2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Sleep disorders associated with disturbances in its structure are characteristic of latent endogenous depression. Since structural disturbances relate to changes in the normal alternation of sleep phases, it is necessary to deal with such a sleep phase as paradoxical or REM sleep, which is externally characterized by rapid eye movements in the sleeping person. Modern views on the meaning of paradoxical sleep are presented in the article by Vadim Rotenberg “Paradoxical sleep. Paradoxes of nature and paradoxes of science”.
The brain is most active during dreams. But at the same time, muscle tension, their tone, decreases, as if the sleeper was in a state of maximum emotional relaxation and rest. This is observed during REM sleep in both humans and animals. As a result, REM sleep is called "paradoxical sleep". Experiments by Professor Jouvet showed that muscles relax so that we cannot take part in our own dreams, as in real events.
REM sleep, and hence dreams, occupy about 1 / 5-1 / 4 of the total sleep. This state is regularly repeated 4-5 times during the night, which means that every night from birth to death we view at least 4 dreams. Most often, we do not remember them, because we do not wake up at this time. If a person or animal is regularly woken up at the very beginning of REM sleep, preventing them from dreaming, then on the night when they are allowed to sleep off without interference, the period of REM sleep increases significantly, sometimes occupying half of the entire sleep.
If you systematically deprive a person or animal of REM sleep and dreams, then significant changes in the psyche and behavior occur. In humans, REM sleep is eliminated by awakening a person at the first physiological signs of this condition. A permanent effect of dream deprivation is a change in the mechanisms of psychological defense. It has been proven that dream deprivation enhances the repression mechanism: a person “forgets” exactly those events that are most unpleasant to him and threaten his self-perception. However, this “forgetting” does not go away painlessly: a person becomes more anxious and tense, he is less protected from stress. The repression of events, thoughts about them and the emotions associated with them, emerge from the subconscious in the form of anxiety.
Little sleepers are people with strong psychological defense in the form of denying troubles or rethinking them. They are energetic, proactive, assertive and do not go deep into the intricacies of experiences and interpersonal relationships. Long-sleepers are more often highly sensitive people with a reduced threshold of vulnerability, more anxious, prone to mood swings. And all these traits, especially anxiety, increase in the evening, before going to bed, and decrease in the morning. It can be assumed that during dreams, these people somehow cope with their emotional problems and there is no need to repress them. Dreaming helps to resolve repressed conflicts.
It is noted that when, after sleeping with dreams, a solution to a problem comes, the problem itself does not always appear in the dream. Thus, a dream indirectly has a positive effect on creative activity, solving some other problems and internal conflicts. Dreams can help to strengthen psychological defenses and release from the burden of unresolved conflicts, even if these conflicts are not represented in the dream. As in the situation with solving creative problems, a real conflict and a real psychological problem can be replaced in a dream with a completely different problem. But if this imaginary other problem is solved successfully, then the dream fulfills its adaptive function and contributes to emotional stabilization. It is important that in the process of solving this imaginary problem a person shows a sufficiently high search activity, for this activity as a process, regardless of content, has a basic value. Dreams create excellent conditions for solving this problem: a person is disconnected from the reality that led to the surrender, and can deal with any other problem. It is only important that he gains experience in actively and successfully solving this problem.
The same principle is used in psychotherapy, when, instead of uselessly dealing with a situation that looks insoluble, a person is guided towards self-realization in other spheres of life. And unexpectedly for him, the conflict loses its acuteness, or even a person finds a non-standard solution. The main thing is that a person does not lose the ability to search - it is important both for health and for solving various problems.
Further, we offer excerpts from the article by VM Kovalzon "Depression, sleep and cerebral amines", which provides experimental substantiation of the causes of disturbances in the structure of sleep.
Sleep with latent depression is represented by such characteristics as a decrease in the period of paradoxical sleep in the first cycle, an increase in the proportion of paradoxical sleep in the second half of the night, early morning awakenings, etc. Depressive symptoms in such patients are most pronounced immediately after waking up, and by the evening their condition improves significantly. If such a person is deprived of all sleep or paradoxical sleep, this leads to a weakening or even disappearance of depressive manifestations, and spontaneous falling asleep, even short-term, leads to their resumption. On the other hand, in accordance with the classical concepts of the aminergic nature of endogenous depression, pharmacological treatment of such patients is aimed at increasing the level of cerebral serotonin and norepinephrine by suppressing their reuptake and degradation.
As you know, all antidepressants suppress REM sleep. Under natural conditions, it is paradoxical sleep that is the state in which the activity of the aminergic neurons in the brain completely stops. In animals and people living in natural conditions with one or two days of sleep, the daily "quota" of paradoxical sleep is fragmented, more or less evenly distributed over all sleep cycles, each of which ends with a short episode of paradoxical sleep.
However, in adults, under the pressure of modern civilization, the daily rhythm of wakefulness-sleep is transformed in such a way that a 16-hour period of continuous wakefulness (sleep deprivation) is followed by an 8-hour period of consolidated sleep ( recoil.). half the night), deep slow sleep (delta sleep) is restored, and then paradoxical. This leads to the formation of uneven sleep cycles, when delta sleep dominates in the first night cycles, and paradoxical sleep in the morning. As a result, long, 30-40-minute morning periods of paradoxical sleep can theoretically lead to a decrease in cerebral amines below the critical level, which, possibly, occurs in patients with endogenous depression due to some congenital defects in serotonin and norepinephrine turnover and / or their reception …
Thus, according to the proposed hypothesis, it is the inadequate sleep pattern dictated by modern urban life that is one of the factors contributing to the formation of a depressive state in people with a certain hereditary predisposition to a low basal level of cerebral amines, and the characteristic shifts in the structure of sleep in this disease are primarily the queue is compensatory in nature. Then, a change in sleep pattern, carried out long before the first symptoms of endogenous depression appear in people predisposed to it, can play a role in the prevention of this disease.
MVVoronov "Group portrait of depression"
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