A very interesting study done on hamsters |(and published
in the journal, Molecular Psychiatry)
found that subjecting hamsters to lots of extra night-time light, such as the
situation in which most of us find ourselves nearly every night, namely,
reading and watching TV or working on a computer or playing video games instead
of sleeping, led to the hamsters becoming depressed.
And how can you tell when a hamster is depressed, you may
well wonder.
Easy: same as in humans.
The hamsters begin to show low energy, they lose interest
in eating, the become much more lackadaisical.
And as you’d expect, these symptoms disappeared when the
hamsters were allowed to resume their normal sleep-wake schedules.
In other words, perhaps the surge in depression that’s
been well documented over the last 50 years may in part be due to our
increasing avidity to staying up late at night, and you know sit-com reruns,
Letterman, solitaire on the computer, email messages that can easily be left for
later or not dealt with at all, none of those are worth feeling tired and
depressed.
