Is poor sleep responsible for your winter blues? Find out

Have you ever woken up feeling drowsy even though you’ve gotten enough hours of sleep? Have you ever felt like not getting out of your cozy bed due to winter blues?

You might just have depression or anxiety triggered by sleep apnea.

Treating obstructive sleep apnea focused on the obvious stuff: snoring, gasping, daytime drowsiness. But a new study suggests they might be missing something equally important.

Research published in JAMA Network Open found that middle-aged and older adults at high risk for sleep apnea face roughly 40% higher odds of experiencing depression, anxiety, or psychological distress.

Among people who started the study mentally healthy, those at high risk for sleep apnea were 20% more likely to develop mental health problems over time.

“The study highlights the urgent need for integrated screening and support for both sleep and mental health,” the researchers wrote, though they did not declare a definitive cause and effect.

The link between sleep and mental health emerged slowly as before the 1960s, medicine fixated on physical symptoms of sleep apnea, sometimes called Pickwickian syndrome after the rotund boy in Dickens who kept falling asleep.

The body and mind were treated separately but that started changing in the 1980s, when early clinical studies noticed a significant percentage of sleep apnea patients also struggled with anxiety or depression.

Sleep apnea attacks mental health through multiple pathways, most of them operating below conscious awareness.

Sleep fragmentation comes first. Repeated awakenings, often unnoticed by the sleeper, prevent deep restorative sleep. The result: chronic fatigue, hair-trigger irritability, stress sensitivity cranked to maximum.

Then there’s oxygen deprivation. Each breathing pause starves the brain, a condition called intermittent hypoxia.

Over time, this alters crucial areas like the hippocampus, which handles memory formation, and the frontal cortex, which manages emotional control and decision-making.

Evidence indicates that sleep apnea alone can cause early cognitive decline, affecting attention, memory, and executive functions even in otherwise healthy individuals. It acts as what researchers call a “brain drain.”

Some researchers are exploring sleep microstructure, the fine-grained architecture of sleep stages, looking for patterns that predict mental health complications.

However, the message for readers is clear: loud snoring, waking up tired despite adequate time in bed, or unexplained mood changes are all discussions you would want to have with your doctor.