Feeling pretty is a subjective topic, but that doesn’t make it immaterial. What good does it do to me to like what I see in the mirror?
The answer is Everything. It is tremendously important to enjoy your own image. Feeling pretty or attractive, whether you are a man or a woman, is a major stepping stone in your mental health journey. It’s about acknowledging yourself as an individual and recognizing your strengths and qualities. It is an act of self-love, and it often marks the beginning of a self-care journey. Therefore, we can’t afford to ignore those feelings. On the contrary, they are crucial to building your self-esteem up, protecting yourself, and embracing self-worth. It’s all about looking at the person in the mirror and believing that someone else could like them too. So, of course, you want to cultivate the art of being pretty/attractive/handsome, regardless of your gender.
We tend to get so used to our image that we stop seeing it. Feeling pretty could be as simple as trying out something new. If you wear your hair in a certain way, for instance, you could experiment
with new hairstyles. Women with mid-length to long hair have a lot of options to be playful with their style. A scarf updo can be a nice change and highlight your face in a different light. A high ponytail can also add realistic bangs to shape your face. In short, there are many ways to transform your appearance and receive unexpected compliments.
If you need eyewear, you can also change your face by switching to contact lenses. If you’re not sure where to start, the cheapest place to buy contacts is typically online. It’s an easy way to create a new style and show off your eyes. The bottom line: Going for something a little different can be enough to fall back in love with yourself.
Indulge in some self-care time
Feeling pretty is something that comes from within. Think of it as the first spark that can light up the fire of your self-esteem. It comes from a place of comfort and confidence, which is precisely why self-care plays a huge role in how you feel about yourself. A spa ritual at home during which you can make your own facial mask, for instance, can help you feel nourished both physically and emotionally. The time you invest in yourself is essential to make peace with the person in the mirror.
Up your selfie’s game
There is no such thing as not being photogenic. Unfortunately, social media platforms make it hard to feel good in your skin when so many influencers are posting flattering selfies. Taking a good selfie requires skills. You need to understand how to pose, how to make the most of the light, etc. While influencers have honed their selfie skills, the mere mortals we still have a lot to learn! Yet, it’s worth experimenting and trying out the best poses so you know what works for you. More importantly, you can use a good selfie as a morale boost. It’s a picture of yourself that you like and that others also compliment.
Feeling pretty is a skill that you need to develop and nourish in your day-to-day life. Of course, it doesn’t solve all self-esteem problems. But it gives you the new mental and emotional strength to tackle life’s challenges. As coping mechanisms go, feeling pretty is safe, pleasant, and enjoyable. So what are you waiting for?
When I first began working at home, I couldn’t believe I was getting away with such a racket.
No one told me what to do or where to be! I could work in my bed, go to the grocery store in the middle of the day, and my clients were none the wiser. Even though I was a freelancer, I was constantly looking over my shoulder and expecting to be reprimanded by someone.
But my elation wore away when I realized I wasn’t quite alone at home: My anxiety was there, too.
Now, I’m an anxious person, even in the best of times. But these days, it seems like we’re all anxious. And anxiety is another ingredient — like Zoom calls, overloaded wifi or howling children or pets — that needs to be factored into your days, your productivity and your time management.
Some days my anxiety drives me to perform at an Olympic level, with no task undone and no email unanswered even if I have to work until midnight. That is overwork — a common way that many of us anxious people deal with our feelings — and I’ll return to it later.
Other days, anxiety creates a background buzz in the form of intrusive thoughts and fears about the future. It can also make us distracted and unable to focus, so another common way of dealing with anxiety is avoidance (more later on this one too). For example, while I was writing this piece, I baked banana bread, made a half-hearted attempt at the exercise bike, fed the cats their pre-lunch snack and wandered around my house looking for things that needed my attention.
Working from home can be wonderful, but when you’re anxious, it can be difficult to concentrate and stay on task. How do you stay accountable to yourself and get work done without driving yourself to exhaustion?
Here are some tips based on what I have learned from 15 years of managing my anxiety while also working from home:
1. Call off the mental fire drill that occurs whenever you get a Slack or email notification
I know I’m not the only one whose heart rate accelerates when I see a new email in my inbox (or a Slack message). It could be a client, a staffer, my accountant or my mother. My anxiety drives me to want to quickly fix what they’re writing me about so I’ll feel better. But before I do, I often spend time worrying and trying to suss out the “true” meaning of their message (a fool’s errand, since emotional nuance is lost in almost any digital communication). Then I’ll force myself to respond no matter what — even if I’m finally eating lunch at 3PM or doing time-sensitive work.
