15 ms·

Why Sleep Deprivation Eases Depression

161 points by youngerdryas 13y ago

daok 13y ago
I have bought 1 year ago Zeo product and since than I have noticed that if I sleep more than 6h30 hours than I am tired and feel more depressed. With over 10 months result, I have DEEP sleep only in the first 2 hours of sleep, then I am moving between REM and light the rest of the night. I guess that, for me, too mush REM is making me more tired.
- gwern 13y ago
  Could it be that you are not using the SmartWake feature or are waking up in the middle of a REM cycle? That does bad things to your alertness and how you feel.
Ziomislaw 13y ago
this is complete bullshit. Lack of sleep makes (my) depression worse.
- cmutty 13y ago
  simply put, everyone is different
  - skrebbel 13y ago
    except me!
- PaulHoule 13y ago
  Not necessarily. They say it works 70% of the time. I'm a Bayesian, and looking at the posts here, I'd say the probability distribution of this probability is beta(5,2). The HDR runs from around 40 to 97 percent and it peaks around 0.8 so what you and the other guys are saying, plus a non-informative prior, agrees with what they say. You're just one of the unlucky beta(2,5). Too bad.
- acomar 13y ago
  Acute sleep deprivation can apparently make depression better, but the effect only lasts until you go to sleep. That's what this article is about. Chronic sleep deprivation is very different and can cause depression. This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    > This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness. If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms. I say this because over time, more and more "mental" illnesses have been recategorized as physical or genetic conditions that happen to have mental symptoms, including schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome, both of which respond dramatically to neurological treatments, and not at all to psychological treatments. This change in the status of "mental" illnesses was recently recognized by the director of the NIMH, who in Scientific American said, "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient's illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely "mental," and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses." Reference: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...
    - SoftwareMaven 13y ago
      If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms. I bet there are few here that don't already believe that. Further, whether the article is correct or not, depression is a physical illness with mental symptoms. And I'm very glad the medical world has moved past the idiocy of the early and mid-20th century beliefs around mental illness. Maybe now we can get to some effective treatments. My money is on pharmacology being only a single piece of the treatment, with many required (diet, exercise) to achieve full health. But hopefully a pill will help people have enough hope and energy to fulfill the rest of the treatment.
- daok 13y ago
  I guess not every human is the same. Saying it's a complete bullshit seem to be irrational.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > this is complete bullshit. Lack of sleep makes (my) depression worse. Science isn't usually about the experiences of individuals, it's about the experiences of populations. This effect isn't true for each individual in the population.
- silverbax88 13y ago
  Same here. This article is utter nonsense. I've battled depression for years (successfully) and one of my top rules is 'get enough sleep'.
- JackFr 13y ago
  I would say that the bulk of the work product of the depression industry is bullshit.
- fusiongyro 13y ago
  Well, it makes mine better. Shall we continue with battle-of-the-anecdotes, or maybe permit science to continue doing its thing with the understanding that statistical results apply statistically?
- kyro 13y ago
  And some people respond to medications in vastly different ways than others. That doesn't mean the medications don't work.
rmdoss 13y ago
From personal experience, I would say it was the opposite. Being overly tired and sleepless lead to depression. But I guess being busy and active can move your mind off from depression and make things better for some.
cmutty 13y ago
Anecdotally I can definitely say my depression seems to get worse when I'm sleeping more and it almost becomes a feedback loop because I want to sleep more therefore making it even worse. It might also have something to do with a sense of productivity feeding back into the depression but that's a different story. Ultimately this makes me want to do a better job of recording sleep patterns and seeing if that correlates with my depression. Anyone suggest using a tool like fitbit for this purpose?
- scorcher 13y ago
  I would go for a Jawbone Up if your using it mainly for sleep tracking. The sleep tracking on a fitbit is a bit of a hassle since you have to get it out and put it in its own separate arm band.
- deweerdt 13y ago
  I used an early version of http://www.sleeptracker.com/ http://www.sleeptracker.com/ and it worked well.
- larrys 13y ago
