Welcome to RESTED

RESTED is a Wellcome Trust funded project that investigates how circadian rhythm disturbances in sleep and heart rate reciprocally affect young adults’ mental health. We specifically focus on symptoms of dissociation (e.g., depersonalisation, derealisation), anxiety, depression and psychosis.

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RESTED is funded through a Wellcome Trust Mental Health Award (grant reference 227112/Z/23/Z)

Project partners

Our key goals

1. To understand the causal mechanisms linking sleep (multiple parameters), autonomic function (heart rate parameters), waking cognition and symptoms of dissociation, depression, anxiety and psychosis.

2. To test and evaluate low-cost interventions for improving autonomic function, sleep and symptoms of dissociation, depression, anxiety and psychosis.

Focus groups

We work with people with lived experience of dissociation, anxiety, depression and psychosis. Your stories and insights are important for shaping our research.

Tracking study

Starting in autumn 2025, our 4-week tracking study will measure fluctuations in circadian rhythms and mental wellbeing to better understand their links.

Sleep intervention study

Starting in 2026, our sleep intervention study is designed to improve circadian rhythms in sleep and autonomic function over the course of 8 weeks.

Dr Helge Gillmeister

Principle Investigator

“I am a cognitive neuroscientist with a long-standing interest in the human self image, its underpinnings in basic bodily processes and its distortions in mental ill health. With RESTED, my team and I hope to understand how fluctuations in our body clocks and in our daily wellbeing can predict one another. I believe that working with the body’s natural rhythms holds great promise for a future where everyone feels a little more balanced.”

The importance of lived experience

How RESTED embeds lived experience of mental illness

People with lived experience have a direct influence on and voices within the RESTED project. Our team includes Joe Perkins (guitarist, author, advocate and trustee at Unreal, the UK’s only charity for people for depersonalisation-derealisation), Sophia Carbonero (clinical and therapeutic practitioner, supervisor, trainer, accredited counsellor and lecturer) and Helen Leckie (advocate and advisor, formerly at Autism Anglia). Sophia and Joe were involved in writing the funding proposal.

At strategic stages within our project, we consult our Lived Experience Advisory Panels (LEAPs). These panels consist of diverse young adults with symptoms of depersonalisation-derealisation or other dissociative disorders, depression, anxiety or psychosis, and are recruited through community sampling, Unreal and our NHS collaborators ESNEFT.
Panels will discuss people’s self-awareness of the links between their body clocks, sleep and mental wellbeing, how people may engage with tracking and intervention studies, how to best design our materials and present our findings and other scientific knowledge around this topic, how the tested interventions may be used in future and what the implications of our findings are for the public healthcare system.
If you have a story to share, too, we would love to hear from you! Contact us and tell us about your sleep, your heart, your thoughts and your mental wellbeing.

Milestones

July 2024 – Project start date

June 2025 – First LEAPs (focus groups) run at Unreal

July 2025 – Work on ALSPAC longitudinal dataset begins

September 2025 – Tracking study begins

Outputs / publications

tbc

For Milad

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