How poor sleep affects your mental health
Outlining how sleep and mental health are linked and giving tips on how to improve your sleeping habits.
Outlining how sleep and mental health are linked and giving tips on how to improve your sleeping habits.
Sleep and mental health often go hand in hand, and a bad night's sleep could disrupt your mental health.
With work, family and other life commitments, many of us don’t get the recommended 7 or 8 hours of sleep each night. Having another coffee to get us through the day can sometimes become the norm.
It can be easy to dismiss sleep as not being important in maintaining a mentally healthy lifestyle – but are we missing a trick? How important is a good night’s sleep to how we function mentally?
Most people who seek help getting to sleep, or staying asleep long enough to feel refreshed, reveal common myths about sleep. The trouble is, these myths end up keeping them awake at night because they lead to false hopes and unrealistic expectations such as:
Insomnia is thought to affect around one in every three people. It's not always clear what triggers it, but it's often associated with stress and anxiety, mental health conditions such as depression and schizophrenia, and sometimes physical health conditions such as heart problems and hormonal changes.
Sleep has an important restorative function in ‘recharging’ the brain at the end of each day, just like we need to charge a mobile phone battery after prolonged use. Maintaining a regular sleep-wake cycle allows the natural rhythm of the body to be reset every day and therefore optimises brain functioning and can improve mental health.
Ongoing poor sleep can be a huge risk factor for the development of major depressive disorder. The risk of feeling depressed and/or anxious (as well as worsening existing anxiety and depression) increases with the severity of insomnia, and so it's important to recognise and tackle sleep problems as soon as they're identified.
Priory Consultant Psychiatrist, Dr Niall Campbell, says: “Anxiety is the greatest enemy of sleep, even more so than depression.
People ruminating can be a real disturber of sleep. Even if you then fall asleep, you can get intermittent sleep, and often have bad dreams."
Read more about expert opinions on sleep here.
Missed sleep can lead to psychological and physical ill health in many ways.
Psychological symptoms and effects include:
Physical symptoms and effects include:
This progressive muscle relaxation meditation, written and narrated by Priory Therapist, Adele Burdon-Bailey, is designed to help you unwind - ready for deep, restorative sleep.