  "It might also have something to do with a sense of productivity feeding back into the depression but that's a different story." I don't suffer from depression but FWIW I have noticed lack of productivity leading to a down mood in the same way simply accomplishing something (even getting the room cleaned up) can lead to an up mood.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bjoernw 13y ago
"Although the mice continued to sleep normally, after 12 hours they showed a rapid improvement in mood and behavior, which lasted for 48 hours." Does anyone know how we measure moods in mice? At first glance it seems like a very subjective exercise.
- dodo53 13y ago
  Checked because I remember hearing about the somewhat horrific forced swim test. Idea is mice are trapped in a container fall of water; depression is when they give up and let themselves drown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_models_of_depression#Despair-based http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_models_of_depression#Des...
  - nlh 13y ago
    The Wikipedia article doesn't mention anything about drowning, just "an immobile posture". /hopes that we're not torturing mice for our own benefit.
    - lacksconfidence 13y ago
      i could be mistaken, but i'm pretty sure we do all kinds of horrific tests on mice, specifically for our own benefit.
      - shardling 13y ago
        Someone I knew once explained how their lab had a machine to give mice precisely calibrated amounts of brain damage through impact. The control group had their skull fractured without causing any direct injury to the brain. This has always struck me as the ickiest thing I've heard, but I'm sure there's much worse out there.
    - JackFr 13y ago
      Are there better reasons for torturing mice?
    - 13y ago
jdmitch 13y ago
At face value, it seems like this flies in the face of the commonly-held wisdom that regular patterns of sleep (as well as eating and other habits) help minimize depression over time. It seems like the research is actually referring to the short-term effect of sleep deprivation on brain chemistry, which makes sense in an evolutionary sense. Maintaining alertness in the face of sleep probably has a hard-wired association at quite a deep level with self-preservation, and I can see how that would explain in some way these findings.
tokenadult 13y ago
There is a long line of research on mood disorders and the ways to deal with those behaviorally and medically. http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Recurrent-Depression/dp/0195135792 http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec... It has been known for quite a while that if a person is in a prolonged depressed mood state, simply shortening that person's periods of sleep (usually by getting the person up earlier, to bright light) can do a lot to boost the person's mood state. On the other hand, for the many people who have bipolar mood disorders (so that they have abnormally elevated mood as well as abnormally depressed mood not related to immediate events in the people's lives), sleep deprivation can be dangerous, as it can trigger mania. Severe sleep deprivation can result in all the psychotic symptoms of florid mania even for most people without a medical history of mood disorders, and it is particularly dangerous for people who have already been through an episode of mania. So as other people here have already commented, regularity of sleep (sleep while it's dark, and get up while it's day) is helpful for mood disorders, up or down, and sleep deprivation by itself will not be a cure-all for all cases of depression. AFTER EDIT: I appreciate HN participant falcolas reminding all of us, in a first reply to this comment, that the submitted article is about an animal model of a proposed drug treatment that may have some of the effects of sleep deprivation without having other effects. Yes, that is what the article is about, and I acknowledged that even after reading the article, the first part of this comment's text (above) had as much to do with other comments here as it had to do with the actual article, maybe more. That said, as investigation of new drug treatments moves from animal models to human clinical trials, the thing to look for in any drug proposed to treat "depression" (depressed mood) is whether it might trigger mania (elevated mood) in the patient receiving the treatment. It's tough to develop an animal model of the psychotic symptoms of mania, which is why this is not an easy problem to solve--how to develop a drug that makes depressed patients enjoy normal mood states without breaking through to florid mania.
- falcolas 13y ago
  From TFA: "This finding points to a promising target for new drug development because it suggests that mimicking sleep deprivation chemically may offer the antidepressant benefits without the unwanted side effects of actually skipping sleep." So no, they aren't recommending sleep deprivation as a method to combat depression. It has, however, given them other lines of research to follow.
criswell 13y ago
I don't think there's enough stuff popping up on my screen for me to fully enjoy this article.
gdonelli 13y ago
Being depressed made me sleep less, which in turns made me feel even less powerless and my depression got even worse... at least in my personal experience
- silverbax88 13y ago
  I agree, I have to watch my sleep patterns because when I don't get enough sleep, it's much easier for depression to kick in.
