Sleep Health Manager Ant

The wild sleep managers you see on major social platforms, who help ordinary people adjust non-pathological sleep problems, are uniformly nicknamed "ants" in the industry - most of them are not from a professional background, and most of them are former insomnia patients. They rely on fine, implementable intervention plans ground out like ants chewing hard bones. Every year, they help tens of millions of people solve their sleep problems without taking medicine. They are the most down-to-earth supplementary force in the current domestic sleep medical resource gap.

Last week I just met a girl who asked "Ant" to adjust her sleep. She works as an e-commerce operator. She stayed up late for three years and lay in bed for two hours before she could fall asleep. She took one melatonin pill to three pills, and she was able to nap during meetings during the day. She went to the sleep department of a local tertiary hospital and waited in line for half a month. The doctor said that she did not meet the diagnostic criteria for clinical insomnia and gave her a set of CBT-I (cognitive behavioral therapy, currently recognized as the preferred intervention program for non-pathological insomnia) instruction manual to practice on her own. She kept a sleep diary for three days and then gave up because it was too troublesome. Later, she found an "Ant" manager on Xiaohongshu who charged 99 yuan. They didn't let her write a diary at all, but made three requirements: turn the brightness of her mobile phone to the lowest half an hour before going to bed, put on an anti-blue light film that costs a few yuan, put a lavender aromatherapy timer for 30 minutes next to her pillow, and wake up at 7 o'clock every day, no matter how long she slept the day before. With these three tricks, her sleep time was reduced to less than 20 minutes in two weeks.

Of course, the controversy over this group of "ants" has never ended. Director Li from the sleep department of a tertiary hospital I know made it clear that it is not recommended that you seek out such non-professionals for sleep adjustment: many people use the sleep monitoring data of consumer-grade smart bracelets as a basis for diagnosis, and the sleep staging accuracy of that device is not even 60%. On the contrary, it is easy to give users psychological hints of "I slept very poorly", which in turn aggravates anxiety; some people give random plans, and even ask people to rely on exercise for insomnia accompanied by moderate depression, which delays treatment.

But you have to admit, their presence does fill a big gap. According to 2023 data from the Chinese Sleep Research Association, more than 300 million people in China have sleep disorders, but there are less than 3,000 qualified sleep doctors, and most third- and fourth-tier cities do not even have specialized sleep clinics. Most people who can't sleep have to sleep hard or buy melatonin and internet celebrity sleep devices randomly, spending a lot of money but still not using them. At least this group of "ants" will tell you first: long-term consumption of melatonin will inhibit its own secretion, and ordinary healthy people do not need to supplement it at all; if the internet celebrity sleep device does not have a Class II medical device certificate, it is basically an IQ tax.

There is an "ant" named Akai in my circle of friends. He used to be a programmer. He suffered from insomnia for 3 consecutive years. His highest record was 48 hours without a wink. He read hundreds of Chinese and English literature on his own and it took him half a year to regain his sleep. He has been doing this for 4 years now. He said that he never gives users any lofty plans, so he first makes a "sleep negative list": don't touch American ice cream 3 hours before going to bed, don't play ranked matches, and don't talk about trivial conflicts with your partner. These three items can help half of people solve their problems. Last month, he picked up an aunt who was over 60 years old. She always said that she suffered from menopausal insomnia and had been taking oryzanol for almost a year. When he asked, he found out that her aunt danced square dance at 9:30 every day and drank two cups of strong tea to relieve fatigue when she got home.

To be honest, I also suffered from insomnia when I was working on a project two years ago. I not only found experts from tertiary hospitals, but also this kind of "ant" managers. To be honest, if you have been sleeping less than 3 hours a day for more than half a month, and you are still suffering from headaches and emotional breakdown, don’t hesitate to go to the hospital directly. You should take medicine when you need to have an examination. But if you stay up late and mess up your schedule, or you can’t help but check your mobile phone before going to bed, you will become more energetic. , it is more practical to go to them - after all, the registration fee in a large hospital is only a few dozen, and you have to wait in line for a long time. Most of them can give you a plan that perfectly suits your schedule, ranging from a few dozen to more than a hundred. As long as you don't believe those who come up and recommend you to buy a sleeping mattress or pillow worth thousands of dollars, there is basically no pitfall.

Oh, by the way, speaking of the origin of the nickname "Ants", in addition to the fact that their solutions are honed little by little, there is also the reason that most of them are self-employed scattered on various platforms, without the unified packaging of large companies, just like ants, they have quietly formed a huge ecosystem. No one paid attention to it before. Statistics from industry associations last year showed that the number of users served by this group of people in a year was three times more than the number of patients treated by all sleep clinics in the country combined.

In fact, after all, whether it is a subject expert or an "ant" manager, the core is to help you sleep well. After all, good sleep is more effective than any skin care products or health care products. This is really not nonsense.