Don’t blame yourself for leaping to reply to every message — much of modern knowledge work is built on this Pavlovian system of instant feedback and urgent response. With so many of us working from home and without the normal in-person interaction, this past year we’ve gotten trained to crave the feedback of a “ping” or a visual notification.
To start to de-program ourselves from the need to always be on, we need to practice being disconnected for small amounts of time. Begin with a time limit. Pick an after-hours moment when you don’t need to be online, and then turn off or hide your devices for an hour. Gradually work towards doing this during a workday. For that, select an hour when you can purposefully avoid checking updates (set up an “away” or “in a meeting” notification so people won’t wonder why you’re not getting back to them).
See how you feel when you can take a break from checking. When I avoid my phone for an hour, I notice that my neck is looser and so are my shoulders! Immediate benefit.
2. Stop waiting to get permission to log off
When work isn’t a place you leave at the end of the day, it can be incredibly difficult to stop. And let’s face it, when the option is to keep working and feel in control or spend more time on the sofa doom-scrolling or with whining kids, overworking might seem even more attractive. But learning to stop work is a discipline that creates good habits and a necessary step to keeping your energy tank filled.
I am an accomplished professional, but unconsciously I still want someone to tell me, “You did a good job today — you’re done.” Well, you need to learn to give yourself that permission.
Psychologist Alice Boyes changed my life when she suggested setting concrete limits around the amount of time I spend on the tasks that make me anxious and tend to overdo. Such shortcuts and hacks that help calm anxiety are called heuristics.
Here’s how you could come up with a heuristic to set boundaries on your work hours. At the beginning of your day (or the day before), create a reasonable to-do list. The key word is reasonable — no writing up a list based upon an imaginary 240-hour day — and based on experience, you’ll probably know how long most of your tasks will take. And if you have to guess time for any, guess upwards. Structure your day based around this list, and when you’re finished, close your computer. You did good.
3. When you get stuck in a worry spiral, ask: “What’s making me anxious right now?”
The flip side of overwork is avoidance — avoiding deadlines and tasks because you’re anxious. Everyone has their greatest hits of coping mechanisms, from trying to worry the fear away to working it away to diving into a bag of cheese doodles. Our brain does this because it’s trying to help us avoid our bad feelings. To understand the motivations and causes behind your anxiety, it helps to take a pause to feel your feelings and monitor how you react to those feelings.
Start by looking at what’s making you anxious right now and how the anxiety is making you react. Here’s an example from my life. Thinking about money makes me anxious. When the economic news is frightening, I might act out when I’m faced with a work task that has anything to do with money. So if I need to prepare a financial report for my small business, I assume it’s going to reveal negative results, which sends me into a spiral of fear. Cognitive behavioral therapists call this kind of reaction an anxious automatic thought. Consequently, instead of facing the spreadsheet and doing my work, I might avoid it entirely. I might eat that bag of cheese doodles or buy something online that makes me feel good. I’m reacting to my anxiety.
It’s better if I can learn to move from reacting on auto-pilot to knowing what sets me off and then managing how I will respond. I can say to myself: “Looking at my company’s finances is going to set me off right now. Maybe I should ask my business partner to do it. Or maybe I should build in a reward if I face the challenge head on? I could let myself have an extra hour of Netflix if I complete the spreadsheet.” I find that most of the time, doing the work doesn’t feel nearly as bad as what my anxiety anticipates.
4. Follow it up by finding a super-achievable work task and doing it
As you can see from my example above, when you feel anxious, it’s easy to turn a relatively straightforward task into an overwhelming thought exercise that sends your brain into catastrophe mode. When you are mired in anxiety and avoiding your work, the important thing is to do something. Jonathan Baxter, a family therapist, gave me this advice:
“The experience of stress has to do with your body wanting to take action. If there are actions you can take — whether getting some exercise or cleaning the bathroom or teaching your kids something — go ahead and take them. When you take action, give yourself a moment to let yourself feel good about taking a step. Use your mind to give your body the signal that you have agency and are doing what you can. (“There, I did it!”) The goal is to feel active and effective rather than scrambling from one thing to the next.”
