It truly can.

The first thing I recommend to anyone that shows early signs of depression is: take care of eating/sleeping/exercising.

Besides giving a concrete plan of action, if you take care of those, quality of life greatly improves, and you can "build" on that, getting out of the rut.

Not suggestion that one should sleep lesser, but it's more important to have a deep sleep. If one is able to sleep like a log even for 6 to 7 hours, it's extremely helpful.

Except that you may not be able to sleep more than 5 or 6 hours, exactly because of stress / burnout/ depression. I haven't scored a 9 hours night in many years, not because I don't have time for it, not because I would be the kind of people who only need short nights, but because I cannot, even after a sleep deprivation period.

As I've gotten older I can't sleep 9 hours straight like I used to. On days where I only sleep 5-6 hours, I get up to pee and go back to bed and rest for another hour or 2. Sometimes I go back to sleep, sometimes not. But it's interesting, because the days I don't go back to sleep, I spend that hour or 2 half asleep and think about my work (HashBackup). I just let my mind wander to whatever it wants. It's sort of the same thing that happens when I have a programming problem I can't easily figure out, go take a shower or a walk outside, and the answer comes to me. This reduces stress because instead of pounding on a problem, you let your mind solve it more slowly in the background while you are focused on other things.