Sleeplessness makes you paranoid, and vice versa
New research shows that people with insomnia are five times more likely to be highly paranoid than those who are well-rested. The study was conducted by Wellcome Trust fellow Daniel Freeman who has co-written what promises to be a fascinating new book, Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear. (Excerpt here.) The results of Freeman's latest scientific study were published in the journal Schizophrenia Research. From Science Daily:
"Macbeth's Curse: Link Between Sleeplessness And Paranoia Identified" (Science Daily), Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear (Amazon)"As most of us know, a few nights of poor sleep can make us feel stressed, muddled in our thinking and disconnected from the world," says Dr Freeman. "These are ideal conditions for paranoid fears to take hold. Regular, good-quality sleep is important to our psychological wellbeing."
Although the study shows a clear link between the two conditions, it is unclear which causes the other. Clinical experience indicates that there is a vicious cycle: insomnia makes us anxious and fearful, and these feelings make it harder for us to sleep.
Dr Freeman believes that the research points to a potential treatment for helping to reduce the risk of developing persecutory thoughts.
"The good news is that there are several tried-and-tested ways to overcome insomnia," he says. "In particular, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has proven benefits. The intriguing implication of the research is that use of the sleep techniques may also make us feel safer and less mistrustful during the day. A good night’s sleep may simply make us view the world in a much more positive light.”
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::cue the obvious comment about the posting habits of certain BBers::
For most of my life, it took me three or four hours to fall asleep. After diagnosing and treating PTSD, I fall asleep in ten minutes. Hyperalertness and sleep make strange bedfellows.
I don't believe you. You're trying to trick me! You can't trick me. I'm too clever for you. Too clever for all of you!
conversely, the sociopaths sleep like babies.
Wow! After reading the excerpt it's almost like Doctor Freeman has been watching my every move! Wait a minute...
As an insomniac, I'd like to say: get the hell off my lawn, and stop laughing at my foil helmet.
And may Nixon haunt your dreams, like his mother does mine.
One has to wonder if US Presidents and Vice Presidents ever sleep well, with all they have to worry about.
We're the sleepless, and WE'RE NOT PARANOID!!! It's just that we possess a highly trained facility for threat-assessment.
If interested in finding out more about Daniel Freeman's work on paranoia, especially his use of virtual reality and the London Underground as a research tool, take a look at the video interview I did with him on the Wellcome site here:
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2008/WTD039337.htm
(Have just noticed that the video is a bit squashed, but you get the idea).
This works for other moods too. A CBT technique is the "half smile". You deliberately adopt a very slight smile in order to positively affect your mood. It works by sending a message to your unconscious, "This is how we're feeling today". Prozac on the other hand, is no better than placebo.
In the recovery community it's called "Fake it till you make it".
#10 posted by noen:
I actually go a bit further than that and laugh uproariously. It can do wonders, and the weird thing is, stuff actually gets funny. If I've had a crap day and burst into laughter for no reason in the car on the way home, then find out the cat has puked all over the rug, I laugh again: she's a fat little calico furball who eats too damn fast, then pukes and runs back to her bowl to eat more, and that's funny.
See, also: laughing meditation.
Yeah, that's good IWood. It isn't a good idea to validate your depression by listening to sad music. as tempting as that is. I guess the whole point is to take control of your emotional life instead of it controlling you.
Insomnia seems to send me into lots of vicious cycles. Depression, frustration, irritability, anxiety, etc. That's why I take Ambien. And Zoloft.
@11
And if you laugh enough when people are around, people will be so scared of you you'll have no need to be paranoid.
How very paranoid sworm. No, people will not shun you if you are a jovial person. They'll do that if your laughter is completely disconnected from reality.
MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I'm posting on boing boing.
It makes perfect sense. You're short on sleep therefore less alert. Paranoia kicks in, and you focus more on your surroundings, and are therefore not eaten by that Grue which was sneaking up on you.
They want you to sleep more, because they're out to get you!
Bryan3000000 @7, funny you should ask that about presidents. The elder Bush was known to have been prescribed triazolam (under the brand name Halcion) for a while during his presidency. It's a sleeping pill whose side effects include amnesia, confusion, and disinhibition. (And, perhaps, vomiting on Japanese prime ministers.) It's been banned in the UK because of its high incidence of psychiatric side-effects.
Yeah. . . you know what else makes you paranoid? Millions of anonymous persecutors everywhere.
Trust me.
... wasn't this something that everyone was already aware of in the first place?
Of course being poorly rested makes you bloody paranoid. Everyone who's had a few occasional sleepless nights and waited until the next day's nightfall to rest is well aware of that.
@AIRPILLO #21
Every time I see research about almost any subject dealing with human behavior, there's always somebody that goes "lol, obvious!"
There are a lot of things that we take for granted as true, but which are utter bullshit. This little nugget of folk wisdom just became science, so bake it a cake.
I'm gonna agree with this. I get like 6.5 hours a sleep a night (not enough) and right now can't sleep - woke up at 2:00am and it's notw 3:00am. The ice maker is scaring the shit out of me and I think there might be burglars stealing stuff out of my garage.
All you have to do is sleep a lot, and all the troubles in your life will go away!
Well I would certainly expect Dr. Freeman to know a thing or two about paranoia, considering that a mysterious man in a blue suit keeps following him around.
There was a time when I wouldn't sleep for two or three nights in a row and then I would experience something like paranoia. I'm really lucky it never progressed to hearing voices that weren't there, but I did experience the conversational banter around me as being directed toward me. The more upsetting and agitating these experiences would become, the harder it was to sleep and the worse it would get. Without the intervention I got, I wonder if I might have gone on to develop schizophrenia.
Much recovered from that awful experience I still have bouts of insomnia. I tried Ambien and I guess I am one of the small (?) number of users to whom the drug induces hallucinations. Fortunately, at the time I took the drug I was grounded enough to know that it wasnt *really* a dead witch hanging from a hook. (bathrobe) And my husband's eyes weren't *really* two dead empty sunken sockets. (optical illusion) heh...
These days I try to remember to sleep and eat and I'm pretty careful about the drugs I consume. Mostly try to keep it to just the one SSRI.
The ultimate flick about sleeplessness and paranoia was depicted in the Machinist:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&resnum=0&q=the+machinist&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title#
Well...duh.
For all the treatment i've had for anxiety, panic attacks, various psychotic episodes and agoraphobia... well, once they focused on my sleeping the other problems sort of faded, substantially.
For about a decade I took 4+ hours to sleep, often not sleeping for a couple of days until exhaustion took over and I collapsed. It's very difficult being aware that you ARE being paranoid, but not actually being able to disengage it. It really is like sitting on your own shoulder grimacing at whats going on in your head and around you, but being totally unable to intervene.
Worse still, benzos (valium, alprazolam [xanax], temazepam et al) exacerbated the situation - removing all my inhibitions but still not knocking me out. So I could happily indulge my faulty perception to an extent I wouldn't have, unmedicated.
One thing I've always wondered is whether all the freaky shit that happens when you stop sleeping has anything to do with dreaming; that is, the dreaming that you aren't doing because you aren't sleeping. So then the dreams kind of overlay on top of your waking life. It can be a real nightmare, to say the least.
Not sure how I ever missed The Machinist.... holy shit! I hope those were special effects and Christian Bale didn't really have to smoke meth to get that crazy skeletal look. God-damn...
Living in the UK I am entitled to be paranoid.
And sleepless.