It’s been a really busy week this week with a lot of deadlines and late nights. It made me think of the importance of quality sleep.

Most people know that when they get tired they get more irritable but often I find I also am more prone to feeling depressed when I’m tired. I find myself turning back to old thinking patterns. My thoughts turn from seeing things as single instances (it’s a shame there’s a traffic jam today but what a good run I had home yesterday) to things like ‘this always happen to me’ (The lights are always red, the traffic light controllers do it on purpose just to annoy me and I’ve never, ever had a trip where the traffic lights weren’t all red). I also find my ability to see the good in people dissipates and even the loveliest of people get on my nerves.

When you suffer from depression, tiredness can be a massive obstacle against your power to challenge your thinking. I’ve found it really important to make getting quality sleep a priority in my living with depression. I try to make sure that I don’t book up my weekend and week nights with lots of late night activities. Obviously I still want to be able to go to parties and stay out late but I need to find a balance. I’ve discovered that if I have too many late nights in a row then I end up getting quite low and end up cancelling a whole lot of other commitments and staying at home to recover. So if I pace myself in my late nights and say no to some things it means I can continue having a social life every week of the year not ebbing and flowing according to my fatigue.

I thought it might be helpful to talk about some of the things that help me to get a good nights sleep. With most cases of depression there is either insomnia (inability to sleep) or hypersomnia (increased need to sleep). I’ve pretty much always had the hypersomnia, so my tips might not be much use to the insomniac. However I hope there might be a few ideas that can help you. So in the next blog entry are my six suggestions for sensational sleep!