Will sleep improve after anxiety and depression are relieved?

In most cases, sleep will get better after anxiety and depression are relieved, but there are a few exceptions, and it is not 100% that "as long as you are in a good mood, you will sleep well."

After all, most people’s sleep problems such as insomnia, easy awakening, and excessive dreams are themselves symptoms of anxiety and depression. If you think about it, your brain is occupied with anxious thoughts all day long, either ruminating on bad things in the past, or uncontrollably thinking about bad consequences in the future. It’s like there are several high-power-consuming programs hanging in the background. You obviously want to lock the screen to sleep, but the background is still running data like crazy, so of course you can’t fall asleep. Two years ago, I met a girl who was preparing for the civil service exam. During her period of severe anxiety, she could sleep no more than three hours a day, and sleeping pills could only help her for half a night. After three months of cognitive adjustment, her anxiety score dropped to the normal range. Within a month, she reported that she felt sleepy after just ten minutes of watching popular science videos in bed, and she no longer had to lie down and count sheep until dawn.

But not everyone is so smooth. When an uncle who had been suffering from depression for five years came to me for sleep intervention, his mood had actually stabilized for more than half a year. He no longer broke down at every turn and didn’t want to move. He usually went fishing and took care of his grandson with no problem, but his sleep was stuck. As soon as he lay down on the pillow in the bedroom, he started to get nervous: "Can I sleep for 6 hours today?" What if I wake up at two o'clock again? ”This kind of "behavioral inertia" is actually left by long-term insomnia, which is equivalent to the previous bad sleeping habits that have been carved into conditioned reflexes. Even if the root cause of the emotion is solved, the bad habits at the sleep level have not disappeared, and behavioral intervention such as sleep restriction and stimulus control can be broken back.

There are also patients with a relatively long course of disease whose neurotransmitter secretion has been disrupted for several years. Emotional regulation is a relatively fast step. Physiological indicators related to sleep such as melatonin and serotonin recover half a beat later. In this case, there is no need to rush. Follow the doctor's instructions to adjust your work and rest. Don't worry about "Why can't I fall asleep?" and give your body some buffer time. Most of them can catch up slowly.

Among the hundreds of cases I have been exposed to, less than 5% of the cases where sleep has not improved after the mood is completely relieved. Most people can return to a normal sleep state after adjusting for two or three months even if they are a little repetitive at the beginning. Don't get anxious just because you haven't caught up with the period of sleep. It will slow down the pace of recovery, which is not worth it.