Questions people ask · Sleep
起居有常
Asleep before eleven, up between five and seven, and the window moved with the season: later to bed in summer, earlier in winter, always up with the light. The tradition does not give one number. It gives a rising hour, which it wants fixed, and a bed hour, which it wants before the liver’s watch begins at one. The Suwen sets the hours by season, and the organ clock explains why.
答
The tradition’s answer is a window, and the window moves. In practice, for most adults in most months: asleep before eleven, awake between five and seven, and the same rising time every day of the week. In summer the bed hour drifts later and the rising hour earlier; in winter both move earlier, and the Suwen actually says to wait for the sun. If you only fix one of the two ends, fix the rising hour. Everything else in the tradition’s sleep advice hangs from it.
The reasoning has two parts, one about the year and one about the night. The year part is in the second chapter of the Suwen, which gives each season its hours. The night part is the organ clock, which gives each two-hour watch to an organ and explains why eleven, and not midnight, is the line.
四气调神
The Suwen’s second chapter is a set of instructions for living through the four seasons, and each season’s paragraph contains a sleep instruction. Read together they say something a clock cannot: that the right bed hour in July is the wrong one in January.
In the three months of spring, go to bed at night and rise early, and walk in the courtyard with loose hair. In the three months of autumn, go to bed early and rise early, rising with the cockerel. In the three months of winter, go to bed early and rise late, and wait for the light of the sun.
The Lingshu explains the night itself as a tide. When the yang is spent and the yin is full, the eyes close; when the yin is spent and the yang rises, a person wakes. Bedtime, in this picture, is not an appointment but the moment you stop fighting the tide.
When the yang qi is exhausted and the yin qi is full, the eyes close. When the yin qi is exhausted and the yang qi is full, one wakes.
子午流注
The Ming physicians laid the twelve channels over the twelve watches of the day, so that each organ had a two-hour turn. The three watches that matter for bedtime are the last three before dawn.
Hence eleven. The Suwen says the blood returns to the liver when a person lies down, and the liver’s watch is one to three; a body still upright at one has missed its own appointment. And hence the rising hour: the large intestine’s watch is when the tradition expects the bowels to move and the day to start, and it expects it at the same time every day. A fixed rising hour is the only part of the sleep schedule you can actually command. The bed hour follows it within a fortnight.
起居
None of that is a promise, and we make none. It is the floor, and the rising hour is the plank under all of it.
慎
Questions
The tradition would say you have missed the gallbladder’s watch and are about to miss the liver’s, and that if you do it every night the blood that should return to the liver at one will not. In plain terms: the occasional late night is nothing; the habitual one is what the three o’clock waking is usually built on.
The classics were written for farmers, and a body that is genuinely alert at midnight and asleep at nine is not one they describe. What they do insist on, and what still applies, is regularity: the same rising hour daily and the bed hour counted back from it. A late but fixed schedule is closer to the tradition than an early but ragged one.
Twenty minutes, in the heart’s watch between eleven and one, sitting or lying. The tradition prizes the noon rest and distrusts the long one, which it says is borrowed from the night. If you wake from a nap groggy, it was too long.
More questions
The longer read on this — the pictures in full, the sources, and the word you may have arrived with — is Waking at three in the morning, in Common concerns.
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