Why do young people feel more exhausted nowadays?

Because they're not getting enough sleep. It's that simple.

First, eight hours of sleep is a lie from the industrial era. People have different genetics, different work and life pressures, different levels of fatigue, so the amount of sleep needed varies.

There's a long-standing saying that sleeping seven to eight hours daily leads to longevity. Nonsense.

Rather than saying sleeping seven to eight hours leads to longevity, it's more accurate to say that if your life is very relaxed and seven to eight hours of sleep is sufficient, then people in that life situation naturally live longer.

The reality is, if you've worked, labored, or exercised during the day, you need to correspondingly extend your sleep time so your body gets adequate recovery.

The recommended daily sleep for adults is 7 hours or more, and that's because 7 hours is enough to keep you alive. Sleeping less than 7 hours long-term and you'll start getting sick.

In fact, given the work pressure young people face today, appropriate sleep time is nine to ten hours.

Second, people's sleep quality now is poor. Don't eat anything three hours before bed, don't play games, and definitely don't stare at your phone or computer at the end.

Yet these are all things modern people can't do—often having late-night snacks before bed, staying up until 2 or 3 a.m. playing games or watching shows. Sleep quality under these conditions is very poor, and if you only get a basic seven to eight hours, that's completely insufficient.

Third, young people have strong recovery capacity and a strong foundation, so they don't have a clear sense of damage to their bodies. Actually, there's a very suitable indicator: reproductive system health. Women can check their menstrual cycles; men can check sperm motility.

The human body has a natural mechanism—when health gradually declines, the reproductive system is the first thing it sacrifices. When women experience excessive work pressure, extreme dieting, and so on, the first physiological signal is often irregular periods.

Men don't show obvious physiological signs under stress, but checking sperm motility will reveal poor sperm activity. However, once they sleep enough, sperm motility recovers.

In summary, one night of sleep certainly won't relieve exhaustion. You need to sleep at 9 p.m. and sleep soundly for a month to truly recover.

Unfortunately, due to lack of self-controlled time, people are unwilling to go to bed early and want to scroll on their phones late into the night. This psychological need is hard to resist. The psychological need for personal time and the physiological need for sufficient sleep conflict with each other—it's really difficult to choose.