It was a middle-aged couple. As soon as she walked into my office, the slightly obese woman began to chatter and complain: “I can’t sleep all night” and “Even if I can sleep, I have many nightmares, and the slightest noise wakes me up.” Her husband, however, said, “The problem is not as serious as she says, last night when I went to the toilet, she was asleep and did not respond at all. However, she still insisted that she hadn’t fallen asleep.” From his words, the soberly dressed gentleman showed a bit of helplessness. In real life, the main role of sleep is also increasingly valued. People cherish this one-third of their lives. People attach great importance to sleep, are very alert to insomnia and want to minimize the impact on their body due to insomnia. However, in the practice of insomnia clinics, one often sees some strange phenomena: although some insomnia patients complain of not being able to sleep all night, their co-sleeping partner finds him often asleep without knowing it. Some of them even quarrel on the spot because of this, and I, the doctor, have to act as a temporary peacemaker and judge. What is this all about? In fact, modern medical research on insomnia has found that many patients use the next day’s mental state as a criterion to judge the quality of their sleep, which means that they often rely on their own feelings to determine whether they have insomnia. We call this “retrospective insomnia”. However, the quality of sleep is not the only factor that affects how we feel the next day, there are many other factors that can affect our state, often related to work, stress and other worries that we don’t really want to face. As a result, we cling to insomnia. Insomnia needs to be “faked” too. There are ways to tell if you are really asleep and how long you have been asleep: go to bed when you are drowsy, get up when you can’t sleep, and get up in the middle of the night to do other things when you wake up. In this way, it is possible to know when you are really asleep. If you really feel the need, you can also come to the hospital for sleep EEG monitoring, as “fake” insomnia cannot escape the eyes of the video EEG.