  - rgoodwintx 13y ago
    Agreed as well. Nothing makes the day WORSE than not enough sleep; and it never feels like enough. Edit: And, as is the style of the day, we've had links on HN/SA and others that not enough sleep hampers cognition, weight control, and stress (which are all triggers/symptoms for depression in many people). So, you need to sleep more, and less, simultaneously?
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    Similarly, I find my depression is fueled by lack of sleep and a strong sleep regimen(sleeping in bouts rather than settling down for 4-6 hours before getting up to go to the bathroom, etc).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- anonymous 13y ago
  You may be confusing depression for anxiety.
  - duaneb 13y ago
    Depression is a collection of symptoms—he could very well be depressed with a different underlying cause.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    A rule of thumb is "can't go to sleep in evening == anxiety; wake up too early == depression". It's a very rough rule. Once disrupted sleep patterns kick in it can be hard to get them back to normal and they go all over the place. Depression comes in a few different forms, and often people learn to live with it for so long before seeking treatment that they have different lists of symptoms.
mrtksn 13y ago
This is one of the things that you know instinctively and you can relate immediately when somebody puts it out in a formal way. Myself and a friend of mine suffer from depression and we both feel much better when we are somewhat tired late in the night. Anecdotal evidence was there, so we both used to get things done just before sleep.
rzimmerman 13y ago
It's important to note that the studies show that the short term effects of sleep deprivation can reduce the symptoms of depression. The long term effects are the opposite and being chronically sleep deprived can aggravate and severely worsen someone who is suffering from depression.
MichaelGG 13y ago
Personal experience, I'd agree. If I stay up all night and then do not go to sleep, I'm more likely to enter a manic mode and continue to get little sleep for the next few days. But things usually crash not too long after.
whattabow 13y ago
The Hines article that this article is written about is open access, and worth a read, especially because the Introduction and Discussion sections look to be fairly comprehensible for people outside the field: http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v3/n1/full/tp2012136a.html http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v3/n1/full/tp2012136a.html
BIair 13y ago
I've seen studies where college students were shown a series of images. The sleep deprived students were more likely to recall the negative images. Focusing on the negative appears to be a hallmark of depression. However, a depressed person can't seem to get enough sleep. Is it a snowball effect? Maybe the balance isn't about sleep deprivation, but finding the correct amount of sleep, waking to bright light, and keeping a consistent schedule.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > However, a depressed person can't seem to get enough sleep. This has not been my experience. If you mean that a depressed person continues to be tired after waking up from a full night's sleep, then sure, but that's not sleep deprivation.
wonnage 13y ago
Potentially pointless anecdote: I've noticed sleep deprivation narrows my capacity for attention - to make an analogy with sight, it's like tunnel vision. As long as I have something to hold what's left of my attention span (e.g, work), I can't help but live in the moment, as I can't focus on (or even perceive, really) depressive thoughts at the same time.
- cLeEOGPw 13y ago
  My theory is that before going to sleep different parts of the brain shut down not in one single moment, but at different moments. Therefore before sleep some parts of the brain is already sleeping. That would explain why so often ideas that seem good before sleep look silly when you wake up. As in this case, maybe before sleep parts of the brain that produce depression shut down sooner and "temporarily cures" the depression.
  - opminion 13y ago
    May I suggest that you measure that, even by your own definition on "parts of the brain" (perhaps a choice of unrelated cognitive functions?) in a way that allows you to make predictions?
cycojesus 13y ago
I want to believe it yet every shorten night sends me to lengths of hellish angry letargious time.
ttrreeww 13y ago
It causes early death too...
hasenj 13y ago
Maybe during the 4-5 hours that you spend resisting sleep. But the next day you will wake up in a bad mood from not sleeping well. At least this is what happens to me. So in general it's a bad idea. On the other hand, I've found that if I sleep for too long I also get a bad mood the next day. 8 hours of sleep seems to be the sweet spot that puts me in a decent mood.
b0rsuk 13y ago
I have noticed this myself - I'm unemployed and frequently go to job interviews. If I slept badly, I'm much more calm and easy going. I may not be the sharpest knife in the shed when it happens, but I no longer care. But I avoid sleep deprivation. It can't be good in the long run.

