Feeling Depressed? Try Staying Awake.
Instead of taking pills or going to therapy, there may be a faster and easier way to deal with depression, neuroscientists suggest: Just try staying awake. At the New York Times' Opinionator blog, Terry Sejnowski notes that over the past four decades, there have been more than 75 published papers linking sleep deprivation to the end of postpartum depression. If you're a new mother feeling down, in other words, you might want to try staying up. Sejnowski argues that while this phenomenon has mostly been documented in relation to postpartum depression, it could also apply to other kinds of depression and change the way scientists examine the sleeping brain. Scientists found that a part of the brain which is overactive among depressed people tends to calm down if patients stay up roughly half the night. The same thing usually happens, Sejnowski adds, when people are put on antidepressants. While researchers have been slow to pick up on the studies, they suggest that "depression can be rapidly reversed" and that there's a connection between sleep and happiness—two implications that could radically alter the way scientists treat depression.
Read original story in The New York Times | Thursday, April 8, 2010
Later. Feel like a nap now.
No comments:
Post a Comment