Young people who can't sleep support trillions of big business

01

Young people who can’t sleep

After nightfall, Yin Shuangshuang’s long battle with sleep kicked off again.

She lay on the bed and tossed and turned, I don’t know how many times, but she never fell asleep. During the day, the trivial matters that were intentionally or unintentionally ignored came to her heart, such as tricky work, criticism from leaders, and incomprehension from her family, all kinds of details were like shackles, tightly entangled in her thoughts, churning repeatedly, and difficult to calm down.

One day, two days, three days…… After countless nights of tossing and turning, 25-year-old Yin Shuangshuang gradually discovered that perhaps she was suffering from a sleep disorder.

This is a little difficult for Yin Shuangshuang to accept, she is still very young, why is she like a middle-aged and elderly person who thinks so much and can’t sleep well? She remembered that two years ago, when she was still living in a college dormitory, she could fall asleep every night when she was in bed, and her roommates who slept lightly often envied her for her good sleep quality, but now it is different.

It can be said that entering the society from university not only took away Yin Shuangshuang’s student status and leisure time, but also took away her good dreams and sleep.

Like Yin Shuangshuang, there are many people who are trapped by the long night. According to the 2024 White Paper on Sleep Health of Chinese Residents, among the sleep data provided by more than 10,000 students, office workers and dropout workers, nearly 60% of them have insomnia symptoms, and only

These young people who can’t sleep are active on major social media platforms, pouring out their troubles, “What should I do if I can’t sleep at three o’clock in the morning?” “I kept my eyes open until five o’clock, and the whole person was about to collapse.” They tried to keep warm, looking for a cure for sleep as if they were looking for a glimmer of light in the dark.

The topic of insomnia has been read more than 900 million times on Weibo, more than 2.6 billion views on Xiaohongshu, hundreds of insomnia groups are active on Douban, and the discussion is even more popular under the experience of treating insomnia.

These people who can’t sleep together support China’s huge “sleep economy”. In 2021, the size of China’s sleep economy market has exceeded 400 billion yuan, and many market research institutions believe that it is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan by 2025.

Interestingly, if you ask the reasons why you can’t sleep, you will find that although the reasons for keeping these young people awake at night vary, they can all be summarized in two categories: “internal worry” and “external stress”.

Coincidentally, Ye Zi and Yin Shuangshuang were in the same class, and after graduation, they engaged in consulting work, and insomnia has already become a frequent visitor to life for more than two years. The difference is that Ye Zi’s insomnia is more due to the working hours of day and night, while Yin Shuangshuang’s insomnia is more due to inner worries and thoughts.

Yezi’s work often requires business trips, and when encountering intense projects, it has become the norm to work overtime until late at night, and the working hours are crushed into pieces. Many times, she didn’t have a meeting until half past twelve in the evening, took a short rest, and had to get up at three o’clock to revise the draft.

This irregular routine completely disrupted her sleep rhythm, causing Ye Zi to still have trouble sleeping even on nights when she was not working overtime, so she could only toss and turn, occasionally picking up her phone, hoping to find some comfort. This feeling of tiredness that is sleepy but unable to sleep has almost become the daily torture of the leaves.

Li Qi’s sleep disorder came earlier. As early as high school and college, she occasionally couldn’t sleep and couldn’t sleep well because of light sleep, but the number of times was not much, and it did not affect her study and life.

In 2018, Li Qi entered the self-media industry, and the work pressure gradually increased, resulting in a sharp decline in her sleep quality. She used to be able to fall asleep before twelve o’clock, but as time went on, she fell asleep later and later, from one or two o’clock to three or four o’clock now. Frequent migraines and poor energy the next day left her relying on coffee for a pick-me-up.

In order to combat the sleepiness of the day, coffee became her “life-sustaining artifact”, but it also caused it to fall into a vicious circle. Drinking coffee during the day, having a worse quality of sleep at night, and needing coffee again the next day to regain energy. Li Qi even developed “coffee addiction”, which must be drunk every day from Monday to Friday, and has headaches when she doesn’t drink on weekends. Especially after drinking coffee in the afternoon, her body has difficulty digesting, and at night, no matter how hard she tries to sleep, her spirit is still high and she can’t sleep.

