It’s possible that some people with symptoms of depression are actually sleep deprived
I’m skeptical of this. Yes, five hours of sleep is bad for your mental health, but usually in a different direction. Did you have depressive symptoms that year? A key symptom of depression is lack of willpower—depressives don’t normally have the willpower not to sleep. Quite the opposite, they sleep more the than normal. This would solve simple sleep deprivation. It’s possible that they lack something more specific that normal people are able to get by sleeping, but even that does not sound terribly likely to me.
ETA: As various people comment, this is largely backwards. I particularly regret suggesting that people who spend a lot of time in bed get useful sleep. So maybe sleep deprivation contributes to some of the symptoms of depression. But there are other symptoms and I am skeptical that the two are confused.
A key symptom of depression is lack of willpower—depressives don’t normally have the willpower not to sleep.
For me personally, and I suspect also for a significant number of other people, it takes willpower to go to sleep as well as to wake up early enough. In the morning, the path of least resistance for me is to sleep in, but in the evening, it is to do something fun until I’m overcome with overwhelming sleepiness, which won’t happen until it’s far too late to maintain a normal sleeping schedule. Therefore, if I were completely deprived of willpower, my “days” would quickly degenerate into cycles of much more than 24 hours, falling asleep as well as waking up at a much later hour each time.
Now, the incentive to wake up early enough (so as not to miss work etc.) is usually much stronger than the incentive to go to bed early enough, which is maintained only by the much milder and more distant threat of feeling sleepy and lousy next day. So a moderate crisis of willpower will have the effect of making me chronically sleep-deprived, since I’ll still muster the willpower to get up for work, but not the willpower to go to bed instead of wasting time until the wee hours.
(This is exacerbated by the fact that when I’m sleep-deprived, I tend to feel lousy and wanting to doze off through the day, but then in the evening I suddenly start feeling perfectly OK and not wanting to sleep at all.)
(This is exacerbated by the fact that when I’m sleep-deprived, I tend to feel lousy and wanting to doze off through the day, but then in the evening I suddenly start feeling perfectly OK and not wanting to sleep at all.)
I suffer from this as well. It is my totally unsubstantiated theory that this is a stress response. Throughout the whole day your body is tired and telling you to go to sleep, but the Conscious High Command keeps pressing the KEEP-GOING-NO-MATTER-WHAT button until your body decides it must be in a war zone and kicks in with cortisol or adrenaline or whatever.
Depressed people can have either insomnia or hypersomnia; insomnia is significantly more common. Depression-related insomnia is usually “terminal”—people wake up very early and can’t get back to sleep.
Strangely enough, there have been some studies showing that depriving depressed people of sleep has a strong positive effect on their mood, but of course then they’re too sleep-deprived to enjoy it.
Quite the opposite, they sleep more the than normal.
Actually, according to my nursing textbooks, depression can manifest either by sleeping more or less than usual. So five hours of sleep a night could, for some people, be a symptom of depression. And I do remember reading somewhere about first-year college or university students developing clinical depression after a few months of unaccustomed stress and lack of sleep. And for most university students, it probably takes willpower to go to bed early, since nearly everyone I know who is my age seems to be on a longer-than-24-hour natural sleep schedule. So lack of sleep could cause depression, although once you were depressed, you might find yourself wanting to sleep more (and having an even harder time keeping up with classes).
Personal anecdote: long periods of sleep deprivation can mess up your neurotransmitter levels enough to cause an episode of psychosis. This actually happened to one of my good friends. (When you’re waking up at 4:30 am every day for swim practice, and staying up late for whatever reason including just wanting to have a life, sleep deprivation can very quickly get out of hand.) You probably have to be genetically predisposed, but still...it scares me.
And for most university students, it probably takes willpower to go to bed early, since nearly everyone I know who is my age seems to be on a longer-than-24-hour natural sleep schedule.
It seems likely that this is a combination of youthful endurance plus a lack of night cues (computer screens make fake-sunlight at any time of the night), rather than young people actually having a circadian rhythm that’s longer by hours.
That it is not a mere preference but a biological reality is one of the reasons I regard melatonin as so useful—fight fire with fire.
