Sleep - The Foundation We Keep Skipping
Almost every patient I see has a sleep story. We treat it like a luxury. It is medicine.
If I had to choose one variable to optimize for almost every patient — depressed, anxious, struggling at work, struggling in marriage — I would choose sleep before anything else. We treat it like a luxury. It is medicine.
Modern Indian life is built against sleep. Late dinners. Phones in bed. Television in the bedroom. Children whose schedules push parents past midnight. The cumulative effect, over years, is not just tiredness. It is mood instability, weakened immunity, fragile concentration, lower libido, and a quietly increased risk of depression.
If a patient improved their sleep by one good hour every night, I could discharge half of them in three months.
The first intervention is almost always the same: protect the last ninety minutes of your day. No screens. Dim light. No work conversations. A consistent wake time, even on weekends. It sounds simple. It is. The difficulty is permission — most adults need to be told they are allowed to do this.
Sleep is not the entire treatment. But it is the floor under everything else. Build the floor first.
Psychiatrist and sexologist, Nizamabad. Writing here every other week about mental and sexual health, plainly and without judgement.