Sleep and the connectivity to depression
The last couple of nights, I’ve been sleeping rather badly. Some nights, I’ve had trouble sleeping, others I’ve woke up in a rather startled state and I’ve been having really weird dreams. This, of course, leads to trouble when it’s time to get up, which means that I’m quite prone to oversleeping. Oversleeping means that I don’t have enough time to eat breakfast, which leads to a rather unhealthy (or large) lunch. Bad food habits have a tendency to cause a bad physique, which will lower the self esteem and low self esteem is a quite good primer for depression. You see the pattern here? I’m not saying it’s the same for everyone, but this is how it works for me.
The link between sleep problems and depression is quite obvious, but it’s not as obvious which leads to which. It might be the case that sleep problems is a trigger for depression, or vice versa. In my case, it was probably lack of quality sleep that caused my mild depression to blow up to a severe depression instead. Working 16-hour shifts, two hours of PT and then lying awake staring into the ceiling for two hours and then finally four hours of uneasy sleep during a period of a couple of months will have an impact on the rest of your brain.
My sleep problems during the first part of my severe depression were quite bad. I had trouble falling asleep, and my dreams were restless and I often woke up with a yank, finding myself sitting upright in my bed. And to make life even easier, every time I woke up like that - I had just as much trouble falling asleep again. So for a year or so, my nights were really long.
The problem is that you need sleep in order to have any energy to cope with your depression, but the depression often makes you sleep less, and the battle is easily lost. (Of course, there are people who have it the other way around: they sleep way more than normal instead of less). I remember when I first went on medication (SSRI), the first two weeks were bizarre. One of the side-effects of SSRI:s is a deeper depression during the first couple of weeks, (which is quite logical since you are toying with your brain-chemistry). My body responded to this by putting me into sleep mode, which was quite comfortable actually. It just so happened that I was free from work for my second week of medication, and I spent that week sleeping 16 hrs/day. You might think I was well rested after this period, but that much sleep isn’t healthy either, but it was nice to get some vacation from feeling depressed all the time, and my change of sleeping pattern reduced this to a whopping 8hrs/day instead of 20.
And this wasn’t at all what I was planning on writing, but I got distracted by a text when I was writing the outline. And my focus isn’t the best right now. I haven’t forgotten the WHO report on suicide prevention, I’ve downloaded it and started reading but haven’t written anything yet though. If you can’t wait for my summary/analysis/thoughts, you can find it here: http://www.who.int/mental_health/suicide-prevention/world_report_2014/en/