National Sleep Awareness Week (3/13-19): The Impact of Sleep on Your Mental Health

Sleep is a key element to living your healthiest and happiest life. Not only does the amount of sleep impact your physical health, it can affect your mental health, as well. Despite knowing that sleep is so important to our health, an estimated 31.6% of U.S. adults report getting less than the recommended amount of sleep each night, according to the CDC.

How Sleep Impacts Your Mental Health

Whether you have opted to spend your nights scrolling through your phone, cramming for your finals, or doing something else, we are here to tell you the ways a lack of sleep can impact your mental health. Sleep deprivation can cause a multitude of issues as it impacts your mood, cognitive functioning, and overall mental health.

While there are some mental health conditions that can adversely affect one’s sleeping habits, poor sleep hygiene can also cause these mental health conditions to arise. Just a few psychological conditions that may be impacted by poor sleep include:

Stress

Stress is the perfect example of a mental health condition that can negatively impact your sleep and that a lack of sleep can exacerbate. Poor sleep can leave you feeling irritable, drained, and on-edge. Because of this, you may find that even the smallest stressors can set you into a stress spiral.

Anxiety

Similar to stress, anxiety can be exacerbated by a lack of sleep. A lack of sleep can impact our ability to cope with even the most minor feelings of anxiety, catastrophizing them more than we intend to.

Depression

Sleep issues are a symptom of depression, but a lack of sleep has also been thought to lead to depression. Recent research has suggested that insomnia can be a predictor of depression, suggesting that a lack of sleep just may be one of the reasons many people develop depression.

Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

A lack of sleep can begin to have an effect on your brain’s cognitive functioning abilities. Because of this, a lack of sleep may aggravate the symptoms of ADHD, leaving a person feeling unable to concentrate on, learn, or remember things throughout their days.

These are only a few examples of many ways that sleep impacts your brain’s ability to function. Trust me when I say that the impact of sleep on mental health is seemingly endless.

Getting good quality sleep is critical to your overall well being. If you are truly struggling to get some much-needed shut eye, consider reaching out to your primary care physician in order to ensure there are no underlying causes keeping you awake throughout the night.

We are here to help you.

If you have found your mental health struggling due to a lack of sleep, it is important to note that you do not struggle alone. We are here to help you. Contact us today and we will work to get you the treatment you need to feel better.

References

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/sleep-health.htm
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032711000292?via%3Dihub

Keywords: mental health, how to sleep better, why am i so tired, how to stop worrying about sleep