Sleeping and depression
The health expert said that all human beings occasionally have difficulties to reconcile or maintain sleep, or the feeling that it didn’t remove the fatigue when awake. If this condition lasts for several days, at least a month, associated with daytime fatigue or impairment of daily activities, and then we can call it insomnia.
Too much sleep and depression
Depression is related to sleep in people sleeping a lot or a little. The majority of depressed people is at risk of insomnia and sleep very little, but approximately 15% sleep too much. This is probably due to lethargy and lack of motivation to enjoy life.
Sleep and mood
It is very important to determine if one or other factor (sleep or mood) intend to cause depression.
For example, sleep apnea, is a sleep disorder characterized by pauses in breathing or instances of shallow breathing during sleep. – respiratory-related heavy snoring – patient wakes up several times at night. Because of these so frequent awakenings, caused by breathing difficulties, the individual fails to get a good night rest. Constant fatigue lowers levels of vital energy and sometimes leads to develop depression.
When the apnea is treated with a device called CPAP (allowing better breathing to the patient), the life energies are increasing; but there remains the low mood. In this case, the cause of this alteration of mood is apnea that leads the patient to make a depression that needs to be treated.
Another very common sleep disturbance is insomnia, which is, having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, without interruption, all night.
When a sleepless complains about waking up without being able to return back to sleep, the root cause of the disorder can be a depression. For yet unknown reasons, depression has as one of its major symptoms an alertness in early morning and the inability of the patient to go back to sleep.
Treatment, in this case, should focus on the alteration of mood. When antidepressant therapy is successful, sleep problems disappear.
Some problems related to sleep
1-More hours of sleep during the winter months
Seasonal affective disorder occurs in a lot of people during the winter months. It is characterized by depression, loss energy and enthusiasm, decrease in sexual interest and the increase of sleep. It is more pronounced at extreme latitudes. Light and temperature are important factors in the control of our internal body clocks. The days of winter are shorter, by what we prepare to our body to “hibernate”. From a physical point of view, there is no need to increase the hours of sleep during the winter. Sleep more during the winter months in fact, aggravates the symptoms of the seasonal affective disorder. However, the seasonal affection is curable. You can overcome the symptoms of the seasonal affection with physical exercise.
2-Less energy
Studies have shown that abundant sleep is associated with a decrease in energy. Have you ever noticed that when sleeping for long hours, for example 9 or 10 hours you feel more tired than if you would have slept for 7 hours ? This is because truly restful sleep comes from the quality of sleep and not quantity. Your body tries to compensate for the poor quality of the sleep through the extension of the duration of sleep. The good quality of sleep comes from good sleep habits and lifestyle habits. The excellent quality of sleep will make you feel refreshed and with powers after sleeping 6 or 7 hours.
3-Lack of exercise
Daily exercise increases your body temperature, allowing you a greater drop in body temperature during the night, which improves the quality of sleep. Sedentary activity may cause a slight increase in the duration of sleep.
4-Poor diet
Food habits and habits of sleep go hand in hand. A poor diet is usually filled with fat and artificial foods that reduce your energy and make you feel more tired. Malnutrition means bad energy. Poor power means more hours of sleep. In addition, artificial processed foods (known as junk food) are more difficult to digest. Don’t eat preprocessed foods before going to bed. Why not? Because then more blood and metabolic energy will be assigned to the digestive system that will have an excess of work, rather than more blood to the brain during sleep.
Your brain might use this excess blood and metabolic energy to improve the quality of sleep.
If you are completely healthy and after 10 hours sleep at night are good during the day, you should not be worried. The direction of causality in each of these cases is not known.
The majority of scientists agree that there is nothing harmful about sleeping itself.
Those who sleep more than nine hours each night and still feel tired during the day, there is something that does not work well and is causing heavy sleep. It is not the sleep itself which is harmful, but what causes fatigue.
Sleeping too many hours is usually a symptom of certain lifestyle choices. It is important to optimize our life habits, which will lead to an increase in the quality of sleep, more energy and in some cases a reduced need for sleep.
If you don’t like sleeping too much, there are effective ways to be active with fewer hours of sleep.
However, the best is to start with a healthy attitude towards sleep. Start by learning to appreciate and enjoy a good night’s sleep for 8 hours (chronic insomniacs would love to have much sleep from time to time). You do not force the situation, excessive sleep may indicate that your body needs rest to heal itself or recover, try to reduce sleep can make the underlying problems worse.
But if you are concerned about how much sleep (either too much or too little) and want this change, consult your doctor.
Is depression curable by sleeping a lot?
There are many questions like this: does sleeping a lot cure depression? They have to be consulted by people who are not aware about the causes of sleep much and this is one of them.
It is common knowledge for those who have read several articles published here, that depression is an emotional state of sadness, not a disease that needs to be cured with pills, or spend time in a mental or neurological Institute, because the person got distracted in a negative image.
The image generated by this state has so much force, that every time you display it mentally, you improve it with effect and shine. For this reason when you go to sleep do it with joy, because you know that it won’t be your distraction when you become awake or under the influence of pills. For this reason there are people that prefer to spend time to sleep during the day.
It is very easy to be distracted, human beings have the capacity to generate that with lots of imagination, that’s why the depressed has fallen and got distracted in some mental image that causes him such emotion and melancholy. As well as you have the power of watching something negative you can change it to positive.
This is called auto programming, but mentally, it happens when the person is in a normal or stable state. We know that for many who have depression it’s not simple, read and put into practice. Because their mind is too disturbed, but must find the right time.
How this can be solved?
