How sleep can help cure your depression
The thing that none of us get enough of is the key to our happiness
I’ve never been much good at sleeping. Since I can remember, I’ve gone through spells of lying in my bed in the dead of night, my mind racing, even after a busy day and an early wakeup, when I should by all accounts be absolutely knackered. And actually, I often am knackered, and I still can’t sleep. During my first year of university it got so bad that for one of my exams I didn’t sleep at all the night before, and I wasn’t even revising — just lying there, not being able to sleep. (I wouldn’t recommend it.)
Sleeping badly can be caused by many factors. Health problems can be one: acid reflux, restless leg syndrome, heart disease, thyroid problems and myriad other illnesses often lead to you not being able to get your forty winks. And it isn’t just illness: our modern society also doesn’t lend itself to healthy sleeping habits. While scientists have recently said the blue light on your phone might not be keeping you up at night, heavy phone use in general has been linked to trouble nodding off. There are the myths that you can survive on just five hours’ sleep, touted by political personalities like Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, as well as the fools who watch television and drink alcohol before bed to try and help them hit the hay. All of this is compounded by Western society’s fast pace of life, emphasis on productivity and achievement, love for staying too late in the office working, and disdain for those who wake up late, despite many people being affected by the disruption of their circadian rhythms. It’s a recipe for chaos if ever there was one.
And all of this insomnia is really bloody bad for you. Almost all health problems are intensified by sleeping poorly, it having been linked to worsening heart conditions, poorer memory, higher blood pressure, lower energy levels, and obesity. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, sleeping enough leads to, well, a much healthier life. It eases your appetite, meaning you’re less likely to become overweight; it decreases your blood pressure and lowers your blood sugar levels; it makes your brain sharper and your moods better. The positive benefits of sleeping enough each night vastly outweigh the extra hour in front of the television or at your work desk.
But there’s another reason why people don’t sleep well, which also happens to be why I sometimes can’t nod off: mental health. My insomnia was and is related mostly to my mental health: when I’m feeling good, I generally sleep well; when I’m feeling stressed or anxious, I can’t sleep to save my life. And perhaps it’s beating you, the reader, over the head with my thank-you-Captain-Obvious stick to say that sleep can help mitigate mental health problems. But actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. Sleeping well, and enough, can literally help cure your depression.
Psychologist, neuroscientist and author Prof Steve Ilardi has written extensively about this as part of his Therapeutic Lifestyle Change (TLC) programme, which he ambitiously labels ‘the depression cure’ (also the title of his accompanying book). The website for his programme states ‘one of the biggest risk factors for depression is sleep deprivation’, and his book goes into minute detail about how important sleep is, offering some textbook advice — go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day, don’t drink caffeine or exercise before bed, read instead of watching telly, etc. — on how we can improve our sleeping routines. He really can’t stress enough the importance of sleep for our mental well being, and this is something we can test ourselves: how much worse are your moods, whether mental health related or not, when you haven’t had enough beauty sleep?
Ilardi’s research was relatively simple: he found the groups of humans who were the least likely to suffer from depression, and observed what it is they do. The example of the Kaluli people, his main case study, is particularly compelling. One thing that over a decade of research on the Kaluli showed is that, from the 2,000 members interviewed in the particular study Ilardi mentions, just one ‘marginal’ case of clinical depression was found — a rate roughly 100 times less than we in the West have, and cases in the West are often anything but marginal. (A quick glance at current suicide rates will confirm that titbit.)
So what is it the Kaluli do? Well, for a start, they exercise crazy amounts — though they don’t call it that themselves. They have to walk and run miles every day for their food, which keeps them in peak physical condition. Their food, often game meat, is extremely rich in omega-3, the essential fatty acid which has also been linked to lower rates of depression. They live in tight-knit groups, meaning their levels of social contact and support are far higher than ours, sitting as we do alone in our apartments for hours on end — and as a result, they have less time to ruminate on their problems. They live almost every waking hour in natural light, from sunrise until sunset, not spending the days concealed within walls like us in our office buildings, bedrooms and bars.
But the biggest takeaway? They sleep between eight and ten hours every night.
Think back to the last time you slept eight or more hours in the week, when you usually have to get up for work. If your experience of life is anything like mine, it’s rare you’ll get the recommended seven to eight hours, let alone any more. Most of my eight-hour-plus nights are on Fridays or Saturdays, when my shuteye is often disrupted from drinking and my sleeping pattern is in tatters. In the winter months, some of us who like to stay at clubs or bars until god knows when won’t see much sunlight on the weekend at all, and during the week, we remain holed up in our offices — so the sleep we do get is affected by the shifting of our circadian rhythms, which really want sunlight from when we wake up to shortly before we go to sleep. What we should be doing is sleeping at least eight hours every night to have the best chance of not developing depression, and making sure we are quickly forced into a healthy circadian rhythm every morning by lots of natural light.
But ah, you think, sleeping more than eight hours has been linked to some health problems. It’s partially true: most websites recommend seven to eight hours a night in order to live the longest and benefit the most from the bodily health boosts sleep gives us. But depression, as Ilardi notes, is becoming an epidemic across the Western world. Americans who are currently in their 60s and 70s have a rate of depression of around ten percent. That’s already an unacceptable number — and it gets worse. Each successive generation has experienced higher levels of depression than the last, to the point where the current generation, in its mid-twenties — that is, my generation; me — has a rate of depression of twenty five per cent. That’s right. If you’re in this age range, one in four of your friends suffers from depression. One in four. Next time you’re at the pub for someone’s birthday, take a look around and do a headcount of the depressed (and thank your lucky stars if you’re one of the unaffected). The minor negative effects you might experience from sleeping a touch too much are absolutely worth the positive effects of not being afflicted by the illness that is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the United Kingdom.
It’s safe to assume the next generation, Generation Z, who are just now reaching their mid-twenties, will suffer rates of depression even higher than those us younger Millennials do. Ilardi argues it’s predominantly our lifestyles which lead us to become depressed — how we eat, how much exercise we do, whether we spend lots of time alone or not — and I tend to agree. Abstract answers about fulfilling lives or lack thereof in modern society don’t seem to hold much credibility when you point to a tribe that experiences a much, much tougher lifestyle than we do — high infant mortality, high death rates from disease, high violent death rates, high just-about-anything-negative-you-can-think-of — and yet has almost no recognisable cases of depression among its population.
800,000 people die from suicide each year. It’s clear something has to change. Obviously exercise, diet, and social contact all have their roles to play, as well as the improvement of health provision for mental illnesses and the breaking down of stigma attached to the illness. But we mustn’t neglect one thing which also plays an integral role: getting enough sleep. If it seems so obvious, why aren’t you doing it?
