Sleep and mental health

Mental health is such an important issue that is often ignored (or worse). Our minds our powerful and yet fragile, and today’s world constantly pulls them this way and that. The buzz can be incessant and often leading to all the problems under the umbrella of mental health. So what about sleep and mental health? Sleep should be a good way pause, reset and rejuvenate ourselves but often mental health issues, like anxiety, can disturb our sleep.

I recently found a website – tuck.com – that had a nice article (unfortunately, this article has disappeared from there site now!) on sleep and mental health. From what I can see, this tuck.com website is not directly sponsored by any companies but they receive income when their articles lead the reader to click and visit a website of one of the companies they have relationships with, which includes Amazon.

Another good sleep related website is sleephelp.org

On the one hand, we have to be careful of articles that may have been written mainly to get us to click and hopefully buy something, as they might present misleading information to increase the chance of a purchase. On the other hand, the funding tuck.com and sleephelp.org receives is somewhat at arms length, and it allows them to research things quite well. It seems to me that tuck.com is doing a pretty good job representing real, valuable information.

By the way, I have no association with tuck.com or sleephelp.org. I’m only highlighting them here as an interesting source of information.

If you take a look at tuck.com’s article (unfortunately, this article has disappeared from there site now!) on sleep and mental health, you’ll see that they cover a large variety of topics including anxiety disorders, depression, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. One important comment they make is that lack of sleep can make it harder to deal with these issues.

For me, I have no trouble sleeping, but I never get enough sleep because there’s always things to be done in the evenings and always a reason (mostly a full-time job) to get up fairly early. I’d have to reduce the pressure I put on myself in order to get more sleep, and that would be a good thing to do, but I can’t quite see how to do it at the moment.

More thoughts about sleep

I find sleep a fascinating topic, mostly because scientists can’t really find a reason why our bodies need to sleep. Back in 2014, I wrote an article – Why do we sleep? – that reviewed a TED talk by Russell Foster. In that article I declared I was going to sleep better, but that hasn’t worked. Why don’t I do what I know is good for me? Good question.

It’s also very interesting that, when we sleep, our bodies are essentially inactive or put on hold, yet we can still experience the most amazing things in our dreams. This really fascinates me as it appears we don’t really need bodies to experience excitement, fun, amazement, fear, etc. We can have a series of different amazing lives in our dreams, and there’s no real danger as, in the end, they’re just dreams. Maybe there’s an important message for us here.

One thing for sure, when it comes to sleep and mental health, is that ensuring we get enough good, quality sleep cannot have a negative effect on any mental disorders. That must be a good thing for every single one of us.

Time for a nap!

Sleep and mental health