161 points by youngerdryas 13y ago

daok 13y ago

I have bought 1 year ago Zeo product and since than I have noticed that if I sleep more than 6h30 hours than I am tired and feel more depressed. With over 10 months result, I have DEEP sleep only in the first 2 hours of sleep, then I am moving between REM and light the rest of the night. I guess that, for me, too mush REM is making me more tired.

gwern 13y ago
Could it be that you are not using the SmartWake feature or are waking up in the middle of a REM cycle? That does bad things to your alertness and how you feel.

Ziomislaw 13y ago

this is complete bullshit. Lack of sleep makes (my) depression worse.

cmutty 13y ago
simply put, everyone is different
- skrebbel 13y ago
  except me!
PaulHoule 13y ago
Not necessarily. They say it works 70% of the time. I'm a Bayesian, and looking at the posts here, I'd say the probability distribution of this probability is beta(5,2). The HDR runs from around 40 to 97 percent and it peaks around 0.8 so what you and the other guys are saying, plus a non-informative prior, agrees with what they say. You're just one of the unlucky beta(2,5). Too bad.
acomar 13y ago
Acute sleep deprivation can apparently make depression better, but the effect only lasts until you go to sleep. That's what this article is about. Chronic sleep deprivation is very different and can cause depression. This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness.
- lutusp 13y ago
  > This article is not describing a treatment, just progress in understanding a mental illness. If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms. I say this because over time, more and more "mental" illnesses have been recategorized as physical or genetic conditions that happen to have mental symptoms, including schizophrenia and bipolar syndrome, both of which respond dramatically to neurological treatments, and not at all to psychological treatments. This change in the status of "mental" illnesses was recently recognized by the director of the NIMH, who in Scientific American said, "In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient's illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely "mental," and psychological therapies followed suit. Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses." Reference: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...
  - SoftwareMaven 13y ago
    If the article's thesis is correct, if depression can be modulated by way of brain chemistry, the it's not a mental illness, it's a physical illness with mental symptoms. I bet there are few here that don't already believe that. Further, whether the article is correct or not, depression is a physical illness with mental symptoms. And I'm very glad the medical world has moved past the idiocy of the early and mid-20th century beliefs around mental illness. Maybe now we can get to some effective treatments. My money is on pharmacology being only a single piece of the treatment, with many required (diet, exercise) to achieve full health. But hopefully a pill will help people have enough hope and energy to fulfill the rest of the treatment.
daok 13y ago
I guess not every human is the same. Saying it's a complete bullshit seem to be irrational.
lutusp 13y ago
> this is complete bullshit. Lack of sleep makes (my) depression worse. Science isn't usually about the experiences of individuals, it's about the experiences of populations. This effect isn't true for each individual in the population.
silverbax88 13y ago
Same here. This article is utter nonsense. I've battled depression for years (successfully) and one of my top rules is 'get enough sleep'.
JackFr 13y ago
I would say that the bulk of the work product of the depression industry is bullshit.
fusiongyro 13y ago
Well, it makes mine better. Shall we continue with battle-of-the-anecdotes, or maybe permit science to continue doing its thing with the understanding that statistical results apply statistically?
kyro 13y ago
And some people respond to medications in vastly different ways than others. That doesn't mean the medications don't work.

rmdoss 13y ago

From personal experience, I would say it was the opposite. Being overly tired and sleepless lead to depression. But I guess being busy and active can move your mind off from depression and make things better for some.

cmutty 13y ago

Anecdotally I can definitely say my depression seems to get worse when I'm sleeping more and it almost becomes a feedback loop because I want to sleep more therefore making it even worse. It might also have something to do with a sense of productivity feeding back into the depression but that's a different story. Ultimately this makes me want to do a better job of recording sleep patterns and seeing if that correlates with my depression. Anyone suggest using a tool like fitbit for this purpose?

scorcher 13y ago
I would go for a Jawbone Up if your using it mainly for sleep tracking. The sleep tracking on a fitbit is a bit of a hassle since you have to get it out and put it in its own separate arm band.
deweerdt 13y ago
I used an early version of http://www.sleeptracker.com/ http://www.sleeptracker.com/ and it worked well.
larrys 13y ago
"It might also have something to do with a sense of productivity feeding back into the depression but that's a different story." I don't suffer from depression but FWIW I have noticed lack of productivity leading to a down mood in the same way simply accomplishing something (even getting the room cleaned up) can lead to an up mood.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bjoernw 13y ago