I like to take a page from positive psychology and choose a small, meaningful action that will build my motivation for work and to tackle bigger tasks ahead. Have you ever organized a messy spreadsheet and just felt so good? Pick an activity that connects you to your larger purpose and allows you to see yourself as an effective and competent individual, which will ultimately help you move towards doing the thing you’re avoiding.
5. If that seems impossible, pick a non-work task
If tackling work just feels like too much when you’re toiling from home and staring at a messy house or out-of-control kids, pick a non-work action that’s physical and helpful. Since I hunch and clench in my desk chair when I’m stuck, I like to pick a task that gets my body moving and my shoulders open. I might pick a household chore (I like to scrub the bathtub because it’s quick but physically demanding), cook, do some yard work or even run up my stairs a few times. I find that it helps me to get off my screen and into motion.
Notice how you feel after you do your tiny non-work task and whether you’re able to begin the thing you have been avoiding. Then notice: How long can you continue until anxiety hits again? Is there a specific activity that almost always gets you in the mood to tackle a task?
6. Keep adding to your anxiety-taming bag of tricks
Anxiety feels different for everyone. We all have different triggers, and we all react differently. Money, as I mentioned before, is a big anxiety trap for me. When I get unwelcome financial news, my brain immediately goes to a gloomy place: My business will fail, we will go broke, we will lose everything.
As you continue in your career, it’s crucial that you understand specifically what sets you off and how it affects your workday. Once you understand that, you can try to avoid these triggers and — when you can’t avoid them — use specific strategies or tools that can help you move out of anxiety.
Many people I talk to for my podcast “The Anxious Achiever” tell me that they find making to-do lists and detailed schedules helpful, because they help them cut down on ruminating and overwork. Others know that they need to sweat, get outside or run around with their dog to dissolve that knot of anxiety. I like to cook. When I’m anxious and unfocused, I make giant stockpots of broth or chili. Hey … it works for me.
It’s possible for you to create a remote workday that minimizes your anxiety, creates real connection and engagement with your coworkers, allows you to get your work done, and lets you feel OK about unplugging at night. But like all skills, learning how to manage your workday anxiety takes practice, time, and above all compassion for yourself. We all succumb to the cheese doodles at times, and that’s OK too.
Morra Aarons-Mele is a (mostly) happy, successful person. She also identifies as an extremely anxious overachiever. To normalize anxiety and help others manage theirs, Aarons-Mele launched and hosts The Anxious Achiever podcast for HBR Presents, which was a 2020 Webby Awards Honoree and is a top 10 management podcast. She’s passionate about helping people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. Aarons-Mele is also the founder of the award-winning social impact agency Women Online, which created a database of female influencers, the Mission List. She was named 2020 Entrepreneur of the Year at the Iris Awards, recognizing excellence in digital parenting media. Aarons-Mele is also a prolific writer. Since 2004 she has covered the campaign trail, the White House, the lactation room and the office cubicle. Her book, Hiding in the Bathroom: How To Get Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home), was published in 2017, and she has written for the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Slate, InStyle, O, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the Guardian.
By examining our actions and attitude, we can start to break the cycle, says psychology researcher Raquel Peel.
This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.
Before she met the love of her life, psychology researcher Raquel Peel says that she was a “romantic self-saboteur.” Her early experiences had affected her attitude and behavior towards love. In her TEDxJCUCairns talk, she recalls, “I assumed that people in my relationships would eventually leave me; I also assumed that all my relationships would fail.” Driven by these feelings of impending doom, Peel — a graduate student at James Cook University in Australia — would invariably “pull the plug” on romances whenever things got the least bit difficult.
Sound familiar?
She knew many other people who acted in deliberately self-destructive ways in relationships, so she decided to learn more about this behavior.She did it in two ways: by interviewing Australian psychologists who specialize in relationship counseling “to understand what self-sabotage looks like in practice” and by surveying more than 600 self-confessed saboteurs worldwide to find out what they did and why they did it.
“My participants varied in age, cultural background, and sexual orientation,” Peel says, “Yet they answered in very similar ways.” They exhibited one or more of what US psychologist and researcher John Gottman (watch his TEDx talk) calls “the four horsemen of the apocalypse,” or what he has identified as the primary behaviors that can lead to the end of a relationship: criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. And while the particular form that these take are as unique as the people surveyed, the people surveyed, according to Peel, “sabotage relationships for one main reason: to protect themselves.”
