02/12/2025
Why depression and insomnia share a relationship
Here are the top three connections between depression and insomnia:
1. Sleep restores mind and body
While you sleep, your body stays active, performing essential maintenance that keeps you healthy. Your brain clears toxins and stores memories. Your cardiovascular system has time to rest and heal as blood pressure drops, blood vessels relax, and the heart rate slows. Insomnia disrupts these critical processes, affecting nerve communication, decreasing neurotransmitter production, and making it hard to regulate emotions and stress — issues that make you vulnerable to depression.
2. Depression and insomnia share brain chemicals
Brain chemicals (neurotransmitters) regulate your sleep cycles and moods. Depression and insomnia both depend on the same neurotransmitters, namely, serotonin and dopamine. Low serotonin levels are directly associated with depression. Many medications we prescribe to treat depression work by restoring serotonin in your brain. You also need serotonin to produce melatonin, the hormone that responds to light and makes you feel sleepy at night. Dopamine also serves a dual role. Depleted dopamine affects your energy and causes symptoms of depression. You need dopamine to ensure you transition from one stage of sleep to the next, which is the only way to get restorative sleep.
3. Mental and behavioral changes occur
Depression and insomnia change your thinking and behaviors in ways that perpetuate and magnify mood and sleep problems. For example, you may drink more alcohol or caffeine than usual. Both disrupt your sleep cycle. Depression makes you focus on negative thoughts that keep you awake. Insomnia makes it hard to deal with daily responsibilities, increasing your stress and making you feel irritable and worthless.
Treatment helps depression and insomnia
It doesn’t matter which condition dominates your life or if you’re plagued by both; treatment can help. We offer customized care with medication management to restore brain chemicals and therapy focused on giving you skills for overcoming depression, insomnia, or both.
Contact us at Newstone Behavioral Health in Garland, Texas, today to request a telemedicine appointment.