"Although the mice continued to sleep normally, after 12 hours they showed a rapid improvement in mood and behavior, which lasted for 48 hours." Does anyone know how we measure moods in mice? At first glance it seems like a very subjective exercise.

dodo53 13y ago
Checked because I remember hearing about the somewhat horrific forced swim test. Idea is mice are trapped in a container fall of water; depression is when they give up and let themselves drown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_models_of_depression#Despair-based http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_models_of_depression#Des...
- nlh 13y ago
  The Wikipedia article doesn't mention anything about drowning, just "an immobile posture". /hopes that we're not torturing mice for our own benefit.
  - lacksconfidence 13y ago
    i could be mistaken, but i'm pretty sure we do all kinds of horrific tests on mice, specifically for our own benefit.
    - shardling 13y ago
      Someone I knew once explained how their lab had a machine to give mice precisely calibrated amounts of brain damage through impact. The control group had their skull fractured without causing any direct injury to the brain. This has always struck me as the ickiest thing I've heard, but I'm sure there's much worse out there.
  - JackFr 13y ago
    Are there better reasons for torturing mice?
  - 13y ago

jdmitch 13y ago

At face value, it seems like this flies in the face of the commonly-held wisdom that regular patterns of sleep (as well as eating and other habits) help minimize depression over time. It seems like the research is actually referring to the short-term effect of sleep deprivation on brain chemistry, which makes sense in an evolutionary sense. Maintaining alertness in the face of sleep probably has a hard-wired association at quite a deep level with self-preservation, and I can see how that would explain in some way these findings.

tokenadult 13y ago

There is a long line of research on mood disorders and the ways to deal with those behaviorally and medically. http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Recurrent-Depression/dp/0195135792 http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec... It has been known for quite a while that if a person is in a prolonged depressed mood state, simply shortening that person's periods of sleep (usually by getting the person up earlier, to bright light) can do a lot to boost the person's mood state. On the other hand, for the many people who have bipolar mood disorders (so that they have abnormally elevated mood as well as abnormally depressed mood not related to immediate events in the people's lives), sleep deprivation can be dangerous, as it can trigger mania. Severe sleep deprivation can result in all the psychotic symptoms of florid mania even for most people without a medical history of mood disorders, and it is particularly dangerous for people who have already been through an episode of mania. So as other people here have already commented, regularity of sleep (sleep while it's dark, and get up while it's day) is helpful for mood disorders, up or down, and sleep deprivation by itself will not be a cure-all for all cases of depression. AFTER EDIT: I appreciate HN participant falcolas reminding all of us, in a first reply to this comment, that the submitted article is about an animal model of a proposed drug treatment that may have some of the effects of sleep deprivation without having other effects. Yes, that is what the article is about, and I acknowledged that even after reading the article, the first part of this comment's text (above) had as much to do with other comments here as it had to do with the actual article, maybe more. That said, as investigation of new drug treatments moves from animal models to human clinical trials, the thing to look for in any drug proposed to treat "depression" (depressed mood) is whether it might trigger mania (elevated mood) in the patient receiving the treatment. It's tough to develop an animal model of the psychotic symptoms of mania, which is why this is not an easy problem to solve--how to develop a drug that makes depressed patients enjoy normal mood states without breaking through to florid mania.

falcolas 13y ago
From TFA: "This finding points to a promising target for new drug development because it suggests that mimicking sleep deprivation chemically may offer the antidepressant benefits without the unwanted side effects of actually skipping sleep." So no, they aren't recommending sleep deprivation as a method to combat depression. It has, however, given them other lines of research to follow.

criswell 13y ago

I don't think there's enough stuff popping up on my screen for me to fully enjoy this article.

