• Question: Which theories do you believe about sleep regarding mental health? As a lucid dreamer I regard the Information Consolidation Theory as one of the closest, do you agree?

    Asked by Guppy to Jack on 15 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Jack barton

      Jack barton answered on 15 Jun 2017:


      Well sleep is a relatively new area in respect to mental health, it has largely been felt that sleep disturbances were a result of mental health symptoms and not the other way round. This viewpoint has changed and there is a lot more research which is trying to understand how sleep problems can cause mental health difficulties. That being said there was a study in the 1950s which sleep deprived individuals with psychosis and found, rather unsurprisingly, that they got much worse…

      Re the different theories, there are a number of different theories which are likely relevant to mental health. There is most certainly a role for information consolidation as poor sleep has consistently been shown to negatively impact memory, and difficulties in working memory are a common cognitive problem in psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression. Another theory, known as the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, is another strong candidate. It states that sleep is important to keep our brain firing efficiently but not too much during the day: over (and under) activity of the certain brain regions is found in psychiatric illnesses. It may be that a failure to sleep adequately interferes with this normal process and makes us more vulnerable to a host of mental health difficulties. This was shown in a cool study which found that a night of sleep deprivation lead to an increase in brain activity to upsetting images in an area responsible for processing threat and emotion. By contrast, the activity in this part of the brain was much lower when participants had a good night’s sleep. This suggests we are more reactive to negative things in our environment.

      I feel that these theories will likely shed light on why poor sleep co-occurs and precedes mental health difficulties. Also, lucid dreaming is incredibly interesting, I’ve only experienced it once myself though…

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