Sleep helps process emotions
unibe.ch
unibe.ch
There's nothing more agonizing in the morning than the few seconds of half-consciousness where the memory of having lost a loved one is absent... only to have it all rush back in an instant. I hated this both when I split with my first serious partner, and when I lost my grandfather. Waking to a nightmare and wishing you were still asleep.
When I wake up, it's respite.
I have a very rich dream life but it is also very much sometimes influenced by dead relatives or current personal life events. For the latter I can't/won't do anything about it but for the first one it has always worked to tell them in my dream "begone, now". I have no bad blood left with those people though so maybe take what I say with a grain of salt and see if you really want to tell him that. Also none of the dead people (and my first dog) who I used to dream of were dead too soon or in a tragedy. I believe my dreams are made up of current events in our life and the psychological state you are in: anxiety, love, hate... those emotions will taint and shape the dream sometimes in very obvious way. Those dreams are also signals to me that I am not dealing with it like I should, otherwise it wouldn't happen so often. There's no escape if I dive in work during daylight and it comes back haunting at night.
I get the sense that you are not being allowed enough of an opportunity to express how bad those feelings make you feel as much as you would like to be able to. And if that’s the case, then I wish for you to find the right means to deeply let it all out, in a safe environment, just so that you would not have to fear each morning about that feeling’s return.
It is such a draining feeling. Let alone the double burden of having to also practice continually the simultaneous dispossession of internal self-restriction. Hope you love strongly again.
A type of therapy that's become more popular recently is called Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR).
You lie down, while the therapist asks you to follow their index finger with your eyes as they move it back and forth about 12 inches in front of you. So it's recreating those rapid eye movements. At the same time, you're asked to recall a traumatic event, bringing back the images, any sounds, thoughts, in detail.
This is a fairly new form of therapy, with both strong supporters and critics. But a lot of evidence points to the fact that, for whatever reason, this technique allows people to more safely access their trauma, process it, and take control of their thoughts.
I first read about in this book The Body Keeps The Score (by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD), which by the way is absolutely fascinating. In a nutshell it's about trauma. But talks about different types of trauma, the effects it has on your brain, childhood vs adult trauma, treatments, his experience treating it, etc.
It's an exciting area of study and there's evidently something about REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and processing memories/trauma.
Works always from PTSD through DID, which is a great range! :D
It's fascinating.
I've noticed this helps me take the shock of the cold water so much better. I feel like it helps my emotional mind latch onto a simple task. It's like when you're air drumming and you nail all of the parts in a song and you feel great because there's something so satisfying about your mind predicting an outcome and then that our coming happening rhythmically. I feel it's the same but on a simpler scale when doing my steps and breathing.
Could you point to a source on this? Genuinely curious to see what these items look like, I searched but no relevant results.
There are some that let you hook up headphones as well. It's all about bilateral stimulation and some people get it better through touch as opposed to visually. From the APA:
"During EMDR therapy, clinical observations suggest that an accelerated learning process is stimulated by EMDR’s standardized procedures, which incorporate the use of eye movements and other forms of rhythmic left-right (bilateral) stimulation (e.g., tones or taps). While clients briefly focus on the trauma memory and simultaneously experience bilateral stimulation (BLS), the vividness and emotion of the memory are reduced."
https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/eye-movement-r...
The idea is that you think about a very emotional event. While you think about this you will get little tasks (for example to move your eyes). Because your brain is now busy with the tasks it also resets the extreme emotional reaction of the event you were thinking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy#Response_rate_to_...
It has some theories on a synapse level and some AI/NN analogues regarding the paradox of "good sleep = good mood" and yet "no sleep = relief" for depressed people.
Especially during times of duress, I find that if I allow myself to be conscious of how I’m feeling, there’s a really good chance that I’ll wake up the next day with a clearer idea of the next step in the process. It’s almost like there’s a limit to how much I can process per “awake period”.
I've always wondered if there's something that induces these special dreams. I know that diet might have an effect on dreams, especially some types of cheese [0]. So, I'm just throwing this idea out there that maybe there's some link in diet, dreams, and mental health.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211117-does-cheese-real...
Maybe it’s good health leading to leftover nighttime surplus reflective capacity - with a grain of salt: I once read a paper [0] suggesting that while awake, the brain processes exteroceptive signals; asleep, it processes interoceptive signals - maybe it’s a ‘belief confirmation’ / error-prediction “circuit” gone haywire, affirming beliefs so strongly that you awake to feel the beliefs hot in your bones, but for no apparent reason. But maybe it’s just a jolt that happens like something to remind you of what it feels like to have the feeling of strongly held convictions, if you’ve been having a hard time coping with sparse rewards from the outside world. I could only speculate :)
(I agree that people use the word vaguely and in a lot of different ways)
Aren't all emotions? I guess it depends what you define as emotion. Pain is a feeling and very simple, if it's physical. Emotional pain is different and can be very complex.
The distinction between thoughts/emotions conscious/unconscious is entirely arbitrary and made up.
Not really. The amygdala is much more involved with emotions.
