Fourteen years ago I woke up one morning and felt really really good: cheerful, eager, and yet somehow serene. I was stunned: There was no obvious cause. I hadn’t slept particularly well. Nothing wonderful had happened the day before. But there was one thing . . . the previous day I’d watched a tape of Jay Leno right after waking up. I’d thought it might improve my sleep. Now — a day later — my mood was better. Could there be a connection? Two very rare events: A (TV early in the morning) and B (very good mood upon awakening). Did A cause B? Such causality would be far different than anything we’re familiar with. Yet it made some sense: From teaching introductory psychology, I knew that depression and insomnia are related. If you have one you are more likely to have the other. I had done something to improve my sleep; had it improved my mood? The already-known depression-insomnia linkage made the new idea, the cause-effect relation, far more plausible. Subsequent experiments led me to a whole new theory of mood and depression.
CureTogether has found another example of the familiar depression-insomnia correlation. Persons with depression are twice as likely to have insomnia as persons without depression. CureTogether gathered this data much more cheaply than previous studies. Unlike previous researchers, they were under no pressure to publish. (Professional researchers must publish regularly to keep their grants and their job.) Unlike previous researchers, they were under no pressure to follow a party line.
On the face of it depression makes you less active. Yet insomnia is a case of being too active. So the depression-insomnia link is far from obvious. Lots of other facts connect depression and circadian rhythms; they all suggest that the intellectual basis of anti-depressants, all that stuff about serotonin and neuro-transmitters and re-uptake, is wrong. If depression is due to messed-up circadian rhythms, taking a drug at random times of day is unlikely to fix the underlying problem.
There are other hypothesis about depression, The bright side of being blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems.
If such is the case there is no contradiction between insomnia and low activity, on the contrary it matches quite well.
Seth, do you still watch faces every morning?
I used to be a filer for a primary care physician (it turned out to be a really interesting job).
I was shocked by how many patients he prescribed anti-depressants (such patients were typically in bad health and returned to the doctor often for all sorts of reasons).
Would a sleep prescription improved their depression and health? It seems like it would be much less invasive than anti-depressants.
intellectual yokel, yes, I still watch faces most mornings.
Fascinating, Seth! Is insomnia always a case of being more active? I hadn’t heard the depression-circadian cycle connection before either, definitely food for thought in my own family – do you know of any good resources/studies that talk about this?
“Is insomnia always a case of being more active?” Well, mentally active, yes. Waking up is a step toward being more physically active, too.
Curiously I cannot find any recent surveys of the depression/circadian rhythm link. There is a 1983 book called “Circadian Rhythms in Psychiatry”. Yet the depression/insomnia link isn’t just very clear in research studies, it’s also clear that many persons with depression feel better later in the day. The depression begins to lift. My 2004 self-experimentation paper
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2xc2h866
gives many references about the various ways circadian rhythms and depression are linked.
@ thehova
re: “Would a sleep prescription improved their depression and health?”
To the extent one believes Wikipedia:
“…the duration of [Slow-Wave Sleep] periods can be increased by ingestion of alcohol, THC, SSRIs, and other drugs….This increase of [Slow-Wave Sleep] can lead to increased REM latency and a decrease in REM period durations…An increase in REM is believed to produce symptoms of depression and bipolar disorder in many patients…Certain substances, such as benzodiazepines (e.g. Ativan, Valium, Klonopin) seem to have the reverse effect on the time spent in [Slow-Wave Sleep]….While these sedatives can increase sleep duration or shorten the time it takes before sleep-onset occurs, they tend to deprive patients of deep sleep.”
in other words, sedatives can increase REM, which can increase depression.
I don’t think this is a revelation — insomnia is well-linked to depression, and is even considered a diagnostic indicator in the DSM-IV, the medical standard.
@theHova, would sleep prescriptions be more productive — “sleep meds” (such as benzodiazapenes and other relaxants) are commonly prescribed for mood disorders including depression and anxiety. In my opinion they are generally ill-advised as people acquire tolerance to them, leaving them worse off when they have to taper off of the medications. Sleep is better regulated through behaviour modification including regular sleep and wake times, and cutting back on or eliminating alchohol and caffeine. Seth’s suggestions about sunlight and other interventions are also worthwhile.
