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 Most people who snore don't know they snore. Not with any real accuracy, anyway. They might have been told by a partner, or half-remembered a comment made in passing. They might have noticed they wake with a dry mouth or a dull headache that clears by mid-morning. But the sound itself — the reliable, nightly disruption that their body is producing while unconscious — they have never actually heard. And because they haven't heard it,

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong You probably don't think much about your dreams. Most professionals don't. Dreams feel peripheral — the strange, forgettable fragments that occasionally surface as you're reaching for your phone in the morning, dissolving before you can quite hold them. Interesting, maybe. Meaningful, possibly. But not exactly a professional concern. I want to make a case that this is a mistake. Not because your dreams contain hidden messages that ne

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

sleep deprivation Hong Kong professionals

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