Mental Health

The correlation between psychiatric illness and poor sleep has been well documented, but the prevailing wisdom until recently was that the best practice was to treat the illness using pharmaceuticals and/or therapy, and in doing so, sleep problems would remedy themselves.

Fortunately, neuroscience has progressed and we now know that a bidirectional relationship exists between sleep health and mental health. Chronic short duration sleep can actually cause or worsen psychiatric illnesses, and mental health challenges can lead to sleep deficits.

In much the same way that sleep debt builds toxicity in the frontal cortex, disrupting capacity for deep restorative sleep,
chronic short duration sleeps disconnect the rational brain (i.e., the prefrontal cortex) from the emotion (i.e., the amygdala) and reward (i.e., the striatum) centers of the brain, thereby disrupting our capacity to manage our emotions and control our appetite for reward. Therefore, care plans designed to address mental illness should include objective sleep assessment, and when necessary, sleep interventions to promote sleep health. Given the bidirectional relationship between sleep and mental health, best practice would be to promote sleep health in combination with standard treatment of mental illness.

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