There are lots of reasons your mood might tank at night. Here’s how to address the bedtime blues.
It’s not uncommon for our minds to unleash a torrent of difficult feelings under the cover of darkness: sadness and negative thoughts may surface at night, making sleep hard to come by.
On social media and elsewhere people often refer to this as “nighttime depression.” But is that really a thing? And if so, why do some people get blue at night?
Feeling down after dusk doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a mental health condition, experts said. Understanding why it happens can help you take steps to feel better.
What is nighttime depression?
Nighttime depression is a colloquial term for depressive symptoms that either appear or worsen late at night. It is not itself a diagnosis.
While anxiety can also ramp up at night, and tends to make people feel agitated, tense and restless, nighttime depression is best characterized as a low mood.
“It’s a sense of sadness,” said Dr. Theresa Miskimen Rivera, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Rutgers University and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association. “It’s that feeling of: There’s no joy. My life is so blah.”