February 9, Professor Wang Weidong, chief medical officer of Beijing Huayou Hospital and chief physician of the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine Psychology, the "psychological and sleep administrator" of the Beijing Winter Olympics, said in an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald reporter that good sleep does have a great impact on competitive athletes, but the specific length of sleep varies from person to person, and not everyone needs to sleep for 10 hours, especially athletes, which cannot form a "hint". "Sleep is closely related to psychology."
On January 6, in order to ensure the smooth progress of the Winter Olympic Games and ensure that all participating athletes in the mainland achieved good competition results in a state of good sleep and psychology and under stress, the Winter Sports Management Center of the State General Administration of Sport issued an invitation to Wang Weidong to go to the Chinese venues of the Winter Olympics to be responsible for the comprehensive management of sleep and psychology during the athletes' competition and related matters. On January 8th, Professor Wang Weidong led the team into the training ground of the figure skating team to learn from the instructors about the status of the participants and the characteristics of the competition. Make adequate preparations for the psychological training of the simulated competition in the later stage in the low impedance state. It is also understood that Wang Weidong is also the leader of medical volunteers for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.
Pictured: Wang Weidong (second from left) and other experts at the Winter Olympic venues Provided by the interviewee
"Secret weapon"?
In fact, sleep does play a huge role in competitive sports.
Professor Wang Weidong told reporters that from a physiological point of view, sleep helps athletes to maintain a good state, including physical strength, vitality and resilience; and from a psychological point of view, good sleep can also make athletes emotionally stable, and willpower will ability will be strengthened. If an athlete does not sleep well, or thinks that he is not sleeping well, it will affect the athlete's state and performance during the game.
Wang Weidong specifically pointed out that athletes think that they have not slept well, which is a psychological suggestive effect that may affect their emotions and then affect their state. Generally speaking, athletes sleep less than half an hour or 10 minutes, which does not necessarily affect his performance, but is conducive to athletes maintaining a certain state of stress and excitement, which is conducive to his play. But if an athlete thinks he's slept less or not, he may struggle with sleep, leading to insomnia and psychological imbalances. From this point of view, the harm of thinking that you have not slept well is even greater.
Wang Weidong introduced a group of athlete insomnia survey data in a previous interview with the media: 60% of athletes have had different degrees of insomnia, of which 95% of the exercise insomnia is temporary psychological physiological insomnia, and 5% is persistent psychological physiological insomnia (that is, sports insomnia). The frequency and duration of insomnia in excellent athletes are more than those of ordinary athletes, and sports insomnia is more common after heavy-duty training and before competition, and the proportion of various insomnia symptoms is the highest, at 79.5%. "The main cause of mental problems in athletes is excessive attention to sleep. Athletes expect to maintain physical strength by sleeping well, and the stronger the perception, the more likely the insomnia problem is. ”
So how do athletes manage sleep? During the competition, athletes should stay in the same state as usual and should not sleep more or less for the competition. Sleeping more can cause athletes to feel overwhelmed and in a state of weakness during competition. Sleeping too little can cause athletes to have insufficient energy, insufficient stress response, and lack of tension and excitement.
At present, Wang Weidong is responsible for the comprehensive management of sleep and psychology during the athletes' competition and related matters at the Chinese venues of the Winter Olympic Games, ensuring that all participating athletes in the mainland achieve good competition results in a state of good sleep and psychological state and under stress. Previously, Wang Weidong also served as the sleep protection medical expert group of the Summer Olympic Games, helping athletes deal with sleep and psychological problems, and had rich experience.
Wang Weidong told the 21st Century Business Herald that athletes also have some common characteristics of ordinary insomnia. But at the same time, athletes are a special group of people, with their own personality and will. Once an athlete uses his will to sleep, with special emphasis on his sleep, it is likely to affect the quality of his sleep. In addition, the life of athletes is extremely regular, and once the rules are broken, athletes may lose sleep. For athletes who are often faced with going abroad and traveling for business competitions, it is crucial to improve their adaptability, which can avoid insomnia caused by breaking the rules and a series of physical and psychological problems.
Wang Weidong also pointed out that at present, many athletes have unreasonable cognition of sleep treatment, and some athletes do not trust the sleep expert group. "In the future, we need to do more science popularization to change the unreasonable perception of athletes and even the public." At the same time, coaches should also receive training on sleep and match athletes with team doctors who specialize in managing sleep to better complete this work. ”
It is worth noting that due to the strict control of the epidemic situation at the Winter Olympics and other reasons, psychological counseling work cannot be communicated with face-to-face. Faced with this challenging task, Wang Weidong and the team immediately flexibly changed the plan, using a demand-oriented approach to help athletes, analyzing the reasons affecting the athletes' sleep time and sleep quality through interviews, and finally formulating relevant plans based on the results of the analysis, so as to ensure that each athlete can have the most suitable exclusive service.
"There are also some athletes who want to save time for training and do not want to go to the clinic to do relevant adjustments. On request, we have created an app that helps mentally regulate and relax and fall asleep, with a variety of adjustment methods, such as playing music or audio. We observe the symptoms of athlete feedback through systematic measurements, identify the factors that contribute to their psychological problems, and regulate brain nerve function through induced protocols and language. Apps are like psychiatrists on mobile phones, providing professional services for athletes anytime, anywhere. Wang Weidong said.
Is there a unified standard for good sleep?
Although some Winter Olympic champions call 10 hours of sleep the secret weapon of their victory, sleep time varies from person to person.
Generally speaking, the average person sleeps 7-8 hours a day. For this statement, Wang Weidong focused on the explanation.
