Keeping a healthy sleep schedule is an important component of your physical and mental health. It can help with mood regulation, cognitive performance, and memory consolidation. As such, getting proper sleep during mental health treatment is a core component of the treatment process and can help you start feeling the benefits of treatment as soon as possible.
Sleep as a Sign of Mental Health Conditions
Sleep is an often overlooked component of mental health, but it plays an enormous role in your mental and emotional symptoms. So much so, that poor sleep quality is often the first indicator of an underlying mental health condition, such as:
- Major depressive disorder
- Generalized anxiety disorder
- Panic disorder
- Bipolar disorder
- Post-traumatic stress disorder
In the case of depression, researchers estimate that approximately three-quarters of people with a depressive disorder have symptoms of insomnia. Approximately 40% experience hypersomnia.
When these sleep problems go unaddressed, they often contribute substantially to the experience of distress and a lowered quality of life, which can make the symptoms of depression markedly worse.
These effects are closely paralleled in the other disorders listed above, with sleep disruption being both a marker of a mental health disorder and a contributing factor to worsening symptoms.
Poor sleep can be a cause of these conditions as well as a consequence, and finding ways to regulate sleep during mental health treatment is crucial to recovery.
How Sleep Affects Mental Health
Sleep is responsible for several essential bodily and mental functions. While the full scope of sleep’s effects is still unknown, scientists have discovered a number of different benefits of a proper sleep schedule and countless negative effects from not getting enough high-quality sleep on a regular basis.
Mood Regulation
One of the most significant and important roles of sleep is to support mood regulation. People who have trouble keeping a consistent sleep schedule or are experiencing insomnia have been shown to have reduced levels of serotonin in the brain, a crucial neurotransmitter that regulates mood, sleep, and appetite.
In effect, this means that people who aren’t getting proper sleep can struggle to deal with stressors in their daily lives. A minor nuisance like sitting in traffic can seem unbearably stressful, interpersonal conflicts can be heightened or exaggerated, or you may simply struggle to brush off difficult events and carry on with your day.
For people in mental health treatment, this often serves as a roadblock to the recovery process. Finding recovery from common mental health conditions often means facing uncomfortable truths, sitting through difficult therapy sessions, or making changes to your behavior that can be difficult when you first attempt them.
If your sleep schedule is out of whack, tackling these obstacles in recovery can quickly become much more difficult than it needs to be.
Stress Management
Proper sleep is arguably the most important component of stress relief. When people experience sleep deprivation, their bodies produce a much higher level of the stress hormone cortisol. This hormone contributes to many of the consequences of stress, including high blood pressure, being more prone to anxiety, and feeling overwhelmed.
Unsurprisingly, this effect can have a substantial impact on the symptoms of people living with anxiety disorders, chronic stress, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Not getting enough sleep can quickly compound your symptoms and make it harder to find the stress relief you’re looking for.
Getting proper sleep helps keep this hormone in balance and provides a natural space to set down the stressors of the day and start feeling better. Letting stress build over time through poor sleep habits can rapidly lead to the experience of chronic stress, which can amplify mental health symptoms and be a key causal factor in developing a mental health disorder.
Cognition
One of the last critical components of sleep is its effects on cognition. The time you spend asleep is critical to long-term memory formation, particularly during the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stage. During REM sleep, your brain consolidates important information from throughout the day and stores it as long-term memories.
When sleep is shortened, people often miss this REM stage, as it typically occurs at the end of a full sleep cycle. This can lead to experiencing forgetfulness or difficulty learning and make it hard to recall important information that you’ve acquired over the last several days.
Additionally, proper sleep contributes to cognitive functions, such as attention, decision-making, and problem-solving. Frequent sleep disruption can make these cognitive tasks difficult and impede your ability to focus, making it more difficult for you to make good decisions.
The Makeup of Proper Sleep
When recognizing the importance of proper sleep for your mental health, it’s important to consider a few key parts of sleep that are essential to restoring balance in this area of your life. Two key components in particular are critical to learning to understand and regulate your sleep patterns:
Circadian Rhythms
Your circadian rhythm is your body’s natural 24-hour clock. It describes the pattern that your brain and body go through every day, with an emphasis on when you go to sleep and when you wake up.
A typical circadian rhythm can be described in four stages:
- Energy levels rise in the morning
- The afternoon slump
- Feeling sleepy before bedtime
- Energy depletion during the night hours
Your circadian rhythm has several different components. Hormones, neurotransmitters, and behaviors all tend to shift with the distinct phases of the day and can contribute to whether you feel awake and alert, tired or groggy, or have the motivation and focus for more intensive physical and mental tasks.
