Insomnia in Hong Kong: What It Actually Is, Why Generic Sleep Advice Doesn't Fix It, and What Does By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong Most people who come to me with insomnia have already tried everything. The sleep hygiene checklist. The no-screens-before-bed rule. The magnesium supplement and the chamomile tea and the white noise machine. The blackout curtains. The consistent bedtime that lasted three weeks before the schedule collapsed. The melatonin, which helped

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong There is a word that comes up constantly in conversations about mental health, wellbeing, and professional performance. It appears in corporate wellness programmes, in meditation apps, in the advice given after someone mentions they're struggling. The word is calm. Calm down. Stay calm. Find your calm. The prescription is so familiar that it has become almost reflexive — the default response to stress, to difficulty, to anything that

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong Let me start with what therapy is not. It is not lying on a couch talking about your childhood while someone with a notepad nods slowly and says very little. It is not something you do when you've had a breakdown. It is not a confession. It is not a sign that you cannot cope. It is not reserved for people with clinical diagnoses, serious mental illness, or lives that have come apart. It is not — and this matters particularly for the

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong You sleep. You wake up tired. You take the holiday. You come back tired. You have the good weekend — no work, decent sleep, time with people you care about — and by Sunday evening you feel, more or less, the same as you did on Friday. Not restored. Not ready. Just... resumed. And you tell yourself what most people in this situation tell themselves. That you need more sleep. That you're getting older. That the workload is genuinely he

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By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong There is a study I come back to more than almost any other in my work. Not because it's the most dramatic finding in psychology. But because it contains something that, once you really understand it, changes the way you relate to one of the central experiences of professional life. Here is what the researchers found. In 1998, a team at the University of Wisconsin surveyed nearly 30,000 American adults. They asked two questions: how m

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong Let's start with a number. 43%. That is the increase in the risk of premature death associated with high stress combined with the belief that stress is harmful to health — a figure from a University of Wisconsin study tracking nearly 30,000 adults over eight years. But that's a different article. The number relevant here is this one: After 14 days of sleeping six hours per night, cognitive performance declines to levels equivalent to

Stress

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong There's a version of the entrepreneurial story that gets told a lot in Hong Kong. The pitch deck. The Series A. The WeWork hot desk at midnight that becomes an office of thirty people. The hustle, the exits, the LinkedIn post about lessons learned. It's an appealing story. It's also, in my experience, missing about half of what's actually happening. What doesn't make the LinkedIn post: the 3am anxiety that isn't about strategy, it's

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