What field does sleep health belong to

Sleep health is a typical interdisciplinary field and does not belong to a single discipline. It core covers the three major sectors of clinical medicine, public health, and psychology. It also intersects with subdivisions such as neuroscience, sociology, sports science, and even home materials science.

The reason why many people struggle with its ownership is mainly because practitioners with different backgrounds have completely different perspectives on this issue, and their views on this issue are quite different. For example, most clinicians in hospital sleep centers think that it is essentially a branch of clinical medicine. After all, pathological sleep problems such as sleep apnea, narcolepsy, and restless legs syndrome require diagnosis by clinical methods such as polysomnography and imaging examinations, as well as clinical intervention such as drugs, non-invasive ventilators, and even surgery. It is a clinical direction hatched by the cross-incubation of neurology, respiratory medicine, and otolaryngology. But researchers in the field of public health don’t think so. They have calculated that more than 300 million people in China have sleep problems, and 80% of them do not meet the disease diagnosis standards. They are either sleep deprivation caused by young people staying up late as a revenge, or transient insomnia caused by high stress in the workplace. This kind of problem does not require medication at all and can be improved by popularizing sleep science and adjusting work and rest. It belongs to the category of national health promotion, and it is more reasonable to include it in the chronic disease prevention sequence of public health. There is also a group of psychological practitioners who do sleep cognitive behavioral intervention, and they are most exposed to sleep problems caused by emotions. Many people's insomnia is not a physical problem at all, but is caused by anxiety, depression, or the wrong perception that "you must sleep for eight hours to be healthy." They feel that the core of sleep health should be an extension of the field of mental health.

I met a visitor last month who worked in Internet operations. After staying up late for three years, he lay in bed for two or three hours and couldn't sleep. He went to the hospital and was prescribed sleeping aids. After taking it for half a month, he always felt drowsy. His reaction was slow at work, and he didn't dare to take any more medication. We first gave him two weeks of cognitive adjustment, first to eliminate his obsession that "if he can't sleep, it will be over the next day", and at the same time, he adjusted his schedule with commonly used sleep restriction therapy. During this period, we also adjusted the dosage of medication simultaneously with his follow-up doctor. After about a month, he could basically fall asleep in bed within 20 minutes and no longer needed to take medicine. The entire adjustment process does not depart from clinical safety guidance, but also uses psychological intervention methods and behavioral adjustment programs in the public health field. It is not appropriate to classify it into any single category.

In fact, no one in the academic community insists on giving it a clear attribution. After all, sleep is the most basic physiological and psychological activity of human beings. There are many influencing factors, as small as the cup of milk tea you drink before going to bed, the thickness of the blackout curtains in the bedroom, as large as your work pressure and circadian rhythm genes, which will directly affect the quality of sleep. Instead of worrying about which field it belongs to, it is better to talk about which method can really solve everyone's sleep problems, and which field of research is inseparable from sleep health.