Hypothesis being that something about a well rested mind lets a waking person check off more of a list of things to consider first thing in the morning.
In contrast, I find a relative peace at 3am, since it's merely a continuation of what I had been doing earlier that day. I'm in a groove, and there's no major decisions to make regarding my resource allocation.
Waking up is absolutely one of my least favorite parts of the day. It comes with a tremendous burden, especially when living alone and not having a fixed schedule or a boss.
I can give another off-the-cuff alternative: sleep deprivation reduces self-awareness, and thus self-report of depressed feelings. It might be that at this point the "brain" is more susceptible to treatment, but that's an entirely different matter.
It is generally accepted that the negative effects of sleep deprivation last longer than a day too. If you are sleep deprived you can't 'catch up' by sleeping in for a night or two (for example on the weekend).
The first few times I happened to do it was not because I was aware of the link (20 years ago nobody wrote about it). It was by accident because I've stayed up so late that dawn surprised me during a night of insomnia. So it made more sense to just power through the day with coffee rather than mess up my sleep pattern. It certainly works for me like some kind of reset.
She said it was for the patients whom were brought in because they just tried to kill themself’s, or told admittance they wanted to die.
I had the idiotic idea I could cure my dysthymia (Minor depression) by sleep deprivation, and it didn’t work at all.
Note how you haven't pointed to a single thing that's bad with his post, but nonetheless managed to sling several condescending accusations (has no clue, quasi-poetic, nonsense) at him...
And all that for a point where he doesn't even pretend to give any specific explanation or causual relationship or anything, just wants recap with a description of the outward appeareance of the phenomenon, precisely to show that we have no clue about it yet:
"It looks like sleep is somehow renewing these people's depressions. As if depression is caused by some injury during sleep, heals part of the way during an average day (or all the way during an extra-long day of sleep deprivation) and then the same injury gets re-inflicted during sleep the next night".
In TFA this is not an explanation of what happens, but an "it looks as if somehow" to highlight exactly the current lack of an explanation, an explicitly presented as such.
The last time I made some headway on why I seem to endlessly procrastinate (said headway being enabled by, er, "self medication"), I came to the conclusion that it's because my brain sees a whole bunch of things to do, and instead of taking the rational approach of "well take things one at a time", it instead gets into a whirlwind of indecision, panics under the stress of all these things to do, and immediately starts reaching for an escape, thus compounding the problem. In the "self medicated" state my brain was more able to get into a groove of "okay, do $N more things" and actually make some headway, but only until the nausea caught up to me (at which point I had to force myself to call it a day).
My hope is that it's just a matter of tooling, and that a better toolset will help me get out of ruts without needing to rely on mind-altering substances.
Then I'd get frustrated with myself and probably go surf reddit for the rest of the day.
No system of any type has worked for me consistently.
Similar problems hit me with exercise. About the only system I have there is too obligate myself to finish something. For example, if I walk the dog a mile out, I have to walk the mile in, as well. Bike to work? I have to bike home now.
How I perform when I have a bad day is completely different from my performance on a good day. Something that's a task today might not be considered like one tomorrow.
There'll be days where I'll only do 25 small things then call it a day, and that's okay.
Can you permit yourself to subdivide those tasks that turn out to be more difficult?
I used to have an hour or so a week where I would consider what I called process improvement. And if anything ever really slows me down, I do consider that a priority.
I once found a weird import issue in a Google App Engine demo that, IIRC, traced back through to pip, virtualenv, and eventually setuptools.