Peter Attia· MD
we do a lot of work on sleeper mental health and it's very clear that I can take people who don't have any problems with mental health depression poor mood anxiety suicidality and when you sleep deprived them you can instigate many of those conditions in fact I can within one single night of sleep loss I can put someone who is non clinically anxious to a level of anxiety where they would have a clinical anxiety disorder diagnosis that's how quickly it can happen so yes sleep can impact your mental health and what's interesting is that psychiatry in the past 25 years I have not been able to discover a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal when we added it up that I can manipulate sleep in mentally well people and then produced by way of the excising of sleep mental ill-health tells me that there is a causal direction from insufficient sleep to poor mental health that sleep is essentially emotional first aid in that regard however don't mistake that for the fact that it's a two-way street as well and I think what you're describing here is a state of mental ill-health and when you course-correct that mental ill-health you then correct the sleep and so i think the relationship between sleep and mental health is bi-directional i think is it's a two-way street