Contributed | Zhang Mingyang
In 2022, the world we are familiar with is "on fire".
01
Since the beginning of the year, as soon as I opened my mobile phone and social media, the Russian-Ukrainian war, the Chinese stock market fell sharply, and the epidemic rebounded at many points... Everything involves people's hearts, so we can't pretend that the years are quiet.
At night, we couldn't pull out of it either. During this time, I don't know how many people are like me, even if they go to bed and turn off the lights, or turn on the mobile phone to brush non-stop, the more you brush the more anxious, the more you brush the more excited, the anxiety is the mood, the excitement is the nerve center.
The epidemic on your side, the war in the distance, and the fierce arguments on social media make you extremely confused in the dark, but you are full of anger.
Sometimes I can't help but argue with people in the circle of friends or where, say a few words that may not represent their true meaning, and when they are remorseful, they will stimulate you more in the words of others, and you will turn remorse into fighting spirit and speak more provocative language.
In the middle of the night, when you are exhausted, only the chicken feathers left black and blacked, sometimes in the dark night you are still indignant, whispering into the air: never wake up a person who pretends to sleep.
Figure/Figureworm Creative
But I couldn't even pretend to sleep. I have been sleeping late for many days, I know that I should go to bed early, and I have almost no strength to continue to stay up, but my hands, eyes and brain have uncontrollably opened one web page after another, public accounts, as if I want to exhaust everything, as if knowing more can alleviate anxiety.
On the night of February, you can easily brush up on a message: Gu Ailing revealed that sleeping 10 hours a day is the secret of his success.
This will only make you more depressed, your life is already anxious enough, and now you find that "anxiety" will make your life more distant from success, look back on the past and reflect on life, can you still sleep?
You turn off your phone, your brain is racing, and you wake up. You are in a demonic excitement, and this excitement makes you physically and mentally exhausted. You get up, get a phone that you deliberately put away from one hand, browse the news page by page, and get more and more irritable with these cold information.
You have also tried to shake off your mobile phone to read before going to bed, it is said that this can help sleep, but a throbbing heart can not see anything, often read a few pages, and involuntarily open the phone, see who followed your circle of friends before, to see what new trends there are on the Russian-Ukrainian front... Even if you come across a book that inspires you at night, it will only make your nerve center more distant from sleep.
In the torment of insomnia, you are me and I am you. In the night when the undercurrent is surging, insomnia engulfs the whole world together.
What is insomnia? Marina Benjamin wrote in The 1001st Sheep of Assignment:
"I couldn't keep my previous sleeping position after counting a few heartbeats, so I tried all the positions one by one: suddenly lying flat, suddenly curled up on my side like a fetus, and suddenly lying prone, as if falling directly from a high altitude onto the mattress. I wondered what kind of posture "relaxation" should be, and every time I thought of one, I changed my sleeping position. Sometimes, I spend the night adjusting to myself and taking this ability to the extreme. ”
My most recent experience of insomnia was lying in bed, tossing and turning, like a fat fish stuck in the internet.
02
March 21, the 22nd World Sleep Day, is this year's theme "Good Sleep, Healthy Together". But the word "good sleep" seems to be moving further and further away from Chinese.
Graph/Network
According to the recently released "China Sleep Research Report (2022)", Chinese have fallen asleep more than two hours late in the past 10 years, and the average sleep duration has shrunk from 8.5 hours in 2012 to 7.06 hours in 2021, and the sleep duration has decreased by 1.5 hours.
Most alarmingly, only 35% of Chinese sleep enough for 8 hours; more than 300 million Chinese have sleep disorders, and the incidence of insomnia in adults is as high as 38.2%.
According to the report, sleep problems are particularly prominent among new mothers, students, and professionals. The factors that affect the length of sleep are: looking at the phone or surfing the Internet leads to sleep delays, work or study time crowds out sleep time, and sleep disorders such as insomnia.
Also recently, the United States also released a medical research result: as long as the optic nerve cells are stimulated by blue light for 8 minutes, they will continue to excite the body for more than 1 hour, causing chaos in the biological clock. Then, this was simplified to #playing mobile phone before bed for 8 minutes of excitement for more than an hour#, rushing to Weibo hot search.
Looking at it this way, someone may say, don't you use your mobile phone before going to bed from now on?
In my opinion, this is almost "right nonsense", if modern people are so easy to restrain their dependence on electronic products, there is no so-called "Internet addiction", we don't have to say so much today?
What's more, for many young white-collar workers, busy work at the end of the day, the evening is a rare or even the only free leisure time in the middle of the day, and the use of mobile phones and mobile Internet is their most popular way to relax in this era.
There is nothing wrong with brushing the phone itself, we can't pretend that we can be outside the times, away from the mobile Internet, which not only lacks operability, but also is not necessary, and the mental needs before going to bed are natural.