EDIT: Of course, it’s also true that artificial light and computer screens are not helpful in the least: see the second paragraph in http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin#health-performance So you might say for young people, it’s a many-edged problem: they naturally want to go to bed late, their electronic devices exacerbate the original biological problem, and then all the social dynamics can begin to contribute their share of the problem...
I think Vaniver is objecting to the narrow claim of a cycle longer than 24 hours. Without clicking through on your sources, they seem to say that teens have a shifted cycle, not a longer cycle.
In particular, that shifting school later improves sleep suggests that teens have a shifted cycle. If they had an unmoored cycle of longer than 24 hours, the greater light exposure of an earlier start would probably be better.
Douglas_Knight is correct; I’m not challenging “young people want to go to bed late and get up late” but “young people want to sleep six times a week rather than seven” (or, more reasonably, 13 times every two weeks).
I do remember reading in a variety of places that young people, especially teenagers, tend to have more trouble sticking to an earlier sleep schedule. But you’re right that this isn’t necessarily biological in origin. It could just be that young people have a) greater benefits to gain from staying up late, since that’s when a lot of socializing takes place, and b) less practice using willpower to force themselves to go to bed, and maybe less incentive, since with their “youthful endurance” they can push through on 2-3 hour of sleep.
And being able to do this, or for example get really drunk and still make it to work early the next morning, is definitely a status thing that people are almost competitive about. Maybe some kind of signalling at work, too: “I’m so healthy and strong, I can afford to get really, really drunk and hardly get any sleep and still function...I must have awesome genes.” That could explain how being a compete idiot and passing out on my friend’s floor in front of my supervisor when I had an exam the next day somehow made me cooler to all the staff.
I don’t think it’s everybody—certainly there are cases of severe depression where the person sleeps 20 hours a day.
Maybe it’s more that sleep deprivation can masquerade as depression. That is, if you’re tired, slow, unmotivated, hopeless, lethargic, plunged in gloom, and you’re sleeping four or five hours a night, your problems might be related to your sleep patterns.
Sure, fatigue can cause unhappiness, but I don’t think it looks like clinical depression. You seem to be holding yourself up as an example. Did anyone think you clinically depressed when sleep deprived?
I’m skeptical of this. Yes, five hours of sleep is bad for your mental health, but usually in a different direction. Did you have depressive symptoms that year? A key symptom of depression is lack of willpower—depressives don’t normally have the willpower not to sleep. Quite the opposite, they sleep more the than normal. This would solve simple sleep deprivation. It’s possible that they lack something more specific that normal people are able to get by sleeping, but even that does not sound terribly likely to me.
ETA: As various people comment, this is largely backwards. I particularly regret suggesting that people who spend a lot of time in bed get useful sleep. So maybe sleep deprivation contributes to some of the symptoms of depression. But there are other symptoms and I am skeptical that the two are confused.
For me personally, and I suspect also for a significant number of other people, it takes willpower to go to sleep as well as to wake up early enough. In the morning, the path of least resistance for me is to sleep in, but in the evening, it is to do something fun until I’m overcome with overwhelming sleepiness, which won’t happen until it’s far too late to maintain a normal sleeping schedule. Therefore, if I were completely deprived of willpower, my “days” would quickly degenerate into cycles of much more than 24 hours, falling asleep as well as waking up at a much later hour each time.
Now, the incentive to wake up early enough (so as not to miss work etc.) is usually much stronger than the incentive to go to bed early enough, which is maintained only by the much milder and more distant threat of feeling sleepy and lousy next day. So a moderate crisis of willpower will have the effect of making me chronically sleep-deprived, since I’ll still muster the willpower to get up for work, but not the willpower to go to bed instead of wasting time until the wee hours.
(This is exacerbated by the fact that when I’m sleep-deprived, I tend to feel lousy and wanting to doze off through the day, but then in the evening I suddenly start feeling perfectly OK and not wanting to sleep at all.)