Until you decide to stop learning, because you have mastered your emotions you must read, use your mind, locates words and do not be fooled. Let’s look at the words.
Depression: Means that it comes “from” something and pressure: force the person to get out of that state. That is why; if they had given another name, it wouldn’t have this.
The depressant that sleep much, can have a neutral emotional state, this is where when must auto program, this can be when he is awake at some point in the day, the person is not always depressed and he knows it, because there are days that it is OK and other day it is not.
When he is well, we must take advantage to do so. In a subtle way, since there are occasions in which the unconscious is going to defend and will not allow you to make mental changes. For this reason, you must be clever and go slowly.
An example: If you´re mentally visualizing images that bring you sorrow and are very bright, you must observe what bothers you from them. To change them to your liking, this may be by lowering the brightness, if people dress them derisively or if you’re who seems saddened, dress them of something funny. Thus, they will cause you laughter.
It is easy to explain this, but for many who are at a high level of sadness, is difficult and they cannot. For this reason it is that a professional change should be entered to do the right job, because many times after the image that seems the most disturbing, hide others back from this and those are actually the cause of your emotional state.
As it is the case of that girl who thinks like that: “can depression be treated by sleeping more than usual or as usual? Because I have seen several psychiatrist and I was prescribed quasi everything but I’m still depressed and living a life full of sorrow. Can someone give me a hand?
For this reason, it is preferable to go to someone who will take care of the root cause, so that in your mind, anything that is not important in your life does not remain. And don’t be fooled and spend time to go where people give you results, that step is dangerous, because first you start with depression, then by taking prescription drugs you become increasingly aggressive.
If the person does not support the supply of drugs, they end up with their neurons, for that reason it is not recommended to go to these establishments. They come with sadness and leave more disturbed than before. Because of that, there are patients waiting to take revenge upon leaving these neurosciences.
Tired of so many drugs and without finding solution they decided to end their life or the other one thinking that those peoples are the culprits, those elected tend to be people who had an influence on your problem.
Thus, there are cases in many places where, persons who come out of mental institutions and go out killing people they think, in their opinion treated bad. For this reason, we should pay attention before taking these medications, because you don’t know what it can cause.
Think about if it is right to end your life just because of sleeping and taking drugs, that will bring you consequences.
Avoid depression, sleeping with the TV off
Sleeping with the television on can increase the risk of depression, reveals a study in the United States, which ensures that the optimum level of light that the brain of mammals need to rest is surprisingly low.
In this study, conducted by researchers at the Ohio State University, it´s worked with 16 hamsters, of which half slept in complete darkness while others were exposed each night to a light level equivalent to that produced by the glow of a TV on in a dark room.
Eight weeks later, the animals that never slept in the dark had been altered mood and developed a degree of depression. When scientists examined their brains, it was found that they had a lower density of dendritic spines in the hippocampus area in neurons than those who slept without light. This means that communication between their nerve cells would have been reduced.
The promoters of this study indicate that the optimum light level that needs the brain of mammals to rest is surprisingly low. Also they associated with the effects of the light exposure to a hormone called melatonin, which is produced when the body detects the darkness.
Melatonin among other things, regulates the circadian circle, and helps to fall asleep. If there is too much ambient light, the body could produce inadequate amounts of this hormone.
Good habits
Beyond relationship between sleep and depression, and their therapeutic approaches, the quality of sleep always can be optimized according to the rules of sleep hygiene.
Here are tips on habits and behaviors that help to achieve optimal sleep overnight.
- Keep a regular schedule for rising and bedtime throughout the week.
- Only use your bedroom as a place of rest, relaxation and just sleeping. Don’t bring work to do in bed. Remain with the mind very active and lying for a long time prevents sleep.
- Go to bed only when you feel very sleepy.
- Establish rituals of relaxation before going to sleep, like a good bath hot tub and a light meal or a few minutes of reading.
- Exercise regularly.
- Avoid intake of caffeine in the afternoon (tea, coffee, cola beverages, cocoa, and chocolate). Also alcohol and cigarette, as both interfere with the achievement of a good sleep.
Recommendations
Below we mention some of the most basic recommendations and practices to treat chronic insomnia anxiety:
– Ensure that the bedroom is quiet, dark and cool. Noise, light and heat can interfere with sleep.
– Establish a regular sleep schedule. Our body really works like clockwork and is very healthy to support it while respecting the time sleeping and getting up every day, to create a rhythm.
– Avoid NAPs. Taking a NAP during the day can make it harder to fall asleep at night.
– Delete the pressure. It is preferable to address each night with low expectations, receiving nightly that passes as a new opportunity to sleep, so they are only a few hours of sleep. In this way we removed the pressure that we are forced to sleep.
– Avoid a high stimulant activity before bedtime. This includes watching television, playing video games or using the computer before bed.
– Control your light. The brain produces a hormone called melatonin, which helps regulate the cycles of sleep and wakefulness (and the biological clock in general). The production of this hormone is controlled by exposure to light. If you do not receive enough natural light in the day or receive plenty of artificial light at night, this will have a direct effect on your ability to sleep.
If you feel that despite implementing those tips self-help and to order and change your sleeping habits, even you cannot overcome your insomnia, it is best that you consider consulting with a health professional. A sleep specialist can observe your sleep patterns, rapid eye movement, brain waves, heart rate and more, through control devices connected to your body. Then analyze the results of your sleep study and, where necessary, will design a treatment program. The important thing is to know that you can count on help and that insomnia can be and should be treated.
Remember, all those sleeping tips can help you with your depression or your emotional disorder.