Many people already know that insufficient sleep has a very big impact on mental health, such as declining learning ability, declining attention and memory loss, etc. As research deepens, psychologists have found that the harm of insufficient sleep is far more serious than these: lack of sleep can also cause or aggravate psychological illness.
Psychologists have long noticed that serious sleep problems often appear in pairs with mental illness. For example, among adults with major depression, an average of 75% reported sleep problems such as sleeping all night and difficulty falling asleep; while among teenagers, this rate is as high as 90%. Is it a sleep problem that causes mental illness, or is it a mental illness that causes sleep problems, or is it just a close connection between the two?
Due to the limitations of economic and technological conditions, psychologists once thought that lack of sleep was just a symptom of mental illness, not the cause. As the understanding of sleep and mental illnesses deepens, psychologists have begun to discover that sleep problems and mental illnesses are mutually causal. To further explore the causal relationship between sleep problems and mental illness, psychologists around the world have collaborated with each other to carry out a grand study.
This study was jointly participated by 34 teams from all over the world, and as many as 170,000 healthy volunteers participated in the study. The researchers followed up each volunteer for sleeping time, which took an average of 60 months. The results showed that the incidence of major depression in volunteers with insufficient sleep increased by twice. In addition, the American team in this study has additional discoveries. They found that if American soldiers on the battlefield had sleep problems, they would be more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder later.
In 2018, psychologists from the University of California conducted another experiment on the impact of sleep problems on interpersonal communication. The researchers recruited 18 mentally healthy adults and then deprived them of their sleep throughout the night. The next morning, the researchers immediately asked volunteers to conduct a psychological test of social skills and observe their behavioral responses. The research results show that just a sleepless night caused these volunteers to avoid others, which is one of the symptoms of social phobia.
By 2021, psychologists have made new discoveries on the connection between sleep problems and mental health. After studying the study of 81 young people aged 12 to 25 who are at a very high risk of mental illness, Australian psychologist Jessica Hartman found that young people with irregular sleep are more likely to suffer from mental illness, and these young people have more symptoms of implicit mental illness.
Specifically, these young people with irregular sleep are less likely to show emotions, are more likely to lack social motivation, and retreat in social interactions. Since not showing emotions is easily misunderstood as calm, while lack of social motivation and withdrawal in social interaction can be misunderstood as fatigue and caution respectively. These symptoms are also very easily mistaken for side effects of drugs, so the symptoms of such implicit mental illness are also the most difficult to diagnose. If mental illness is not diagnosed in time, it is very likely that the best time for treatment will be missed.
All these psychological studies show that in order to have a healthy mental state, whether it is adolescents or adults, they must have a good sleep. What is particularly important is that you should sleep regularly. If you sleep irregularly, even if you sleep enough, your mental health will still be affected.
