The usual assumption is that sleep will sort itself out once the underlying problem is dealt with. Sometimes it does. Often it becomes the thing holding the problem in place.
Sleep as a symptom
Disrupted sleep is among the most consistent early features of depression, anxiety, mania and post-traumatic stress, and the pattern carries information. Waking at 4am and being unable to get back to sleep is a classic depressive pattern. Being unable to fall asleep because the mind will not stop is more typical of anxiety. A sharply reduced need for sleep, with energy rather than exhaustion, is a feature of mania and is one of the things clinicians look for.
Sleep as a driver
It also runs the other way. Sustained poor sleep degrades emotional regulation and concentration, and can maintain a depressive or anxious episode after whatever started it has resolved. That is the reasoning behind treating insomnia as a condition in its own right rather than waiting for the mood to lift.
How common it is
About one in four people in Singapore reports sleeping badly. Bad sleep here is closer to normal than to unusual, which is worth knowing if you have been treating yours as a personal failing.
Nobody has measured it nationally since, and sleep is not tracked in the national health survey at all. For something this common, remarkably little attention is paid to it.
What to do with this
Two things. If your sleep has changed and stayed changed, raise it with a doctor as the thing you came about, not as a detail you mention on the way out. And if you are already being treated for something else and the sleep has not recovered, say so. It can be treated on its own, and cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia is available in the public system.
Where to get it is on sleep.
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