gdonelli 13y ago

Being depressed made me sleep less, which in turns made me feel even less powerless and my depression got even worse... at least in my personal experience

silverbax88 13y ago
I agree, I have to watch my sleep patterns because when I don't get enough sleep, it's much easier for depression to kick in.
- rgoodwintx 13y ago
  Agreed as well. Nothing makes the day WORSE than not enough sleep; and it never feels like enough. Edit: And, as is the style of the day, we've had links on HN/SA and others that not enough sleep hampers cognition, weight control, and stress (which are all triggers/symptoms for depression in many people). So, you need to sleep more, and less, simultaneously?
- knowaveragejoe 13y ago
  Similarly, I find my depression is fueled by lack of sleep and a strong sleep regimen(sleeping in bouts rather than settling down for 4-6 hours before getting up to go to the bathroom, etc).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
anonymous 13y ago
You may be confusing depression for anxiety.
- duaneb 13y ago
  Depression is a collection of symptoms—he could very well be depressed with a different underlying cause.
- DanBC 13y ago
  A rule of thumb is "can't go to sleep in evening == anxiety; wake up too early == depression". It's a very rough rule. Once disrupted sleep patterns kick in it can be hard to get them back to normal and they go all over the place. Depression comes in a few different forms, and often people learn to live with it for so long before seeking treatment that they have different lists of symptoms.

mrtksn 13y ago

This is one of the things that you know instinctively and you can relate immediately when somebody puts it out in a formal way. Myself and a friend of mine suffer from depression and we both feel much better when we are somewhat tired late in the night. Anecdotal evidence was there, so we both used to get things done just before sleep.

rzimmerman 13y ago

It's important to note that the studies show that the short term effects of sleep deprivation can reduce the symptoms of depression. The long term effects are the opposite and being chronically sleep deprived can aggravate and severely worsen someone who is suffering from depression.

MichaelGG 13y ago

Personal experience, I'd agree. If I stay up all night and then do not go to sleep, I'm more likely to enter a manic mode and continue to get little sleep for the next few days. But things usually crash not too long after.

whattabow 13y ago

The Hines article that this article is written about is open access, and worth a read, especially because the Introduction and Discussion sections look to be fairly comprehensible for people outside the field: http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v3/n1/full/tp2012136a.html http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v3/n1/full/tp2012136a.html

BIair 13y ago

I've seen studies where college students were shown a series of images. The sleep deprived students were more likely to recall the negative images. Focusing on the negative appears to be a hallmark of depression. However, a depressed person can't seem to get enough sleep. Is it a snowball effect? Maybe the balance isn't about sleep deprivation, but finding the correct amount of sleep, waking to bright light, and keeping a consistent schedule.

saraid216 13y ago
> However, a depressed person can't seem to get enough sleep. This has not been my experience. If you mean that a depressed person continues to be tired after waking up from a full night's sleep, then sure, but that's not sleep deprivation.

wonnage 13y ago

Potentially pointless anecdote: I've noticed sleep deprivation narrows my capacity for attention - to make an analogy with sight, it's like tunnel vision. As long as I have something to hold what's left of my attention span (e.g, work), I can't help but live in the moment, as I can't focus on (or even perceive, really) depressive thoughts at the same time.

cLeEOGPw 13y ago
My theory is that before going to sleep different parts of the brain shut down not in one single moment, but at different moments. Therefore before sleep some parts of the brain is already sleeping. That would explain why so often ideas that seem good before sleep look silly when you wake up. As in this case, maybe before sleep parts of the brain that produce depression shut down sooner and "temporarily cures" the depression.
- opminion 13y ago
  May I suggest that you measure that, even by your own definition on "parts of the brain" (perhaps a choice of unrelated cognitive functions?) in a way that allows you to make predictions?

cycojesus 13y ago

I want to believe it yet every shorten night sends me to lengths of hellish angry letargious time.

ttrreeww 13y ago

It causes early death too...

hasenj 13y ago

Maybe during the 4-5 hours that you spend resisting sleep. But the next day you will wake up in a bad mood from not sleeping well. At least this is what happens to me. So in general it's a bad idea. On the other hand, I've found that if I sleep for too long I also get a bad mood the next day. 8 hours of sleep seems to be the sweet spot that puts me in a decent mood.

b0rsuk 13y ago

I have noticed this myself - I'm unemployed and frequently go to job interviews. If I slept badly, I'm much more calm and easy going. I may not be the sharpest knife in the shed when it happens, but I no longer care. But I avoid sleep deprivation. It can't be good in the long run.