In this post I wrote about how I reckoned I could think myself into a depression, if I wanted to.
Apart from the cognitive stuff (negative triads, automatic thoughts, depressogenic assumptions, blahblah), another potential cause of depression is dreaming. The smart people in white coats worked this out because depressed people seem more so in the mornings. Complete sleep deprivation didn’t help, but if the patients were prevented from entering REM sleep (the type of sleep where you dream, though apparently they’ve found out that we dream at other times as well) throughout the night, they felt better the following day.
Conversely, you would expect that if on a specific night a depressed person dreamt more than usual, they would feel worse than usual the next day.
I don’t know if this applies to “normals” as well. (ie to non-depressed people.) If it does, I think I may have fallen prey to these evil mechanism and accidentally given myself a case of the blues. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not depressed. But, I have been waking up gloomy in the morning faaaar too often over the past week. It takes me a couple of hours, and then I’m back to “normal” (hehe, whatever that may be). And couldn’t a possible cause be that I have been snoozing for an average of two hours each morning, and thus spending a lot more time see-sawing in and out of REM sleep?
I’d like that to be the case. Because otherwise, I have no idea what’s up. Autumn? Also, if I am in fact “making myself depressed” in this way, there’s an easy cure! Just get up when the alarm rings.