Surrounded by the fast-paced modern life, sleep disorders are like spider webs that entangle them, and it is difficult to break free.

02

Difficult self-help

The torment of the night is just the tip of the iceberg of the after-effects of sleep disorders.

After many days of lack of sleep, Yin Shuangshuang found that he always felt dizzy and uncomfortable when he woke up in the morning, and it was difficult to concentrate during working hours. She began to overeat, often made small mistakes, and was repeatedly criticized, which caused her to be depressed and clouded with fear of being made redundant.

It can’t go on like this, Yin Shuangshuang thought, and began to try various measures to try to self-regulate and alleviate. At first, she thought that she had trouble falling asleep at night because her energy was not exhausted during the day, and she had the strength to think crankily at night, so she hoped to improve her sleep through exercise, and go running, cycling and dancing whenever she had time after work, and never go home until she sweated. But after a while, she found that her problem of not being able to sleep still did not improve.

I heard that listening to sleep aid music before going to bed has a miraculous effect, Yin Shuangshuang specially collected a bunch of audio on the Internet and played it before going to bed. In the dark night, she lay quietly on the bed, with the sound of spring water tinkling and light rain flowing in her ears.

Later, Yin Shuangshuang tried a bunch of “free-cost” sleep aid projects, mindfulness meditation, singing bowls, ASMR …… More often than not, “I was lying in bed, obviously tired, but my brain was highly active like a naughty child, dragging my consciousness to run and make it impossible for me to sleep.” ”

The turning point was a friend’s Amway. As usual, Yin Shuang’s friend complained about her poor sleep quality, but she didn’t expect her friend to recommend her to try massage and acupuncture. For acupuncture, a treatment in which thin silver needles are pierced into the flesh, Yin Shuangshuang felt his scalp tingle when he heard it, and he refused the proposal without hesitation.

However, until one day, she was on the verge of a mental breakdown due to severe insomnia, and finally made up her mind to try. As a result, lying on the massage table, every muscle in her body gradually relaxed with the master’s technique, and Yin Shuangshuang fell asleep unconsciously in this comfortable kneading.

Since then, massage and acupuncture have become Yin Shuangshuang’s daily sleep aid items, and she has to go to the hospital almost once a week, which is reimbursed by medical insurance, and the cost of doing a massage plus acupuncture is less than 100 yuan.

Li Qi prefers to buy and try all kinds of sleep aid products. Because she often searches for keywords such as “sleep aid”, Taobao will always recommend all kinds of related products to her, she thinks it may be helpful, so she will buy it and try it, some are useful, but most of them are “IQ tax” products, which are more chicken.

For example, this smart sleep device that can help sleep in his hand, Li Qi bought it for more than 100 yuan at the time, but after using it, he felt completely useless. While she often tries new products, she mostly uses simple sleep-in props like pillows, eye masks, scents and dim lights.

She uses these props to create a comfortable sleeping environment and establish some rituals for falling asleep, such as changing into pajamas and pajamas before going to bed, locking the door, replacing the curtains with thick, completely blackout styles, turning on the yellow nightlight at the bedside, putting on an eye mask, lighting scented candles with sandalwood, and then lying on specially bought pillows and mattresses.

In fact, it is difficult for Li Qi to tell how effective these memory foam pillows and mattresses that she bought for thousands of yuan, sometimes she can fall asleep quickly, and sometimes she has no sleepiness, the only thing that is certain is that the eye mask, aromatherapy, dim light and soft pillow mattress have indeed made her a little more relaxed and easier to fall asleep.

