“Why Do I Get Depressed At Night?” Understanding How Sleep And Mood Are Related

Updated April 3, 2024by Regain Editorial Team

Many people may find themselves asking the question, “why do I get depressed at night?” You may have wondered this while lying awake in bed at night or maybe even in the early hours of the morning. It might even seem like your sleep and mood are related. It turns out that they can be.

Sleep and depression

Sometimes, when you’re depressed, you may feel like all you want to do is sleep. Other times, it may seem like you can do anything but sleep. Or you might be able to sleep, just not at night. These patterns of sleep and depression could make you start to wonder if something is wrong with you. 

Sleep, depression, and you

The mind-body connection is real

Sleep and your mood can be closely related. Understanding how they are related can help you live a happier and healthier life. Everyone is different, though, and there could be several different ways your mood and sleep are connected. It may take some time to determine how these two factors are related for you as an individual. 

What is depression?

Some people may use the term “depression” colloquially to describe less than ideal feelings. Most everyone feels down sometimes, but depression is a serious condition.

Depression can be different for everyone who experiences it, but there are a few common symptoms. These include feelings of sadness or hopelessness, lack of energy, apathy, problems maintaining a healthy weight, and yes, abnormal sleeping patterns.

To be diagnosed, symptoms must persist for at least a couple of weeks. However, exceptions are sometimes made in the face of traumatic events like a death in the family. Depression can also be caused by other significant events like moving, ending a relationship, or losing a job. Sometimes, depression might seem to come out of nowhere.

If you think that you have depression, you may want to talk to your healthcare provider right away, no matter how long you’ve been feeling this way. Even if it hasn’t been a couple of weeks yet, talking to your healthcare provider as soon as possible can help. For example, you may want to establish when symptoms started and begin ruling out any other possible medical conditions.  

Your feelings matter

It can be important to understand the difference between feeling depressed and having depression. That is not to say that your feelings aren’t important until a doctor says so. Life can be hard, and sometimes, it may seem like too much. This can be the case whether you have depression or not. 

The relationship between sleep and mood

It turns out that there are several ways sleep and mood may be related. Everything that happens in your body – from how it functions to how you feel – results from a complex interplay of chemical reactions. 

Sometimes, certain chemical imbalances can make your emotions go haywire, which can make life much harder and much less pleasant for you. It can work the other way too, though. That is, sometimes life is hard and unpleasant, and that can cause chemical imbalances. This can lead to a seemingly endless loop of negative feelings and circumstances, regardless of where the problem started.

There may be a silver lining, though. Just like one of these systems falling out of sync can throw off the other, focusing on improving one of these systems can pull the other back into line, too.

Sleep and mood: Energy

It may seem like you’re not doing anything when you’re asleep, but that’s not exactly true. The brain is busy converting memories from short-term to long-term. Your muscles and skin are busy repairing the wear and tear that they sustain every day. Your organs are busy cleaning your blood and extracting nutrients from your food.

When you don’t get enough sleep, these processes don’t happen like they’re supposed to. As a result, you might wake up feeling hazy and tired. You could feel like you’re unable to face the day. This could be the catalyst for a vicious cycle of feeling tired and stressed. When you can’t sleep, for instance, you may have trouble meeting your obligations. And when you have trouble meeting your obligations, you may feel stressed and have trouble sleeping.

Break the cycle

If you can fall asleep, doing so might be one way to break the cycle. Sometimes, we may treat sleep like a luxury, but it could be more like an investment. You might want to try prioritizing your sleep and see how your mood improves. Consider rescheduling things and even taking some time off if you need to. This can help you reset both your sleep and your mood. 

Sleep and mood: Rest

Here’s a scenario you may find familiar: 

You go to bed, turn out the lights, and close your eyes. Then, it hits you. You have a long day at work tomorrow. That will leave you little time to do all the errands and chores that you have to do – never mind your friend or partner who has been complaining that you’ve been neglecting them lately. 

This is a common predicament, but you might wonder why all these things come to mind as soon as you try to relax in the evenings. 

As paradoxical as it may sound, one of the reasons these things come to mind is precisely because you’re trying to relax. When you’re at work, you’re worrying about work. When you’re running errands and doing chores, you’re worrying about the errands that you’re running and the chores that you’re doing. When you’re paying the bills, you’re worried about paying the bills. When you’re trying to sleep, though, your mind may be free to worry about everything at once.

Actively relax

Perhaps one of the best ways to prevent your worries from ganging up on you is to be intentional about relaxation. This might cue your brain to focus itself on winding down. For example, you might want to have a “buffer” time before bed. This could be a time when you don’t check emails, look at your phone or computer, or even think about work. During this time, you might consider listening to soft music, doing some gentle yoga, or reading a book.

If those things don’t work, you might want to try a mental activity like progressive muscle relaxation. In this form of meditation, you breathe in and imagine the breath moving through your body to your toes. Focus on how your toes feel, then exhale and imagine the breath moving out of your toes through your body and out of your mouth. Repeat this step moving up your body. 

Sleep and mood: Chemicals

Remember, your mood and physical functioning may be the result of chemical reactions in your brain and body. This means that any chemical imbalance can be double trouble. One of these chemicals is called serotonin.

Serotonin helps to manage your mood and keep you happy. Low serotonin is often found in people with depression. Whether depression causes low serotonin or low serotonin causes depression is still a topic of debate. Serotonin doesn’t only improve your mood, though. It can also improve your sleep patterns.

Several things can cause serotonin imbalances. Some people’s bodies may not create enough of it. Other people may not have enough active receptors in their bodies, or their bodies might flush out the chemical before their receptors get the chance to use it. Some drugs can also damage receptors.

Treatment options

Chemical imbalances may not be things that you can power through. Instead, you may need to work with a healthcare provider to determine the cause of any chemical imbalance you may have. This may be the first step toward recovery.

One of the most common solutions is a class of drugs called Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors or SSRIs. These drugs help keep serotonin in your body longer than it otherwise would so that your body has enough time to use it. It might seem like it would make more sense to give you serotonin, but this can lead your receptors to develop an intolerance – and that could lead to addiction and other problems.

Getting help

The mind-body connection is real

If you think that depression may be causing your sleep problems, perhaps the best thing to do is to talk to your healthcare provider to get a diagnosis as soon as possible. This can help you to get the care that you need. Many times, a combination of medical treatment and mental health counseling may be prescribed. 

There may be barriers to traditional counseling for people experiencing symptoms of depression, though. For example, low energy combined with a lack of sleep could be keeping you in bed all day. This can make it difficult to attend an in-person counseling session. In this case, you might want to consider online counseling instead. Online counseling is also more convenient for many people since it can be accessed from the comfort of your home. 

Whether you decide to attend counseling individually or with your partner, you can rest assured that internet-based counseling is an effective treatment option. One recent study demonstrated that counseling delivered via videoconferencing technology resulted in positive outcomes for couples and families. 

Takeaway

Whether your sleeping problem started with a depressed mood, or you started having mood swings as a result of your sleeping problem, finding and addressing the cause may be enough to fix both problems. The tips above may be enough to help you remedy the situation, but if not, the help that you need is just a click away.

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