Of course, while self-protection is the reason given by most of her participants, the actual causes of sabotaging behaviors are complex, varied and deep-rooted. Still, Peel has this advice to share with any self-identified romantic saboteurs out there:
Stop entering relationships that you know are doomed.
One form of romantic self-sabotage is choosing partners that are just plain wrong for you. “We should not be pursuing every relationship that comes our way,” says Peel. “Pursue those relationships that have the potential to work.”
Get curious about how you act when you’re in a relationship.
Peel suggests: “Take a really good look at yourself and your behaviors in relationships and ask yourself, Are you someone who needs a lot of reassurance from your partner? Are you someone who gets nervous when things get too close?”
Think about those four horsemen — criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. How often do you exhibit any of them? Which are your go-tos? And what are the beliefs you hold about yourself or your partner when you act in these ways? Try to observe your actions — or think back to what you’ve done in the past — and strive to understand the reasons behind them.
View your relationship as a partnership.
“We need to figure out how to collaborate with our partners, and how, even, to be vulnerable together,” says Peel. “Are you and your partner on the same team? Do you talk to your partner about your relationship goals?”
Obviously, this isn’t appropriate in the early days when you’re getting to know each other. But when you’re in a committed relationship, writer Mandy Len Catron (watch her TED talk about the reality of love) says — borrowing from linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff — it helps to view it as a “work of art” that you two are co-creating together, in real time. Adopting this attitude can make you more excited about the future you’re both building, rather than seeing love, and therefore your relationship, as something that is happening to you beyond your control or input and likely to end in heartbreak.
Many romantic saboteurs mention the dispiriting sensation they have when they’re in a relationship knowing it’s just a matter of time before it will end. As Peel puts it, “it’s like staring into a crystal ball knowing exactly what’s going to happen.” However, the work-of-art mindset can help counter that pessimistic self-narrative. Instead, “you get to stop thinking about yourself and what you’re gaining or losing in your relationship, and you get to start thinking about what you have to offer,” says Catron.
Be kind to yourself.
Your reasons for developing self-sabotaging behaviors most likely spring from an understandable and human place. “It’s natural to want to protect yourself,” says Peel, “but the way out of it is to have insight into who you are in a relationship … and how best to collaborate with them. After all, if you know who you are in a relationship, your partner will also have a chance to get to know you, and together you can break the pattern to sabotage.” She adds, “Love will never be easy, but without self-sabotage, it is a lot more reachable.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniella Balarezo is a Media Fellow at TEDx. She is also a writer and comedian based in NYC.
Sheryl Chan at A Chronic Voice has been hosting the monthly Link Up Parties since 2017, that’s a lot of sharing and learning from people with chronic illnesses, please check out her website, the archives are extensive. Each month she provides five word prompts, do all five or at least three. This month I picked three, Breathing, Smiling, and Relishing.
This month I’m talking about what I do to survive and how looking honestly at our circumstances shapes the outcome. I’m inspired by people who have so much going on with their health/life and still smile, they want to know how others are doing, and they move forward with their life.
Breathing
I am breathing a huge sigh of relief! We were spared the damage so many others suffered from the storm. We had a massive Winter storm, the worst in 70 years for our state and it almost brought down the power grid. Our houses are not built to withstand weather below 24 degrees for an extended period of time and certainly not for lower temperatures. It was far below freezing for over 100 hours. People’s pipes were bursting, flooding their houses and apartments. You could see water raining down from the apartment above and destroying all the furniture in the apartment below. Many people lost power in the freezing tempters and the broken pipe caused many to have to shut the water off. We had several pipes break and we did have to turn our water off for three days. It’s heartbreaking to watch people go without water and electricity but it’s more painful when you know they are elderly or chronically ill. Reality hits you hard when you hear a story about a woman who has a stoma and her water is shut off. She gets so much water per day and she has to decide between washing her dishes and flushing the toilet. Hardcore reality.
Smiling
I do believe there are studies that show smiling makes you feel better. Something about sending signals to the brain. I feel happy most of the time but I don’t catch myself smiling a lot. March is a good time to pay attention to how I feel and making sure it’s showing on my face. I have to think about my husband and those around me, if I’m never smiling how will they know how happy I am. I’ve received some devastating health news this month, post about it to come. I have to remember that my health does not drive my happiness, I’m in charge of that. I can choose to be happy in spite of the circumstances.
