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Category: Dreams
What Your Dreams Say About Your Mental Health
After treatment for depression or anxiety, people’s dreams often improve in tone.
After treatment for depression or anxiety, people’s dreams often improve in tone.
People whose dreams are more positive have better mental health.
However, those who have more negative dreams tend to experience more anxiety while they are awake as well.
Indeed, after treatment for depression or anxiety, people’s dreams often improve in tone.
It may be because people who can regulate their emotions better while awake can also keep their emotions more positive while they sleep.
For the study, 44 people kept a dream diary for three weeks, recording what they remembered each morning.
They also rated the emotions they experienced with the dreams.
The results showed that people who experienced more positive dreams generally had greater peace of mind while awake as well.
Ms Pilleriin Sikka, the study’s first author, said:
“These findings show that if we want to understand how dream content is related to waking well-being, it is not enough to measure only the symptoms of mental ill-being but we should measure well-being in its own right.
Surprisingly, those aspects that are typically considered and measured as ‘well-being’ were not related to dream content.
So there seems to be something unique about peace of mind and anxiety.”
Anxiety while waking was linked to negative dreams, the authors explain:
“…individuals with more symptoms of anxiety expressed more negative affect in subsequent dream reports and rated their dreams to contain more negative affect.”
Previous studies have linked depression and anxiety to worse dreams:
“People with different mental health disorders (e.g., anxiety, depression), sleep disorders, and health behavior problems report more nightmares and negatively toned dreams in general.
Interestingly, the reduction of depressive symptoms as a result of antidepressant treatment has been shown to accompany a corresponding change in dream affect.”
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The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Sikka et al., 2018).
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Usually when we recall emotional memories, the brain pumps out stressful neurochemicals…
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One of the purposes of dreaming is to take the edge off emotional memories, research suggests.
While dreaming, which we do during 20% of our sleep, the brain chemistry related to stress powers down.
This enables us to process emotional memories without the same jolts of fear and anxiety.
People in the study who looked at a series of emotional images felt much less disturbed by them after sleeping.
Those who looked at them in the morning first, then in the evening, without sleeping, reported a higher emotional reaction.
Brain scans also showed lower emotional reactivity in the amygdalas of those who slept.
Dr Matthew Walker, who led the study, said:
“The dream stage of sleep, based on its unique neurochemical composition, provides us with a form of overnight therapy, a soothing balm that removes the sharp edges from the prior day’s emotional experiences.”
The research was inspired by the treatment of war veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.
This type of dream therapy may be inefficient in veterans since when a…
“…flashback is triggered by, say, a car backfiring, they relive the whole visceral experience once again because the emotion has not been properly stripped away from the memory during sleep.”
Dr Els van der Helm, the study’s first author, said:
“During REM sleep, memories are being reactivated, put in perspective and connected and integrated, but in a state where stress neurochemicals are beneficially suppressed.”
Dr Walker explained that the research was inspired by the side-effect of a blood pressure drug.
It happened to reduce levels of norepinephrine in the brain.
Dr Walker said:
“We know that during REM sleep there is a sharp decrease in levels of norepinephrine, a brain chemical associated with stress.
By reprocessing previous emotional experiences in this neuro-chemically safe environment of low norepinephrine during REM sleep, we wake up the next day, and those experiences have been softened in their emotional strength.
We feel better about them, we feel we can cope.”
The study was published in the journal Current Biology (ven der Helm et al., 2011).
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