With proper sleep, your circadian rhythm falls into a regular and consistent schedule. It helps you to feel alert when you wake up in the morning, have a consistent energy level throughout the day, and start feeling sleepy at your usual bedtime.
But if your sleep is disrupted, your circadian rhythm falls out from a consistent pattern. This can lead to counterproductive symptoms, such as feeling groggy and tired during the day and restless at bedtime. Essentially, your body loses track of when it’s time to go to sleep and when to be alert.
A number of different factors contribute to a proper circadian rhythm. Some of the most common causes of disruption to this cycle include:
- Traveling between time zones
- Insomnia or hypersomnia
- Low exposure to natural light sources throughout the day
- Exposure to artificial light sources at night
- Medications or substance use
Any one of these factors can throw your circadian rhythm off, leading to less restorative sleep, lower sleep quantity, and difficulty falling or staying asleep.
Sleep Stages
The other important component to consider is the different sleep stages that occur each night. Sleep stages are typically broken into four distinct categories:
- N1: The first and lightest sleep stage, typically only lasting a few minutes
- N2: Considered light sleep, this takes up the majority of your sleep during the night
- N3: Deep sleep, which takes up a significant portion of sleep stages
- REM: The final stage of sleep, which occurs in cycles that get progressively longer throughout the night
In general, sleep stages occur in 90-minute cycles. After first falling asleep and progressing through N1 sleep, each 90-minute interval contains an N2 cycle, an N3 cycle, and a REM cycle.
In the first few cycles of the night, people get little REM sleep and an abundance of N3 sleep. But by the last few cycles, this pattern shifts in the other direction, and people get more REM and less N3 each cycle.
What this means is that the vast majority of REM occurs in the final hours of sleep. If you only get five or six hours of sleep each night, then it’s likely that you’re not getting enough REM to provide the mental health benefits of sleep.
Similarly, this means that sleeping over multiple intervals isn’t the same as getting one long, restful sleep. If you only sleep for four hours and then take a three-hour nap later in the day, it is not the same as getting seven hours of sleep. Doing so means you’ll never reach the later stages of sleep, where REM cycles are much longer.
This is critical, as REM sleep plays the largest role in regulating your emotions, supporting healthy thinking processes, and even contributing to your overall physical health.
How Mental Health Treatment Supports Proper Sleep
Understanding the key role that sleep plays in mental health, a comprehensive mental health treatment center typically has a number of different treatment options to help support people in getting the quality sleep they need each night.
Which treatment option fits best for your needs depends on several different factors: your specific diagnosis, how much sleep you’re getting, and whether you’re taking any medications that may interfere with sleep.
The first step is typically introducing lifestyle changes and general sleep education that have been shown to improve sleep quantity and quality. For most adults, experts recommend between seven and nine hours of sleep each and every night.
Lifestyle changes typically revolve around improving your sleep hygiene, or the practices that you do during the day that can be sleep-promoting or sleep-disrupting.
In brief, sleep hygiene focuses on:
- Keeping a Consistent Bedtime and Waketime: Such as going to bed every night at 11 p.m. and waking up at 7 a.m. every day, including weekends
- Keeping Your Bedroom Comfortable: Blocking out lights, ensuring your bedroom is quiet, and keeping the temperature cool can all improve your sleep
- Avoiding Caffeine in the Afternoon: Drinking coffee or energy drinks too late in the day can disrupt sleep
- Turning Off Screens at Night: Smartphones, television, or computers can be too stimulating at night, and turning them off 2 hours before bedtime can help
- Creating a Nightly Routine: A relaxing routine at night can help prepare your body and mind for bed and may include meditation, stretching, or skin care
People with more severe sleep disruption may benefit from targeted therapy approaches designed to help support sleep.
Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), for instance, is a specific style of talk therapy designed explicitly to support people in getting better and more restorative rest. CBT-I is highly effective, even for people with significant mental health challenges.
Finally, simply getting evidence-based treatment for your mental health condition can vastly improve your sleep, which can improve your mental health symptoms in turn.
Start Getting Help at APN
When you’re ready to start treating mental health challenges, reach out to the team at APN by calling 424.644.6486 or by using the confidential contact form on our website. Our representatives can help explain our multitude of different mental health treatment services and can help you start the path to recovery to last a lifetime.
References
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences. “Circadian Rhythms.” Www.nigms.nih.gov, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Sept. 2023, www.nigms.nih.gov/education/fact-sheets/Pages/circadian-rhythms.aspx.
- Nutt, David et al. “Sleep disorders as core symptoms of depression.” Dialogues in clinical neuroscience vol. 10,3 (2008): 329-36. doi:10.31887/DCNS.2008.10.3/dnutt