Just to say, specific to the time before going to bed, relaxing by brushing the mobile phone has become a "counterproductive" thing in many cases, when the brushing mobile phone not only did not achieve the effect of relaxing you, but also aggravated the tension you continue to accumulate during the day, we naturally have to reflect.
This reflection is clearly not about abandoning the phone. What we really need to reflect on is how to find the "original intention" of brushing the mobile phone before going to bed, that is, "relaxation".
In fact, we ordinary users and the industry have fallen into a myth before: the most valuable emotion brought to users by the app in the "go to sleep" stage should not be information overload and "addiction", but also "relaxation".
Sometimes"addiction" and "relaxation" are the same thing, but at least at this time before bedtime, the two are very different emotions. A person has a hundred emotions in the bedtime preparation phase, but when you really want to fall asleep, there is only one emotion – relax to the point where the mind is free of distractions and calm, and then go to sleep.
So, how to "reconcile" with your phone before going to bed and find a sense of lost relaxation? Many young people find a solution: listen to the audio APP before going to bed.
03
Compared with "looking at the phone before going to bed", audio not only does not stimulate optic nerve cells, but also because the human speech speed (150-200 words / minute) is lower than the reading speed (300-500 words / minute), the information density of audio is naturally lower than that of text, which naturally can avoid the tension of information overload.
So, is turning on an audio randomly the ultimate answer to bedtime?
In general, listening to audio is more conducive to relaxing and falling asleep before going to bed than watching text or watching videos, but this does not mean that all audio content is conducive to falling asleep, if you don't believe it, you go to bed to listen to rock and heavy metal to try it, do not hear a blood vein is strange.
For audio apps, to fully meet the "bedtime needs", it may be necessary to have at least one condition: there is enough content suitable for bedtime listening.
I am personally an old user of the Himalayas, but to be honest, I used to listen to it when I took the subway, bus station, sports, and doing housework, and I listened more to the "knowledge payment" related to my professional background and personal interests, and even if I listened before going to bed, I didn't know and wouldn't particularly look for "bedtime content".
But just these few days, I found that as long as you search for "sleep day" on the Himalayas, you can enter the main page of the "Night Cat no emo" event, which contains a large selection of bedtime content: audiobooks, radio dramas, crosstalk, talk shows, humanistic history...
It is said that young users are the main force of Himalayan night listening. Although I am already a middle-aged man, but the old man talks about juvenile madness, so these nights, I basically brew sleepiness in the Himalayan audio, usually listening to 1-2 hours, falling asleep around 12:30 - don't think I'm late, but for a writer, I feel very moved.
I also systematically experienced the legendary "white noise" for the first time, as a liberal arts student, I could not say its magic, in short, in the "magic sound" that resembled the sound of rain instead of rain, like the sound of the waves instead of the waves, before I had time to care about what Zhang Wenhong said and where the fate of mankind went, I fell asleep inexplicably.
However, as a self-proclaimed high-level intellectual, I actually like to listen to "Guo Degang + Yu Qian" before going to bed these days, what "Love Era", "Rich and Noble", "Legend of Uncle", "Perfect Life", some are not the first time to listen, and even do not think it is very funny, but just listen to listening to laughter and laughter and fall asleep.
You know, often an hour ago, I was still brushing all kinds of information about the epidemic with a vicious face, and this period of isolation at home made my depression reach a new height, if I brushed until midnight, it would be even a cramp in my face.
In the next few days, what I would like to try most is "Thriller", night cat no emo with Keigo Higashino and Agatha Christie. This reminds me of my college days, when my roommates and I listened to ghost stories on the radio in the evening, and made ghosts cry wolf howls with the ups and downs of the plot, especially when the next dorm classmates knocked on the window and flashlighted their faces, so that many of us pure grandfathers went to the toilet in the middle of the night.
When I was a student, especially in middle school, I fell asleep to the radio and music almost every night, and it seemed that I could not relieve the fatigue of late study. After graduating from college, I seem to have forgotten about this, and now, I have decided to "wake up my ears" again and relive the experience of youth before going to bed.
Well, it's like a Himalayan concept: "Bedtime stories after becoming an adult.". Listening to stories is also youth.
It is said that there are more than 5,000 high-quality content in the Himalayas that are suitable for listening before going to bed, and I calculated the frequency of my average of two times a week of quasi-insomnia, which is definitely enough for the rest of my life.
At the time of writing, it rained lightly all night in Shanghai. I put on my headphones and intermittently remembered a passage before falling asleep: "The sound of the river is mighty, rising from behind the house." Rain hits the windows all day. A layer of water mist snaked down along the crack in the glass. It was dark. There was a stuffy smell inside. ”
The more pressing things and the quieter people are, it's time to quiet yourself.