For many people, rest no longer marks the end of the day—it interrupts it. Work slows, notifications quiet, and the body finally stops moving. Yet sleep arrives lightly, if at all, and morning brings the same dull fatigue as the night before.
对许多人来说，休息不再标志着一天的结束——反而会打断这一天。工作放缓，通知静音，身体终于停止活动。然而，睡眠即便能到来，也十分浅淡，早上醒来时，人们依旧带着前一晚那种沉闷的疲惫感。
In sleep laboratories, researchers are seeing a pattern: reduced time spent in slow-wave sleep—the stage most closely linked to cellular repair and metabolic recovery—despite normal total sleep duration¹. Eight hours in bed no longer guarantees² that the body has fully reset.
在睡眠实验室中，研究人员发现了一种规律：尽管总睡眠时间正常，但慢波睡眠（与细胞修复和代谢恢复联系最紧密的睡眠阶段）的时长却在减少。在床上躺八小时，已不再能保证身体完全恢复状态。
It’s tempting to frame this as a personal failure: too much screen time, an inability to unplug. But sleep scientists say the problem runs deeper. “You may end your day,” says Orfeu Buxton, a sleep researcher at Pennsylvania State University, “but your brain hasn’t received the hormonal³ and neural⁴ signals that it’s safe to let go—cortisol declining, parasympathetic pathways activating, and the circadian clock shifting fully into night mode.”
人们很容易将这归因为个人问题：看屏幕时间过长、无法脱离电子设备。但睡眠科学家表示，问题远比这更深层。宾夕法尼亚州立大学的睡眠研究员奥弗·巴克斯顿说：“你可能结束了一天的工作，但你的大脑并未收到可以放松的荷尔蒙和神经信号——皮质醇水平下降、副交感神经通路激活、生物钟完全切换到夜间模式。”
In Dopamine Nation, Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke writes that constant digital stimulation pushes the brain’s reward system toward craving, leaving it restless even after the screen goes dark.
斯坦福大学精神病学家安娜·莱姆克在《多巴胺国度》一书中写道，持续的数字刺激会让大脑的奖励系统陷入渴望状态，即便屏幕熄灭，大脑也依然无法平静。
Emerging research supports that shift. A 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that higher levels of smartphone dependence⁵ were strongly associated⁶ with poorer sleep quality and greater psychological distress—even among people who deliberately carved out time to rest. The problem isn’t simply that screens push bedtime later. It’s that even when we protect eight hours and the lights go out on schedule, the physiology of restoration may fail to engage.
新出现的研究支持这一变化。2025年发表在《精神病学前沿》上的一项研究发现，智能手机依赖程度越高，睡眠质量就越差，心理压力也越大——即便是那些特意留出休息时间的人也是如此。问题不仅仅是屏幕让就寝时间推迟，更在于即便我们保证了八小时睡眠、按时熄灯，身体的恢复生理过程也可能无法正常进行。
To understand why that signal is breaking down, researchers are now looking beyond bedtime and into the biology of how the body recognizes that it’s safe to let go.
为了弄清楚这种信号为何会中断，研究人员目前正将目光投向就寝时间之外，去研究人体如何通过生理机制识别出“可以放松”的信号。
