11/10/2023 0 Comments I have no deep sleep![]() Scanning depressed patients while they sleep has shown that the emotion areas of the brain, the limbic and paralimbic systems, are activated at a higher level in REM than when these patients are awake. That’s where recent technology has helped shed light:īrain imaging technology has helped to shed light on this mystery. ![]() This complete lack of dream recall in depression has showed up in study after study, but it’s been unclear whether it’s due to patients’ reluctance to talk with researchers or to truly not forming and experiencing any dreams. In fact, they are sometimes so frequent that they are called eye movement storms.īut what has perplexed researchers is that when these depressed patients are awakened 5 minutes into the first REM sleep episode, they’re unable to explain what they are experiencing. The eye movements too are abnormal - either too sparse or too dense. Instead of the usual 10 minutes or so, this REM may last twice that. The first REM sleep period not only begins too early in the night in people who are clinically depressed, it is also often abnormally long. The absence of the large spurt of HGH during the first deep sleep continues in many depressed patients even when they are no longer depressed (in remission). If we do not get enough deep sleep, our bodies take longer to heal and grow. The depressed have very little SWS and no big pulse of HGH and in addition to growth, HGH is related to physical repair. The timing of the greatest release of human growth hormone (HGH) is in the first deep sleep cycle. This displacement of the first deep sleep is accompanied by an absence of the usual large outflow of growth hormone. This early REM displaces the initial deep sleep, which is not fully recovered later in the night. That means these sleepers’ first cycle of NREM sleep amounts to about half the usual length of time. Sometimes it starts as early as 45 minutes into sleep. The more severe the depression, the earlier the first REM begins. One particularly fascinating aspect of her research deals with dreaming as a mechanism for regulating negative emotion and the relationship between REM sleep and depression: In The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives ( public library), Cartwright offers an absorbing history of sleep research, at once revealing how far we’ve come in understanding this vital third of our lives and how much still remains outside our grasp. Cartwright has produced some of the most compelling and influential work in the field, enlisting modern science in revising and expanding the theories of Freud and those of Jung about the role of sleep and dreams in our lives. For the past half-century, sleep researcher Rosalind D.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |