The color of the quilt can affect sleep?
——Recently, such a "cold knowledge" has been on the hot search on Weibo.
The content of the blog post said: Even after people fall asleep, the skin can sense the color of the quilt, red makes people anxious, and blue and white make people calm.
Is this true?
Color does affect the quality of sleep
First of all, the conclusion is that the color of the quilt and the color of the bedroom wall will indeed affect the speed and quality of sleep for some people to a certain extent, but it is not because the skin can perceive the color.
In the large number of insomnia cases I have seen, the influence of environmental factors on sleep is often overlooked, while psychological factors are often exaggerated. In fact, many symptoms of insomnia can be started by improving the environment in which they fall asleep.
The influence of environmental factors on sleep is mainly reflected in light, sound, temperature, humidity and touch, etc., and the color of the quilt and bedroom wall is affected by the light.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, for the vast majority of people, people who paint their bedrooms blue will sleep longer.
Image source: What Colors Are Soothing for Sleep | Sleep.org
The reason for this is that the retina of the human eye has a special type of photoreceptor cell: ganglion cells, which are the most sensitive to the color blue.
Ganglion cells in the retina relay blue information to the part of the brain that controls the body's 24-hour rhythm, which has an impact on sleep and the next day's state. Overall, blue is associated with a sense of calmness and helps lower blood pressure and heart rate, all of which contribute to a restful night's sleep.
However, photoreceptors are objective, but each person's preference for color is subjective, and blue calms people is the mainstream result based on observation and statistics, and it does not apply to everyone.
If you're just a different kind of fireworks, blue isn't your cup of tea, you can also consider switching to a cooler, more neutral color, such as gray or silver, to improve your sleep. If you prefer something a little brighter, you can also consider a pale yellow. In short, choose whichever color will make you feel calm and comfortable.
So, if you're feeling depressed and nervous as soon as you're in bed, try changing your favorite color quilt cover or changing a batch of wallpaper to your bedroom.
Note that the likes here are the feelings that make you "comfortable" and "calm", not the colors that make you "excited" and "enthusiastic".
The skin does not perceive color
As for the fact that human skin can perceive color while sleeping, this is a theory that funny bloggers take for granted, not serious scientific research.
There is indeed a group of animals in nature that can perceive color through their skin, not the chameleon as many people think, but the cephalopod octopus.
Studies have found that the "chromosomes" on the octopus' skin can directly respond to light, and the sensory nerve cells on the skin produce opsins needed to detect light, which allow octopuses to detect different wavelengths of light.
However, there is no opsin-like structure on human skin, and there are no high-quality studies that have observed that human skin can perceive color.
After falling asleep, the colors of the world exist only in dreams.
Formulas that can improve sleep
Of course, if you want to get a good night's sleep, it's not enough to have a good color.
Most importantly, you need to know why you don't sleep well. I'm going to share with you a very useful formula that can be used to express all the secrets of sleep problems:
Power + Rhythm - Resistance = Sleep
In other words, if you have sleep problems, you can find the cause from these 3 aspects first.
1. Power
Motivation is the driving force for sleep, which is what we often call sleepiness. The more sleepy you are, the easier it is to fall asleep.
So where does sleepiness come from? Quite simply, as long as you stay awake long enough, your body will naturally accumulate drowsiness. If you sleep too much during the day, it weakens your sleep drive. So, if you're having trouble falling asleep at night, I suggest you try canceling your daytime nap first.
However, sometimes I am tired and can't sleep, so what's going on? This brings us to the second factor: rhythm.
Image credit: pixabay
2. Rhythm
Rhythm refers to the circadian rhythm. As the old saying goes, "the sun rises and the sun sets" is the result of the circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm is like a "physical activity schedule" in your body, according to which many physiological activities such as eating, drinking, lazing, and sleeping are carried out.
At the same time, the table will match day and night, and the end result is that you can stay in the right state for different times of the 24 hours, sleeping when it's time to sleep, and staying awake when it's time to work.
How do you hold on to your circadian rhythm?
The most important method is to go out for waves during the day and avoid the light at night. That is, you want to harness the power of light.
Going out to surf during the day means that you should be exposed to outdoor light from time to time during the day.
At the same time, it is very important to avoid light at night, and if you always use your mobile phone for a long time before going to bed, it is easy to push the rhythm backwards: tend to go to bed late and wake up late.
In fact, both of them are relatively easy to solve, whether it is the driving force or the circadian rhythm, and the biggest problem in sleep problems is the third factor: sleep resistance.
3. Sleep resistance
Sleep resistance is the various factors that hinder your sleep. I liken them to 6 locks – locking the door to your sleep. The 6 locks are: Realm, Movement, Body, Mind, Medicine, and Sleep.
Environment: Refers to the sleeping environment, including sound, light, temperature, humidity, etc.
Row: Refers to the act of sleeping. Wrong behaviors can interfere with sleep, such as lying in bed when it's okay, sleeping too much during the day, drinking alcohol before bed, etc.
Body: Refers to changes in the body, including physiological changes and diseases. For example, women do not sleep well during menstruation and pregnancy, and they will not sleep well when they are older, etc.
Heart: refers to psycho-emotional stress, but also includes mental and psychiatric illnesses such as anxiety and depression.
Medicine: Refers to medications that affect your sleep. Elderly people have many diseases, often take a lot of medicines, some drugs will interfere with sleep, this time you need to adjust the drug regimen.
Sleep: Refers to a specific sleep disorder. For example, severe snoring, hitting until there is a lack of oxygen. In addition, some people will feel inexplicably uncomfortable when lying in bed at night, and they need to get up and take a walk, etc.
You will find that the secret of sleep is that you don't need to work sleep itself, as long as you can solve these resistances, sleep will come naturally.