Relishing
I received devastating news this month about my Immune Deficiency Disorder, Hypogammaglobulinemia. My immune system is in such bad shape that I need Plasma Infusion Therapy. There are a couple of issues right up front, one I feel pretty good, noting like my lab work suggests and I don’t like being dependant on others to give blood for me to get Plasma. To put my illness at the basic level it’s like there are so many players required on the field to win a game but I have a fraction of the players. I can catch almost anything I’m exposed to. That’s a hell of a position to be in. I’m relishing the time I have before my treatments began. I don’t have the complete treatment plan yet so I don’t know if I’ll be having monthly Infusion treatments or what the schedule is. It’s similar to the Antibiotic Infusion Treatments I received for Lyme Disease. Similar in that you sit in a reclining chair with an IV hooked up to your arm for several hours while the Infusion takes place.
I’m so glad you’ve joined me this week for another edition of Weekend Music Share.
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I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease in 2013 and almost died, I had 18 months of Antibiotic Infusion Treatments and took more prescriptions and supplements than I can count. I’ve been what I consider my normal healthy for years now.
The thing is, the Lyme virus went to my brain and continues to do damage albeit at a slower rate. There is no cure for Lyme Disease and you just have to deal with the relapses as they come. My biggest health problem has been cognitive, I have early onset Dementia and it’s a bitch! I have lost a great deal of my memory and can only drive within a few blocks of the house.
Why am I writing this post? When diagnosed I was told that I would continue to have complications with my immune system for years to come without a clear link to Lyme Disease.
Here we are in 2021and I’ve been diagnosed with a serious Immune Diffecency Disorder. Are they related? No-one will ever know but I have to ask.
I received devastating news this month about my Immune Deficiency Disorder, Hypogammaglobulinemia. My immune system is in such bad shape that I need Plasma Infusion Therapy. There are a couple of issues right up front, one I feel pretty good, noting like my lab work suggests and I don’t like being dependant on others to give blood for me to get Plasma. To put my illness at the basic level it’s like there are so many players required on the field to win a game but I have a fraction of the players. I can catch almost anything I’m exposed to. That’s a hell of a position to be in. I’m relishing the time I have before my treatments began. I don’t have the complete treatment plan yet so I don’t know if I’ll be having monthly Infusion treatments or what the schedule is. It’s similar to the Antibiotic Infusion Treatments I received for Lyme Disease. Similar in that you sit in a reclining chair with an IV hooked up to your arm for several hours while the Infusion takes place.
If you’ve been diagnosed with Lyme Diseases and find yourself battling unseeing unrelated illness, you’re not alone. The solace in that is you’re not alone with these challenges, the hurdles trying to get a doctor to understand and you’re not alone, period. One thing I’ve learned since my diagnosis is that there is a large Lyme community willing to listen and help any way they can.
You’re not crazy, it’s the illness that can make you feel that way.
It’s late morning and the teenagers in the house are still fast asleep long after you’ve got up. Should you rush upstairs and pull them out of bed by their feet? It may be tempting, but the answer is probably no. The evidence is mounting that sleep in adolescence is important for current and future mental health.
It should come as no surprise that a serious lack of sleep, or seriously disturbed sleep, is one of the most common symptoms of depression among adolescents. After all, however tired you might feel, it’s hard to drop off if you’re wracked with doubts or worries. This is true for adults too, with 92% of people with depression complaining of sleep difficulties.
What is perhaps less intuitive is that, for some, problems with sleeping might start before the depression, raising the risk of mental health problems in the future. Does this mean that sleep in teenagers should be taken more seriously? And can it lower the risk of depression later?
You might also be interested in:
The sleep illness that can be fatal Why science says you need a nap Why students need to get more sleep In a study published in 2020, Faith Orchard, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, examined the data from a large group of teenagers followed from the age of 15 to 24. Those who reported sleeping badly at the age of 15, but didn’t have depression or anxiety at the time, were more likely than their peers to be experiencing anxiety or depression when they reached 17, 21 or 24 years of age.
With adults too, sleep problems can be a predictor of future depression. A meta-analysis of 34 studies, which between them followed 150,000 people over a period of between three months and 34 years, found that if people had sleep problems, their relative risk of suffering depression later in life doubled. Of course, it doesn’t follow that everyone with insomnia is going to develop depression later on. Most people won’t. The last thing that people with insomnia need of course, is the worry about what might happen to them in the future.
