Staying Up All Night Can Have Surprising Antidepressant Effects, Study Finds

If you've ever pulled an all-nighter, you're probably familiar with that strange feeling of being exhausted physically while your brain is wide awake, almost to the point of giddiness. It turns out that that state of deliriousness can actually help cure depression. 

Neurobiologists at Northwestern University put this theory to the test in a new study published in the Neuron journal. Researchers conducted their experiment on mice, depriving them of sleep and observing their behaviors and brain activity. They found that dopamine release increased during the sleep loss period; additionally, synaptic plasticity was enhanced as their brains were rewiring themselves to maintain the elevated mood for days. In the end, the sleepless mice were more excitable, more aggressive, more sexual, and less depressed than those that got a regular amount of sleep. 

"Chronic sleep loss is well studied, and its uniformly detrimental effects are widely documented,” study co-author Prof. Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy said. “But brief sleep loss—like the equivalent of a student pulling an all-nighter before an exam—is less understood." 

"We found that sleep loss induces a potent antidepressant effect and rewires the brain," she concluded. "This is an important reminder of how our casual activities, such as a sleepless night, can fundamentally alter the brain in as little as a few hours."

Of course, you shouldn't forgo sleep entirely if you're feeling depressed. As Kozorovitskiy pointed out, chronic sleep loss only negatively impacts our health, and the good news from the recent research only has to do with acute sleep loss, such as just going one night without sleep. Either way, try to get as much rest as you can.