Treatments for depression do not always obtain the expected results, which is why specialists in this field never tire of looking for new ways that allow them to confront this pathology in a more effective way. Now a novel study carried out at Stanford University indicates that sleep could become a good treatment for depression.
Basically, the effectiveness of cognitive-behavioral treatments was found to double when people with depression are also taught techniques to fall asleep and avoid insomnia. The researchers are very confident in their discovery, so much so that they say it could be the biggest advance in the field of depression treatment since Prozac was introduced in the late 1980s.
What did the treatment consist of?
First, the mechanism of sleep, its importance and its effects on a physiological level were explained to people. In fact, in case you don’t know, sleep is essential for our brain to regenerate and for the experiences we have had during the day to be consolidated.
Secondly, they were given some basic strategies to create a good sleep routine. Like always going to bed at the same time, not using the bed all day unless they were sleepy, and practicing relaxation before going to sleep.
As you can see, it is not complicated at all. So how can they double the effectiveness of a treatment to combat depression?
Researchers think that one of the problems of depressed people is that their body behaves as if it were shutting down, their immune system does not respond to threats, appetite becomes uncontrolled, fatigue becomes more acute, and cognitive processes slowly shut down. In other words, depression prevents normal physiological regeneration, which primarily takes place during sleep. In fact, it has been shown that the more chronic the insomnia, the more acute the depression.
As you can imagine, if we manage to sleep well, our body will automatically regenerate, both from a physical and psychological point of view. In practice, it would be like charging a cell phone.
Sleep “detoxifies” our brain
Clues to better understand the action of sleep on depression and our brain come from another study, carried out at the University of Rochester. In this research, it was observed that during sleep the brain is capable of eliminating residual products through a drainage system that was not known and which was called the “glymphatic system”, in which both the cerebrospinal fluid and the glial cells of the brain are involved.
Through this system, the brain would eliminate some toxins during sleep, such as the beta-amyloid protein, whose accumulation is mainly responsible for the appearance of diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to think that during sleep we can rediscover the psychological balance we need, especially when we suffer from pathologies such as depression.
References:
Nedergaard, M. et. Al. (2013) Evaluating glymphatic pathway function utilizing clinically relevant intrathecal infusion of CSF tracer. Journal of Translational Medicine, 11: 107.
Manber, R. et. Al. (2008) Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia enhances depression outcome in patients with comorbid major depressive disorder and insomnia. Sleep; 31(4): 489-495.
