Turning to pills

When all else fails, some of the sleep-deprived turn to stronger measures.

A 28-year-old office worker in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, who asked to be identified as Li, has been struggling with chronic insomnia for more than two years. After special pillows and supplements made no difference, he began seeking pharmaceutical help — cycling between zopiclone and zolpidem, two prescription sleep medications, and trying to find a balance between effectiveness and side effects.

"Zopiclone knocks me out, but I wake up with a metallic taste in my mouth and feel groggy the whole next day," he said.

"Zolpidem works faster, but I have read about people doing things in their sleep without remembering. That scares me," he added.

Li said he also tried traditional Chinese medicine, including herbal formulas prescribed by a TCM practitioner and a course of acupuncture sessions targeting what his doctor described as liver qi stagnation. The results, he said, were negligible. "I went for six weeks, but was still staring at the ceiling at 2 am."

He now takes zolpidem two or three nights a week, a pattern he knows is unsustainable but feels unable to break. "I'm not sleeping well with the pills. But I'm not sleeping at all without them," he said.

Pan Jiyang, director of the Sleep Medicine Center at the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University in Guangdong, said the demographic shift in sleep problems is visible at his own clinic. Sleep medicine departments, which a decade ago treated mostly middle-aged and elderly patients, are now seeing a surge of people in their 20s and early 30s. Appointments that were once easy to book are now difficult to secure, with waiting times stretching to weeks at major hospitals.

"Our department used to be one of the quieter corners of the hospital," he said. "Now it is fully booked. The age of our patients has dropped, and their conditions are often tied not to physiological decline, but to anxiety, career pressure, and emotional exhaustion."