Yin Shuangshuang also bought memory foam pillows, she felt that lying down was indeed softer than ordinary pillows, but it was not cost-effective, and Li Qi’s set of sleeping rituals was also more troublesome for her, “Everyone’s means of falling asleep, there is really a feeling that the eight immortals cross the sea and show their magical powers.” ”

The sleep aid of the leaves is aromatherapy. One of the most important things she found out about her sleep disorder was that it was difficult to relax and switch to sleep during breaks because of the indiscriminate time of work, and this therapy could isolate those restless “work breaths” through external means.

After work, Ye Zi will rush into the bathroom first, put some bath bombs with different scents in the bathtub, and after bathing, go back to the room to light the scented candles, drop the newly bought osmanthus essential oil on the diffuser stone, and then lie on the bed. She squinted her eyes and sniffed the scent in the air, and her body instantly relaxed as if she had received some signal.

Essential oils are not cheap, and a small bottle can cost tens or hundreds of yuan. In the past two years, Ye Zi has spent as much as 10,000 yuan on various essential oils, bath bombs and sleep aid sprays. But she felt that everything was worth it for the sake of a good dream.

03

The medicine cannot be stopped

Usually, most people do not choose to go to the hospital to prescribe sleeping pills because of the addictive nature of the drug if they can sleep smoothly using various conventional means.

Li Qi has twice prescribed sleeping pills. She remembers that at that time, due to the frequent overtime, she basically had to fall asleep until dawn for two to three days, and the whole person was in a trance during the day, and her spirit was very broken. In order to get rid of this state as soon as possible, she had to go to the hospital and prescribe some sleeping pills, which worked very well, and she could basically fall asleep quickly as soon as she ate them.

But this is not a long-term solution, sleeping pills are addictive, and they are quickly immune to the body, and they need to be changed. Li Qi prefers to prescribe some Chinese medicine to relieve sleep problems than Western medicine. However, she also admitted, “I feel that Chinese medicine does not work quickly, but more psychologically.” ”

However, for a subset of young people with sleep disorders, medication is sometimes the last option.

Cen Yu is one of them. Three years ago, she deviated from her parents’ expectations to enter the system and chose to go to another country to work in a private company of her choice and become a new media editor. Obviously, everything is developing in the ideal direction, but the rumors and tricky work around her, coupled with her sensitive temperament, have to make her think a lot, which in turn affects her sleep.

After dozens of days of opening his eyes to dawn, Cen Yu couldn’t help it, and began to try a variety of sleep aid methods such as aromatherapy, sleep aid, melatonin and exercise, but there was no obvious effect. She also tried acupuncture, and although she was able to relieve it for a while, the sleep disorder recurred after two days.

At the suggestion of a friend, Cen Yu decided to go to the hospital, only to find that her sleep disorder had reached a pathological level, and the doctor specially marked the words “refractory insomnia” on her diagnosis – a sleep disorder that is difficult to control with conventional treatment. This also means that Cen Yu almost relies on sleeping pills to barely fall asleep, and without the help of drugs, she can barely fall asleep.

Returning home with a lot of sleeping pills, Cen Yu fell asleep quickly that night, sleeping directly from 6 o’clock in the evening to 10 o’clock in the morning, accidentally missed the work time, and received a fatal call from the leader, but she had never felt so good – this was the best sleep she had in months.

However, even with the help of medicine, Cen Yu still had difficulty sleeping soundly at night. Usually, she needs to take medicine once or twice a night, and she will wake up after sleeping less than four hours each time, and she needs to take medicine again to continue falling asleep, and even wake up every 1~2 hours in severe cases.

Taking medicine also brought some inconvenience to Cen Yu’s life. To make sure she falls asleep on time at night, she needs to take her medicine early, usually around 9:30 p.m., but the effect of the medicine is not always as stable as expected, and she may wake up too early or too late. What makes her feel most helpless is that the medication sometimes makes her feel drowsy during the day and has to rely on a short nap to regain her energy.

Cen Yu also has to take regular leave to go to the hospital to change her medication, because a drug that can be taken for a long time will produce “drug resistance” or immunity, and some drugs are also at risk of addiction, so she needs to constantly adjust.

