Why Sleep is Important for Your Ketamine Patients and YOU!

We know you know sleep is important, and we know you are probably a little sleep deprived yourself. Especially since you are considering or already starting a ketamine infusion practice. But as physicians we’re used to little sleep. At some point in your medical career, you probably wore it as a badge of honor not sleeping because of crazy call-night. So we know you put sleep towards the bottom of the list of to-dos. But guess what? So do your ketamine infusion patients and that can be a reason they aren’t doing as well as they could with their treatments. 

In this blog, we are going to discuss why you sleep is important for your ketamine patients and YOU by going over how sleep is related to mental health, how ketamine affects sleep, and more.

Chances are that your patients are experiencing poor sleep and this could be affecting their mental health.

Why Sleep Matters For Your Ketamine Patient

You’re balancing your old clinical job as well as starting your ketamine practice. Or you’re juggling running your clinic but now you just found out you need to hire someone new to answer the phone! Remembering to ask your patients about sleep can easily fall down the priority list. But YOU NEED TO ASK this. There’s a vicious cycle between mental health problems and lack of sleep. In a study by Vgontzas et al., both short sleep duration and mental health issues were strong predictors of persistent insomnia. They also found that mental health problems were strongly associated with insomnia compared to normal sleep. Szklo-Coxe M et al. reported insomnia symptoms or markers increased depression risk 2.2- to 5.3-fold.

Your patients likely have poor sleep, and poor sleep can also be contributing to their treatment resistant depression as well. Let’s not forget your patients with PTSD. Sleep promotes generalization of extinction of conditioned fear according to Pace-Schott EF et al. This “generalization of extinction” is the goal of exposure therapy. Meaning with repeated stimuli the patient encounters, will result in a more subdued or absent conditioned fear response, i.e. less fear. According to Orr SP et al. patients with PTSD have an abnormal inclination toward fear conditioning plus impaired extinction of conditioned fear responses. In a nutshell, this means less sleep accomplishes the exact opposite of what you want for your PTSD patients.

Studies show that ketamine can help improve one’s sleep. As a result, improved sleep can help improve mental health.

How Ketamine Affects Sleep

Early research is showing ketamine appears to improve sleep. Song B et al. pointed out that because of this finding, there are possible new applications for ketamine, such as treatment for sleep disturbances and circadian rhythm disorders. Duncan WC Jr. et al. showed one of the possible antidepressant mechanisms of ketamine may be associated with its actions on clock-gene-related molecules that result in changes in the circadian rhythm. In regards to ketamine, sleep, and depression, a different study by Duncan WC Jr. et al. demonstrated that patients with treatment-resistant depression had not only improved depression scores after receiving ketamine as we know, but also improved total sleep and decreased waking after.

In summary, your patients could be having poor sleep contributing to their worsening mental health. Poor sleep in turn worsens their mental health. Research is showing ketamine improves sleep, which then helps with their mental health! While all this research is very promising, we look to future research to better understand this interplay of ketamine and sleep.

Not only is sleep important for your patients to get better, but is also important to help you become a better and more functional ketamine doctor and business owner.

TWO Reasons Why Sleep Is Important for YOU and Your Ketamine Patients

Reason 1: Asking about sleep, as well as other lifestyle factors such as diet, physical activity, and social connection, and addressing the impaired sleep can help your patient maximize their chance of getting better the most. As the above research showed, ketamine is going to help them sleep better thus feel better, or they are going to feel better and therefore sleep better. You can support them in improved sleep hygiene or getting tested for obstructive sleep apnea (as we prompted one of our patients to do!). Ketamine alone is not going to change our patient’s life. Making changes in their everyday life supported by ketamine therapy does, and improvement in sleep is one of those changes. 

Reason 2: Better sleep for you equals being a better ketamine specialist and business owner. Good sleep means you are in a higher functioning state to see patients and make good business decisions. You need good judgment and actions based on your values instead of out of fear to run a successful business. We’ve all been there. After a crazy day at the hospital, doubting your diagnosis and treatment. Wondering if you did the right thing. Plus you’re hungry and you haven’t had quality time with family or friends in weeks. Then a good night’s rest, seems to make things a little easier. The world seems a little less oppressive, a little bit brighter. Well it’s not different from running your own ketamine clinic. So a word of advice for personal experience, get some sleep!

By making some adjustments in your schedule to allow you longer hours of sleep, you will be able to treat and guide your patients better.

Summary

We understand how difficult it is for us to get proper sleep when we have so much going on in life. But guess what? Sleep probably comes above everything else in your priority list. Before you can guide your patients on how to sleep better, we believe that you should walk the talk and go catch those Z’s yourself! This can be started by adjusting your schedule or even avoiding watching your favorite shows on Netflix late at night. Why don’t you challenge yourself to try getting proper sleep tonight, and see how big of a difference it can make? Who knows? It might just be what you need.

Are you ready to take the next step and start your ketamine clinic? Join our email list and be notified about the next free webinar and open registration for Ketamine StartUp.

You’re probably aware that sleep is important, yet deprive yourself of it most of the time. Your ketamine patients could be sleep-deprived too. In this blog, we are going to talk about why both you and your patients need good sleep in your lives.

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