News Briefs: Poor Sleep; Depression Treatment; Gift Wrapping
A Good Night’s Sleep May Help Ease Anxiety Symptoms, While Poor Sleep Worsens Them
If you’ve ever awakened in the morning after a healthy, deep sleep and felt less worried or anxious about things, it may be due to some reorganizing within the brain during slumber. In a small study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, researchers found that the deep sleep stage restores the brain’s prefrontal mechanism that regulates emotions, lowering emotional and physiological reactivity and preventing an increase in anxiety. A sleepless night, on the other hand, appears to foster a shutdown of the medial prefrontal cortex, allowing the brain’s emotional centers to become overactive. Little or no sleep can trigger up to a 30 percent rise in anxiety levels. The researchers noted that throughout the industrialized world, people are getting less sleep than they used to, while the numbers of people with anxiety disorders is on the rise. The two trends may not be coincidental, the researchers said, but instead may be closely linked. If you’re having trouble getting a good night’s sleep and you’ve noticed your anxiety levels increasing, work on improving your sleep hygiene or talk with a health-care provider, such as a sleep specialist, about strategies you can try to get more deep sleep and experience less stress when you awaken.
Antidepressants or Psychotherapy: Which Is Better in the Long Run?
Standard treatments for depression include antidepressant medications, psychotherapy (also known as talk therapy), or some combination of the two approaches. The cost and effectiveness for each treatment varies from person to person. If you have recently been diagnosed with depression, you may wonder what treatment option will be best for you down the road. A study published recently in Annals of Internal Medicine may help provide some answers. The study, which included researchers from Harvard University and the University of Michigan, found that for people with newly diagnosed major depression, the costs and benefits of talk therapy vs. taking an antidepressant average out to about the same after five years. “One might assume that antidepressants are more cost-effective than psychotherapy, because they don’t require travel time, time away from work, and as many contacts with providers as therapy does,” says study author Eric L. Ross, MD, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “But when incorporating the long-term effectiveness of each treatment, we found that neither treatment is consistently superior to the other.” Researchers note that for people who prefer to try talk therapy rather than start taking medications that come with possible side effects, the long-term benefits of psychotherapy may be worth the higher costs at the start of your treatment. You and your health-care provider should discuss the short- and long-term risks, benefits, costs, and goals of your treatment.
How Well (or Poorly) a Gift Is Wrapped May Affect the Recipient’s Response
Did you receive any beautifully wrapped gifts over the holidays? Any presents that were a little sloppily wrapped, maybe with an unsightly crease or two? Though you may not have realized it, your response to the gift after opening may have been set in motion before you removed the bow. In a study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, researchers found that a beautifully wrapped present raises expectations in the mind of the recipient, while a poorly wrapped present does the opposite. In the multi-part study, basketball fans were given a mug of their favorite team or that of a rival and were then questioned about their attitudes toward the gift. A key finding was that people tended to have more favorable attitudes toward the poorly wrapped presents compared to the nicely wrapped ones, even if they received a mug that didn’t represent their favorite team. In another part of the study, participants received JVC earbuds that were either beautifully wrapped or sloppily wrapped. They were then asked to rate their expectations. The participants who opened the beautifully wrapped presents had much higher expectations for what was inside and had generally less favorable attitudes than those who received the sloppily wrapped presents. The lesson may be to take it easy when wrapping an inexpensive item so as not to build up the recipient’s expectations. Or make sure that the exquisitely wrapped present is a can’t-miss item that would wow someone regardless of the paper and bows surrounding it.
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