Cranky and depressed: Why bad sleep equals bad mental health

All In The Mind

ABC listen

Life Sciences, Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When you think about pillars of health a few things might come to mind — nutrition, exercise, connectedness. But there's something many of us miss off that list — sleep.

Insomnia does so much more than make us cranky, it's closely tied to our mental health. Not just how we feel on a day to day basis, but our likelihood of developing depression.

This week, what happens when you don't get enough sleep; the effect on your brain and why it's so impactful on your mental health.

If you'd like to learn more about sleep, check out the science team's Sleeptember content.

This episode touches on the topic of suicide. Please take care while listening. If you need support, you can reach Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.

Transcript

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0:00.0	ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:07.6	What's the worst sleep habit you've seen in your time as a sleep psychologist?
0:12.2	Look, a big one that we see, which I always think is unusual, especially in Perth here in the summer,
0:18.6	we get these mornings that, you know, it's getting light
0:22.7	at kind of quarter to five. And people will come in complaining of early waking. And
0:27.5	after a little bit of digging about their sleep environment, we might find that there's no
0:32.1	curtains on the windows. What? Seriously? And I think, oh, well, great, because that's some low-hanging fruit right that we can go for right away.
0:40.9	You have clients that get to the point of going to a psychologist about their sleep who don't have curtains on their windows.
0:46.8	Yeah, it happens. It happens. But you know what's even more interesting? A couple of those clients I can think of chose to keep it that way.
0:55.2	Why? And they said, you know, I like the fresh air. I like the airflow.
1:00.0	That's when you just move the curtains to the side.
1:03.2	Look, there's a bit of each to their own right in this. But, you know, in those cases,
1:08.5	what the clients decided to do was to make peace with waking at quarter to five in the mornings and say, well, you know what?
1:15.8	For that time of the year, I'm going to go to bed at 8pm, and that suits me fine.
1:22.2	Kids, stressful jobs, doom-scrolling.
1:25.4	There is always something ready to rob you of a bit of shut-eye.
1:29.0	Maybe, and I'm not judging, even curtains. The first time a client ever told you that,
1:34.5	that they were getting up early and then you realized they had no curtains, what was your reaction?
1:38.8	Was it a struggle to keep a straight face? Look, yes, I think we probably had a little laugh about it, actually.
1:45.3	In fact, so many of us are being robbed that research from the federal government shows more than half of adults in Australia have at least one sleep issue,
1:54.7	like trouble falling asleep, or restless slow-quality sleep, or a more serious disorder like insomnia.
2:02.1	And you know how crappy sleep can leave you feeling cranky and snappy.
	...

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