Young people who can’t sleep support trillions of big business

While taking medicine, Cen Yu also tried psychotherapy, hoping to improve sleep by adjusting her mentality, but the effect was not significant, but she felt that her mentality was much better and not so depressed. Later, the psychiatrist she once trusted left Beijing and she was assigned a new doctor, but the treatment was interrupted because the treatment process was more like an interview, making her feel uncomfortable.

What hit Cen Yu was that after changing the dressing in March this year, he gained 30 pounds in just a few months, his body began to stretch lines, his clothes became ill-fitting, and his colleagues often made malicious jokes. Fortunately, the doctor later readjusted her medication, her weight did not rise, and she began to lose weight.

04

The right to sleep is transferred

How important is it to get a good night’s sleep?

Shakespeare once described the importance of sleep in Macbeth, “All living beings are indispensable for sleep.” “Studies have also shown that sleep deficiency can impair people’s longevity, emotional intelligence, and ability to work.

Unfortunately, in today’s society, it is not easy to get enough sleep, and lack of sleep may have become a symptom of the times among young people. Many young people have to sacrifice sleep to meet the demands of a “24-hour on-call” workplace under intense work pressure.

The boundaries between work and life are becoming more and more blurred, and the high-pressure demands of the workplace and the complexity of social interaction have squeezed the time that originally belonged to sleep, and young people seem to be unconsciously deprived of their right to sleep. According to the “China Sleep Research Report 2024”, the sleep index of Chinese residents will drop to 62.61 points in 2023, a new low in the past three years.

Young people who can’t sleep support trillions of big business

And the seemingly colorful entertainment content on social media is actually a kind of implicit plundering of the right to sleep. The already small leisure time is infinitely extended by short videos, games and other forms of entertainment, and young people are often immersed in it and forget the passage of time. When they finally realized it, it was late at night, and sleep was once again forced to give way.

As sleep transforms from a physiological necessity into a tradable resource, contemporary people are experiencing double deprivation: on the material level, the overwork system compresses nighttime rest into fragmented short naps; On a mental level, sleep anxiety eats up the rest time that should be.

Yin Shuangshuang was deeply touched by this. As a newcomer in the workplace who has only graduated for two years, she often faces many work problems, the leader only issues orders, and the rest depends on her own understanding, which leads to many times in order to complete the task, she has to sacrifice her rest time to work overtime to check the information and make forms.

01 The young man who can’t sleep After nightfall, Yin Shuangshuang’s long battle with sleep kicked off again. She lay on the bed and tossed and turned, I don’t know how many times, but she never fell asleep. During the day, those trivial matters that were intentionally or unintentionally ignored came to her heart, such as tricky work, criticism from leaders, and incomprehension from her family, all kinds of details were like shackles, tightly entangled in her thoughts

“Essentially, my sleep disorder is an over-possession of the present and a good expectation for the future.” Yin Shuangshuang also felt very helpless, just like countless newcomers who have just entered the workplace and been admonished to be more patient and learn more, she still wonders, can she really return to a normal sleep rhythm in the future?

Some people may have done it, but some have not. Li Qi has worked for six years, sleep problems are everywhere, she feels, under the high degree of work pressure, maybe everyone’s control over sleep has long been deprived, Party A said that four o’clock in the morning to the draft, then you can’t sleep before three o’clock. Many times, sitting in front of the computer late at night, looking at the little red dots on WeChat, Li Qi was so irritable that she was numb, and she had no time to take into account the possibility of sudden death.

Sometimes, Ye Zi feels that he is no longer a human being, but a tool, on call 24 hours a day, with only cold computers, mobile phones, and never-ending meetings in his life. The smell of tobacco, the smell of ink on paper, and the bitterness of coffee make up her entire impression of her work.

She wanted to escape, but she couldn’t find a way to escape. She can only bury herself in the thick fragrance, perhaps in this way to isolate the “breath” that suffocates her.