But you can see why in some cases poor sleep might contribute to poor mental health. A deficit of sleep has well-established negative effects on us, including a tendency to withdraw from friends and family, a lack of motivation and increased irritability, all of which can affect the quality of a person’s relationships, putting them at greater risk of depression. On top of that there are biological factors to consider. A lack of sleep can lead to increased inflammation in the body, which has been implicated in mental health difficulties.
Researchers are now examining the relationship between sleep disorders and other mental health conditions. The eminent Oxford University neuroscientist Russell Foster has found that this link doesn’t only occur in depression. Disruption to circadian rhythms – the natural sleep-wake cycle – is not uncommon among people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. In some cases, the body clock can become so out of sync that people find themselves awake all night and asleep during the day.
Even when mental health problems precede disrupted sleep, the lack of sleep might exacerbate a person’s difficulties
His colleague, the clinical psychologist Daniel Freeman, has called for sleep problems to be given a higher priority within mental health care. Because they are common across different diagnoses, they don’t tend to be viewed as central to a particular condition. He feels they are sometimes neglected, when they could be tackled.
Even when mental health problems precede disrupted sleep, the lack of sleep might exacerbate a person’s difficulties. After all, just one night of sleep deprivation has a well-established negative impact on mood and thinking.
The complex relationship between sleep and mental health is further reinforced by the finding that if you treat depression, the problems with sleep don’t all disappear. It’s easy to see how psychological treatments which help people reduce ruminating over negative thoughts could also result in them falling asleep more easily. But in 2020 Shirley Reynolds, a clinical psychologist at Reading University, and her team trialled three different psychological treatments for depression. They worked equally well in reducing depression, but only sorted out the sleep problems for half of the participants. For the other half, the insomnia persisted, suggesting it was independent of their depression and needed to be addressed separately.
That said, problems sleeping and mental health difficulties can stem from the same causes. Traumatic or negative events, for example. Or excessive rumination or various genetic factors. Genes involved in serotonin pathways and dopamine functioning have been shown to be factors in both poor sleep and depression, as have the genes which influence a person’s circadian clock.
And, as we’ve already seen, it’s likely that insomnia and mental health issues exacerbate each other, making both issues worse. You’re distressed so you can’t sleep; you can’t sleep so you are more distressed – and so on, and so on, in an escalating cycle.
It’s also possible that a lack of sleep is not so much a cause of later depression, but more of an early warning signal. The worrying that stops you dropping off can in some cases be a first symptom of more serious mental health issues to come.
So perhaps persistent issues with sleep need to be taken more seriously in teenagers and adults
Foster is convinced that from a biological perspective, the best way to disentangle the web of correlation and causation is by studying the impact that disruption of circadian rhythms could be having on the brain. He says we need to look at the complex interactions between multiple genes, brain regions and neurotransmitters to understand what’s happening.
So perhaps persistent issues with sleep need to be taken more seriously in teenagers and adults. Sleep interventions are straightforward, and in some cases successful. What is already clear, from a meta-analysis of 49 studies, is that tackling poor sleep among those with insomnia, who are already experiencing symptoms of depression, not only helps them sleep better but also reduces the depression.
The large Oasis trial led by Daniel Freeman across 26 universities in the UK found that digital cognitive behavioural therapy for students with insomnia, not only helped them to sleep, but reduced the occurrence of hallucinations and paranoia, symptoms of psychosis.
The million-dollar question is whether sleep interventions could even prevent mental health problems down the line. To answer this, large-scale, long-term trials would be needed. One advantage of earlier and better interventions to prevent poor sleep – both for itself and to potentially reduce wider mental health problems – is that there is less stigma surrounding insomnia, so it might prove easier to persuade people to come forward for treatment.
Getting better sleep won’t on its own solve the mental health crisis, of course
In the meantime, anyone who has trouble sleeping can try the techniques shown to be most effective: ensuring you get enough light during the day (in the morning for most people); not napping for longer than 20 minutes; not eating or exercising or drinking caffeine late in the evening; avoid reading your emails or discussing stressful topics in bed; keeping the bedroom cool, quiet and dark; and trying to get up and go to bed at the same time each day.
Getting better sleep won’t on its own solve the mental health crisis, of course. But could it make a difference in the long run? Even if it doesn’t, as sleepy teenagers know, even for its own sake, there’s nothing better a good night’s sleep.
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