It's easy to see how psychological treatments which help people reduce ruminating over negative thoughts could also result in them falling asleep more easily. The complex relationship between sleep and mental health is further reinforced by the finding that if you treat depression, the problems with sleep don't all disappear. After all, just one night of sleep deprivation has a well-established negative impact on mood and thinking. He feels they are sometimes neglected, when they could be tackled.Įven when mental health problems precede disrupted sleep, the lack of sleep might exacerbate a person's difficulties. Because they are common across different diagnoses, they don't tend to be viewed as central to a particular condition. His colleague, the clinical psychologist Daniel Freeman, has called for sleep problems to be given a higher priority within mental health care. In some cases, the body clock can become so out of sync that people find themselves awake all night and asleep during the day. Disruption to circadian rhythms – the natural sleep-wake cycle – is not uncommon among people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The eminent Oxford University neuroscientist Russell Foster has found that this link doesn't only occur in depression. Researchers are now examining the relationship between sleep disorders and other mental health conditions.

A lack of sleep can lead to increased inflammation in the body, which has been implicated in mental health difficulties. On top of that there are biological factors to consider.

A deficit of sleep has well-established negative effects on us, including a tendency to withdraw from friends and family, a lack of motivation and increased irritability, all of which can affect the quality of a person's relationships, putting them at greater risk of depression. The last thing that people with insomnia need of course, is the worry about what might happen to them in the future.īut you can see why in some cases poor sleep might contribute to poor mental health. Of course, it doesn't follow that everyone with insomnia is going to develop depression later on. A meta-analysis of 34 studies, which between them followed 150,000 people over a period of between three months and 34 years, found that if people had sleep problems, their relative risk of suffering depression later in life doubled. With adults too, sleep problems can be a predictor of future depression. Those who reported sleeping badly at the age of 15, but didn't have depression or anxiety at the time, were more likely than their peers to be experiencing anxiety or depression when they reached 17, 21 or 24 years of age. In a study published in 2020, Faith Orchard, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, examined the data from a large group of teenagers followed from the age of 15 to 24. Does this mean that sleep in teenagers should be taken more seriously? And can it lower the risk of depression later? What is perhaps less intuitive is that, for some, problems with sleeping might start before the depression, raising the risk of mental health problems in the future. This is true for adults too, with 92% of people with depression complaining of sleep difficulties. After all, however tired you might feel, it's hard to drop off if you're wracked with doubts or worries. It should come as no surprise that a serious lack of sleep, or seriously disturbed sleep, is one of the most common symptoms of depression among adolescents. The evidence is mounting that sleep in adolescence is important for current and future mental health. Should you rush upstairs and pull them out of bed by their feet? It may be tempting, but the answer is probably no. It's late morning and the teenagers in the house are still fast asleep long after you've got up.

Do i have insomnia teenager