Hi have noticed a very strong connection between my mood and these factors, in order of importance:
1) Time at which I fall asleep – if this is later than midnight, there is a very good chance that I will be in a very bad mood the next day.
2) How long I sleep for – 8 hours is required, or I will be at least ‘somewhat grouchy’
3) How much ‘stimulation’ I have had – this encompasses pretty much anything more demanding than sitting in a darkened room and thinking airy thoughts. To have a chance of being in a very good mood the following day, it is *vital* that I manage to relax fully through an hour or so of _awake rest away from anything even mildly demanding_. I have only recently been taking the third step, in the process discovering precisely why I have been in an unaccountably bad mood for the last 15 years or so.
Wrt to the third point, it has recently occurred to me that what is generally taken to be restorative or relaxing: watching the tv, reading, listening to music are actually quite the opposite – however ‘mild’ each dose may be, they are still enervating. Relatedly, I have found that tv in the evening has a noticeable effect on my inclination to be sociable during the following day (my job is the most social of all).
The mental exertion involved in seemingly innocuous, routine activities was confirmed by some experiments I carried out on myself on ‘concentrated concentration’ ie. attempting to ‘think hard’ for very long periods (all waking moments in days on end). After three or four days, my brain would rebel and react to any attempts at further thinking with nausea, headaches – the offending acts of cerebration would include many activities that I had hitherto considered eminently undemanding – watching bad tv, reading magazines, chatting (!) with nausea, headaches etc.
Ceva, your point #3 is very interesting. You’re saying that if you watch TV in the evening you are LESS inclined to be social the next day? That awake rest you need to be in a very good mood the next day — when during the day must it occur?
your experiments on concentrated concentration sound really good.
Yes, absolutely. I noticed this because I had a limited set-up at home for a while, alternating between weeks of spending evenings doing little or nothing (reading or sleeping) or doing little or nothing whilst watching tv (when my housemate would be around – he hated not having it on). I was working as an elementary school teacher, a reasonably intense job that involves a huge range and great number of social interactions, so changes in social inclination on my part tended to be clear to me.
One theory I had was that tv might ‘use up’ the psychological space that one has for social interactions – for my housemate, he may have felt compelled to watch it to supplement the small number of social encounters that his job involved (he would typically watch Friends). The more straightforward theory I had was that tv was actually enervating rather than relaxing.
The concentrated concentration experiments involved two days (8am to 11pm) of non-stop German grammar drills, followed by a day of writing maths puzzles. The work was highly intensive (I was aiming to be ‘processing’ info as deeply as possible at all times), far more intensive than any of the academic work that I have been led to do in the past.
The consequent feelings of nausea were very closely related to having to process mentally even the most rudimentary input. I also suffered from a mild but insistent, and oddly located, headache and had difficulty walking (I would list to one side).
I repeated the experiment recently, seeing how much I could stuff into my head using spaced repetition software. After reviewing 2000 words in the first session, I again got oddly located headaches (front-top of head?), nausea and slight dizziness. That lasted for two hours or so.
As if that wasn’t enough for me to learn my lesson, I recently decided to append heavy language work (aural comprehension) to intensive daytime work learning new maths, after which I had about 5 days of odd headaches (which would be provoked by mental work and whose intensity would be proportional to the difficulty of the work (this was a good way of ascertaining the difficulty of tasks!)) and general malaise.
It was after this that I decided to start tweaking the levels of stimulation more closely, to maximise working time without permanently disabling myself.
Regarding awake rest, I haven’t started playing with timings during the day, but it would appear that, for me, full mental ‘cooling’, before decent sleeping rest is vital to be in a good mood the day after.
In a different experiment, I seemed to find that high-speed, repetitive, high-concentration analytical work (for example, Sudokuing or anagramming) had noticeable effects on my social skills/awareness of the social world around me/self-relation, lasting for around three hours, after a twenty minute ‘dose’. It would feel like induced aspergers (as if I were operating myself at one remove, as one would a puppet – very bad for teaching well). I repeated this experiment many, many times (over a space of three years) and had the same outcome on every occasion. I haven’t been able to find someone with similar experiences.