If you look into EMDR therapy for PTSD there is some interesting theory there. The short version is that extreme emotion prevents memories from being properly processed and stored, but techniques can be used to fix that.
I've seen EMDR used to great effect on someone. I've also experienced REM while awake and reprocessing some memories on two occasions.
I dont think anyone really understands this stuff, but there are explanations that make sense at times.
Worked for me.. and don't binge on the news and food too much lol
(My sleep is absolute garbage despite years of attempts to fix it, and all of these articles both scare and dismay me)
That fixed wake up time concept seems to be the bedrock of sensible sleep programs. It makes massive common sense. Unfortunately it nearly ruined my life. I tried it for a couple of months and it ground my life to a raging headache halt, taking my sleep from two or three hours a night to 30 minutes or an hour if that.
Restricting screen time before bed doesn’t seem to matter for me, but what I did find to be very helpful was not to have any in the periods I wake up at night, which happen at least every hour.
Melatonin does nothing for me, whether it’s 1mg or 10mg.
Very touched that you took the time.
1. See a therapist 2. Avoid taking sleep medication 3. Accept that you're not going to sleep when you aren't sleeping
If you're not taking drugs then everything that you're going through when you're not sleeping is natural. Your body is designed to go without sleep. When you haven't slept in 48 hours don't worry about "not sleeping again tonight" just accept that you may not and that's fine, and you'll sleep eventually.
Following this advice I've gotten into a rhythm where I've slept 7h a night for months. I've had maybe a couple bad nights but it never spirals out.
Have also tried things like yoga, meditation, melatonin, milk before bed, waking at a fixed hour, eating early, eating late, not eating at all, high complex carb diet, paleo diet, exercising early in the day, exercising late in the day, not exercising, and others.
Very grateful for the advice, though. I am very very open to it and am grateful for your caring.
Of course, cleaning up your lifestyle will do wonders for your neurotransmitters over the long term. Focus on diet, exercise, and reducing stress. Good luck
Once the process is complete I'm able to more easily deal with a similar sensations while awake.
The key understanding is that the same emotion can be triggered in different situations. In the dream a huge monster could be attacking you. In real life the same emotion is felt by simply being in the presence of a dog.
If you can deal with the emotion in the dream. You'll have much more success in waking life too.
"How and why these emotions are reactivated is unclear. The prefrontal cortex integrates many of these emotions during wakefulness but appears paradoxically quiescent during REM sleep."
The prefrontal cortex is responsible for a lot of our "executive functioning"; the areas of our brain that work together to make decisions when we are awake. While we are awake both our emotional and executive functions are active, but in REM sleep our executive functions shut down and but our emotional functions do not.
What is so useful about this state is that it allows us to gain insight onto our underlying emotions without any concealment from our executive functions (which we often use to hide our emotional state from others while we are awake). If we focus on our own behaviour as characters within our own dreams, and less on the extreme circumstances we find ourselves in, we will surprisingly often witness ourselves perform odd behaviours, which, due to the nature of the quiet prefrontal cortex, are revealing of oddities in our emotional wiring. These disturbances within our emotions are what a good therapist is trying to find, yet our dreams can really do a lot of the diagnostic legwork (I believe it is their function).
A good example, which I include in a paper I wrote on the topic (https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz), was the dream of a friend of mine. She dreamt of a very dirty and smelly homeless man. In the room with this homeless man was a bed, but not a normal bed. This bed was dangerous and it would throw you into the air without warning. The homeless man told her he was feeling sad and he wanted her to come to bed with him (in a non sexual way). She did not want to fulfil his request, but felt she could not upset him and lay in the bed.
If you look at the situation (one the requires a clear but polite "no") and her response (a reluctant yes), and we layer on our knowledge that this is a purely emotional response, we gain a great deal of insight into how her unconscious emotional responses might be impacting her life (excessive responsibility for the emotions of others).
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It is also not surprising that the article finds that the dreaming brain has a bias towards unanxious interpretation of external stimuli. The brain is profoundly unanxious during REM sleep: the fight or flight neurotransmitter norepinephrine is ~80% below its base level during waking, and even though we might dream of scary things, paradoxically, our amygdala (the area of the brain responsible for threats) is as inactive as the prefrontal cortex.
There has been a great deal of research which compares dreaming to mind wandering. The level of stress that our brains are experiencing (norepinephrine levels + amygdala activation) dictate the contents of our mind wandering. If you fear flying and are sitting on an airplane before takeoff, your brain will be stressed and you will find terrible aviation outcomes popping into your head (the plane crashing on takeoff, etc.). These negative thoughts are designed to make you take avoidant action; getting off the plane!
However, as mentioned above, in dreaming our minds are distinctly unanxious. This, I believe, means that the brains design situations where we should be unavoidant. The dream with the homeless man is a good example of this. It is a great situation to say no in (it was notable that my friend did not feel physically threatened/coerced by the homeless man when she told me about the dream). These situations which urge unavoidant behaviour often provide a fantastic backdrop to contrast our purely emotional behaviour, which, more often than not, is disturbed by fears we picked up in our childhood.
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If you are interested in reading more please see my paper Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering, https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz.
It was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590