In fact, "average" here has two meanings: the first is the average of the entire population: in the crowd, some people sleep more and some people sleep less, so the average of the whole population is 7-8 hours. There are even differences between people in different regions, such as Chinese have a nap habit, which May not be the same in Europe and the United States; the second is the average number of sleeps a person has in their lifetime: as they age, the amount of sleep time may decrease. For children, it may take more than 10 hours of sleep, adults may need 7-8 hours, and the elderly may only need 4-6 hours of sleep. Therefore, 7-8 hours of sleep is only the average number of sleep time a person's life, and the public should not compare the sleep time of a certain age group or a certain process with the average.
Therefore, the public cannot mechanically understand and compare sleep problems. For any normal person, there is no unified standard for sleep time limit, and the sleep time limit of each individual may be different. For athletes, due to the relatively large physical exertion, they usually sleep longer than the average person. However, for some people who are particularly energetic, 4-5 hours of sleep per day may be enough. You can't impose sleep time on one person, especially since coaches shouldn't require or imply that athletes deliberately achieve a certain amount of sleep.
For the reasons why everyone's sleep time is different, Wang Weidong pointed out to the 21st Century Business Herald reporter that this difference may be related to heredity, that is, nerve type. In addition, the different habits of each person also lead to different sleep durations. If a person is accustomed to sleeping 10 hours a day, when he is forced to sleep only 6 hours, his energy, physical strength, emotions, physiology, and psychology will be greatly affected.
In addition, the time to fall asleep is also related to people's habits. Chinese medicine believes that people should fall asleep at the time of the child (23 o'clock), because at this time the yang qi enters the yin, the yang qi gradually decreases, and people are more likely to sleep until the middle of the night after sleeping at this time.
In this regard, Wang Weidong explained that for children, ensuring 1-3 points of sleep helps the secretion of growth hormone; and for adults, this is more of a habit. In ancient times, people planned their work and rest with the sun, worked at sunrise, and rested at sunset, thus forming the habit of sleeping at night. However, if some people, such as writers and writers, are accustomed to sleeping during the day and working at night, this will not necessarily affect his physical health and life expectancy. Wang Weidong once again stressed that it is necessary to look at sleep problems from a dialectical point of view, and do not treat sleep with an absolute eye.
So how to judge whether it is a good sleep? Physiologically, it can be determined by sleep monitoring. Sleep has regularities and specific sleep structures, ranging from phases I, II, to III. The first phase is the sleep period, the second stage is light sleep, during which it is accompanied by dreaming, and after the third stage, it enters the deep sleep period, and after the deep sleep period, it begins to enter the light sleep and dreaming period. Every night people go through periodic sleep. Sleep monitoring can help people recognize their sleep cycles and record the length of time during each sleep period to find sleep problems.
However, the quality of sleep is more critical to the subjective feelings of individuals as the criterion. For example, if a person only sleeps for 5 hours, but is energetic the next day and does not have any symptoms, it cannot be said that this sleep is not good. On the other hand, if someone sleeps for 10 hours, but wakes up the next day and feels uncomfortable sleeping, and has not slept enough, this cannot be called a good sleep. Therefore, the sleeper's self-perception is more important than physiological monitoring.
Wang Weidong pointed out that sleep is a complex physiological and psychological phenomenon, and the impact of human psychology on sleep is very large, especially on the problem of insomnia disorder. Insomnia has 6 symptoms: difficulty falling asleep, waking up early, waking up halfway, shallow sleep, sleep daytime dysfunction, dreaming, etc., and these 6 major symptoms are actually closely related to psychology.
Wang Weidong also stressed not to rely too much on drugs and used one of his own patients as an example, explaining that drugs may "treat the symptoms but not the root causes". "I have a patient in his sixties who has struggled with medication and insomnia for almost 40 years, but with no significant results. After more than a month of recuperation in our hospital, it changed his cognition, mood and anxiety and depression of sleep, and helped him solve the problem of insomnia. ”
"Some patients take medicine, the sleep structure is destroyed, after taking medicine directly into deep sleep, or always in a light sleep state, the next day after getting up may feel uncomfortable." We prefer to put patients into a most natural state of sleep through non-drug therapies. Wang Weidong said that many insomnia problems are caused by psychological problems in childhood, childhood and even adulthood, such as family concepts and the impact of education, so simple drug treatment cannot solve psychological problems.
Here are Wang Weidong's sleep tips:
Tips1: Relative rhythmic routine
For ordinary people, good living habits are very important. People who maintain a good psychological state every day, no contradictions and conflicts, no interpersonal barrier relationships, have their own goals and direction of struggle, and have the ability to regulate emotions usually sleep better. If you can exercise regularly, it will promote sleep. However, this rhythm should be relative rather than absolute. When a person "locks" sleep time at a specific time and has extremely high requirements for the law, then once this law is broken, he will be more likely to lose sleep. Thus, absolute rhythms can backfire.
Tips2: Peace of mind
Sleep seems to have a "paradox". The more people who pay attention to the quality of sleep, the worse the quality of sleep; the more people who emphasize sleep time, the shorter the sleep time; the more people who require themselves to sleep faster, the less likely they may fall asleep. Therefore, sleep should be regarded as a natural sleep process, maintaining their natural sleep state according to their own physical exertion, and treating sleep problems with a peaceful mind.
Tips3: Dietary therapy is more of a psychological effect
Porridge with lilies, bananas, milk, goji berries... Food may have a certain role in helping sleep, may help insomniacs regulate physiological states, but more play a psychological cue role. If insomniacs have improved their insomnia through dietary therapy or traditional Chinese medicine such as acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, they can consider it as their own way to cope with insomnia. But the fundamental way to deal with insomnia is to start from the psychological level.