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Getting a good night's sleep is vitally important to both your short-term wellbeing and your long-term health, yet one doctor issues a warning for people engaging in a new social media trend focused around maximising the length and quality of your rest.
It's generally accepted that getting between seven and nine hours of sleep every single night is not only the sweet spot but a great way to improve your health, yet for some this can prove challenging.
You might need to get up early in the morning and find getting to sleep difficult, or there might be various disturbances that either keep you up or pull you out of your rest in the middle of the night.
If possible though it's always best to try as hard as you can to get those fabled eight hours of rest, yet trying a little too hard can actually cause more harm than good according to one medical expert.
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As reported by UNILAD, amid a rise in optimization-based trends on social media like 'looksmaxxing' or the comparatively frightening 'ballmaxxing' movement, one in particular has emerged that revolves around your sleep every night.
Appropriately named 'sleepmaxxing', this trend – which has amassed over 500 million views on TikTok – sees people employ various techniques and tips to make sure they're getting enough rest, including using wearable trackers like Apple Watches to track their sleep down to the minute.
While this seems like a healthy and positive practice in theory, the reality of the situation can cause the opposite result, as Dr Deborah Lee reveals.
She indicates that the trend can be linked to a clinically recognised issue known as orthosomnia, which she describes as when "people become so obsessed with sleep that it keeps them up at night, ironically."
Dr Lee illustrates that "the cruel irony of orthosomnia is that the harder you try to achieve perfect sleep, the further away it gets. Sleep is not a performance you can force.
"It requires a relaxed, non-vigilant state and if you're going to bed anxious about whether you'll hit eight hours of sleep, then you've already undermined the conditions you need to actually sleep well."
It's difficult to know exactly what you should do in response, as it can then be easy to slip back into bad habits. However, simply making sure you're going to bed with enough time to get a good amount of sleep is usually ideal — and not worrying about the exactly figure will hopefully help you drift more naturally into your dreams.
