Dr. Matt Walker

We often see that patients will have problems staying asleep.

They wake up in the middle of the night.

They can't get back to sleep.

It's problematic.

and therefore their sleep duration and their sleep quality decrease.

However, on the other hand, there is an interesting question, by the way, of can you get too much sleep, which I should probably come back as there's a whole episode to do on that probably, but

One of the places where we see, quote unquote, too much sleep is in the depression literature.

And it's a condition that we call hypersomnia.

In other words, increased or excessive degrees of sleep, hypersomnia.

But

A great PhD student at Berkeley looked at the data.

Kate Kaplan, who's a fantastic cognitive behavioral therapist now and a clinical psychologist, looked a little bit at the data and others have looked at this too.

When you examine what people were asking those patients, where there is this conclusion that patients with depression can sleep too long, really what they were asking in those studies was what time do you go to bed and what time do you wake up?

And there, what you clearly find is that people with depression will be in bed for significantly longer periods of time.

And the inference there, and you could argue almost the conflation, is that if you're in bed for longer, then you're sleeping for longer, and therefore depression is a condition of hypersomnia.

But when people looked at this a little bit more in a nuanced way and asked a different question, what time did you go to sleep and what time did you wake up?

that hypersomnia phenomenon is nowhere near as strong as you would have been led to believe otherwise from the, what time did you go to bed?

And what time did you wake up?

And I think part of the reason comes back to depression as a condition.

When you think about depression, one of the aspects, one of the features is that you're depressed to the point where you just don't want to interact with the world.