Sleep Deprivation helps depression: Could this be due to the effects of laying down on gut motility?
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I have experienced, at times, feeling better on mild sleep deprivation. This is quite a common reported phenomenon. I am dissatisifed with certain answers I have recieved as to what is behind this and find them inadequate.
Theres also the aspect where people tend to feel horrible in the morning after a night sleep, most commonly in pregnancy. You'd expect to feel much better after resting, but it ends up being the worst part of the day, and coffee is needed to help cure this (gut motility increase?).
After thinking about how people report that their acid reflux is worse when they are laying down, I though how our gut health might be better when we are upright rather than laying down. This better digestion/increased gut motility for the removal of wastes can explain the better feeling.
Could the benefits of sleep deprivation be due to the effects of laying down on gut motility?
I think if this is the case, there could be an argument for splitting sleep in half (getting up to do some work in the middle of the night so that you dont accumulate the stress of poor gut motility, then go back to sleep 2 hours later) and also not laying down except when sleeping.
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@dan-saintdominic Nah.
Next!
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What do you think explains this phenomenon?
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@dan-saintdominic So this forum is based on Ray Peat's ideas mostly. that's where I would suggest starting.
Answering would almost do you a disservice, better to fully inform yourself and develop understanding, but because I'm a sweetie:
Stress hormones give you energy! Movement can increase metabolism and help digestion but the primary driver of intestinal movement is the metabolic STATE of the body, in other words the functioning of your thyroid.
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@CO3 Ray has mentioned sleep deprivation as being used to help depression,. Maybe I should have included that quote from him in my post
Edit: Quote "On a Sunday, when a person
sleeps an extra hour or two, it's common to feel
lethargic for the rest of the day. And when a
person has to get up several hours too early, there
is often the feeling of being over-stimulated.
Many years ago, someone noticed that
depressed people who missed a night's sleep, or
who were wakened several hours earlier than
normal, came out of their depression, until they
caught up on their sleep. Sleep deprivation has
become a recognized treatment for depression" (Though and Energy, Mood and Metabolism).I've been on and off following his ideas, and I posted this here, aside from the fact that Ray mentioned it, because I know people on here are a lot more focused on gut motility and its importance in health and keeping the gut clean. Keeping the gut clean improves thyroid function and I'm wondering if reclining for too long (10+ hours) at night time could induce limited gut motility and thus impact the whole hormonal function.
And im not talking about movement, I genuinely just mean sitting up straight versus laying down fully reclined. And when one sleepes, maybe get up in the middle of the night, have something to eat, watch some videos or do some work for a little while and then go back to sleep.
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@dan-saintdominic said in Sleep Deprivation helps depression: Could this be due to the effects of laying down on gut motility?:
Though and Energy, Mood and Metabolism
Maybe you should read the rest of that newsletter! Or even simply the sentence before that (note the use of the passive)
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@dan-saintdominic Most of our emotional intuition is processed during sleep. Lack of sleep creates a sort of emotional chaos where you don't really know whether to be happy or sad which is better than total depression.
Also yeah, short-time stress can be good if you are really in a depressed state. Though long term you lose out, the damage caused by the stress is usually greater than the good you derive from having that momentanous energy.
