Philip Gehrman, PhD

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228 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Philip Gehrman, PhD’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Speaking of Psychology · Rethinking sleep and mental health, with Philip Gehrman, PhD · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

Thanks so much for having me.

The short answer is there there's a lot.

We know that sleep plays uh a so many critical roles for healthy brain functioning.

So it's tied to our emotion regulations uh abilities.

Uh it's tied even to the clearance of waste products from the brain.

So there's just a lot happening during sleep that is uh critical for a healthy brain functioning.

Yeah, this is something the sleep field has been trying to change for a very long time.

Because as you said, it's just been assumed by the mental health field that when people have insomnia, you don't really need to pay attention to the insomnia or the other sleep problems.

You just have to focus on their depression, on their anxiety, on their psychosis, whatever it may be.

But there's now several dozen.

In longitudinal studies showing that for people who don't meet the criteria for any mental health problems, if they have trouble sleeping, they're roughly two to three times more likely to go on to develop depression, anxiety, substance use disorder.

So poor sleep can actually be a risk factor increasing vulnerability to poor mental health.

Well, most mental health providers, regardless of discipline, get virtually no education about sleep in their graduate school curriculum, despite the fact that we spend a third of our lives doing it.

And so we're we're trying to increase the education that's out there, but unfortunately most people just aren't getting much of anything.

It really opens up our toolbox for a range of different options.

And so uh, you know, I'm always trying to could teach mental health providers to pay attention to sleep, to listen to what their clients are telling them about their sleep, and to try to figure out: are there specific sleep disorders going on?

And if there are, the good news is we have effective treatments for a

number of them.

So bringing that sleep focus in can take a more holistic approach to someone's mental health and provide access to a whole new set of techniques that they can bring to bear on on treating someone's mental health problems.

This has been a really hot area of research the last six or seven years in the field where it was discovered that it's during sleep that waste products that just normally build up from waking brain function, uh it's during sleep that they're cleared away, in particular our our deep sleep.

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