Dr. Matt Walker

It is...

like the other conditions, bi-directional, that depression can disrupt sleep very much and disrupted sleep can trigger depression.

Depression is interesting, by the way, some people have conceptualized it as being different to anxiety based in some ways on memory, which is that when you think about anxiety, people consider anxiety a disorder of the future.

that you are constantly worried about what's coming up in the future.

I didn't do this today, so I need to do that tomorrow.

And then I've got that other thing next week, or I'm fearful of going out to see them tomorrow.

I just, I'm fearful of taking that flight tomorrow.

It seems to be so much about prospective future.

Whereas other people have suggested depression is the opposite.

It's about rumination of the past.

I went through this event.

I had this bereavement.

I had this painful divorce.

I just can't get over my past.

Now, I don't necessarily know if that's entirely true, but it is interesting in the sense that both of those abnormal prospection, worry of the future, and abnormal retrospection, sort of ruminating on the past, seem to disrupt sleep.

And to your question though about sleep, it's been a little bit interesting with depression.

Firstly, what we know is that depression will disrupt your sleep and make your sleep shorter.

And it comes back to your comment from Carl, from Carl Deisseroth.

We often see that patients will have problems staying asleep.

They wake up in the middle of the night.