I suffer from this as well. It is my totally unsubstantiated theory that this is a stress response. Throughout the whole day your body is tired and telling you to go to sleep, but the Conscious High Command keeps pressing the KEEP-GOING-NO-MATTER-WHAT button until your body decides it must be in a war zone and kicks in with cortisol or adrenaline or whatever.
This has been my experience as well.
Me too!
Depressed people can have either insomnia or hypersomnia; insomnia is significantly more common. Depression-related insomnia is usually “terminal”—people wake up very early and can’t get back to sleep.
Strangely enough, there have been some studies showing that depriving depressed people of sleep has a strong positive effect on their mood, but of course then they’re too sleep-deprived to enjoy it.
Actually, according to my nursing textbooks, depression can manifest either by sleeping more or less than usual. So five hours of sleep a night could, for some people, be a symptom of depression. And I do remember reading somewhere about first-year college or university students developing clinical depression after a few months of unaccustomed stress and lack of sleep. And for most university students, it probably takes willpower to go to bed early, since nearly everyone I know who is my age seems to be on a longer-than-24-hour natural sleep schedule. So lack of sleep could cause depression, although once you were depressed, you might find yourself wanting to sleep more (and having an even harder time keeping up with classes).
Personal anecdote: long periods of sleep deprivation can mess up your neurotransmitter levels enough to cause an episode of psychosis. This actually happened to one of my good friends. (When you’re waking up at 4:30 am every day for swim practice, and staying up late for whatever reason including just wanting to have a life, sleep deprivation can very quickly get out of hand.) You probably have to be genetically predisposed, but still...it scares me.
It seems likely that this is a combination of youthful endurance plus a lack of night cues (computer screens make fake-sunlight at any time of the night), rather than young people actually having a circadian rhythm that’s longer by hours.
I disagree. The circadian rhythms in middle school and up is very well established; please see all the links & citations in http://www.gwern.net/education-is-not-about-learning#school-hours
That it is not a mere preference but a biological reality is one of the reasons I regard melatonin as so useful—fight fire with fire.
EDIT: Of course, it’s also true that artificial light and computer screens are not helpful in the least: see the second paragraph in http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin#health-performance So you might say for young people, it’s a many-edged problem: they naturally want to go to bed late, their electronic devices exacerbate the original biological problem, and then all the social dynamics can begin to contribute their share of the problem...
I think Vaniver is objecting to the narrow claim of a cycle longer than 24 hours. Without clicking through on your sources, they seem to say that teens have a shifted cycle, not a longer cycle.
In particular, that shifting school later improves sleep suggests that teens have a shifted cycle. If they had an unmoored cycle of longer than 24 hours, the greater light exposure of an earlier start would probably be better.
Douglas_Knight is correct; I’m not challenging “young people want to go to bed late and get up late” but “young people want to sleep six times a week rather than seven” (or, more reasonably, 13 times every two weeks).
I do remember reading in a variety of places that young people, especially teenagers, tend to have more trouble sticking to an earlier sleep schedule. But you’re right that this isn’t necessarily biological in origin. It could just be that young people have a) greater benefits to gain from staying up late, since that’s when a lot of socializing takes place, and b) less practice using willpower to force themselves to go to bed, and maybe less incentive, since with their “youthful endurance” they can push through on 2-3 hour of sleep.
And being able to do this, or for example get really drunk and still make it to work early the next morning, is definitely a status thing that people are almost competitive about. Maybe some kind of signalling at work, too: “I’m so healthy and strong, I can afford to get really, really drunk and hardly get any sleep and still function...I must have awesome genes.” That could explain how being a compete idiot and passing out on my friend’s floor in front of my supervisor when I had an exam the next day somehow made me cooler to all the staff.
I don’t think it’s everybody—certainly there are cases of severe depression where the person sleeps 20 hours a day.
Maybe it’s more that sleep deprivation can masquerade as depression. That is, if you’re tired, slow, unmotivated, hopeless, lethargic, plunged in gloom, and you’re sleeping four or five hours a night, your problems might be related to your sleep patterns.
Sure, fatigue can cause unhappiness, but I don’t think it looks like clinical depression. You seem to be holding yourself up as an example. Did anyone think you clinically depressed when sleep deprived?