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Some Brains Are Out of Sync
Disrupted circadian clocks appear to cause cases of depression and ADHD.
Thoreau famously wrote that some men march to the beat of a different drummer. But psychology researchers today are taking that literally, finding that daily clocks that are out of sync can cause depression or ADHD. Furthermore, restoring natural rhythms can alleviate symptoms of these conditions.
Major disruptions of daily patterns of behavior and hormone secretion have been associated with most mental health conditions, including depression, mania, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, ADHD, and dementia. But even though sleep disruption is known to exacerbate most of these conditions, until fairly recently disturbances of sleep and other daily rhythms have usually been framed simply as symptoms of these conditions.
Sinking into the topic of how desynchronized rhythms can contribute to mental health disorders requires an understanding of the biology of human rhythms. For years, astrology and the 1970’s pseudoscientific fad of biorhythms discouraged some scientists from investigating biological rhythms. But research has revealed how the body generates daily rhythms, and how hormones, light, and behavioral interventions can resynchronize disrupted rhythms. Being out of synch no longer needs to be treated like an out-of-body…
