8 ms·

Sleep helps process emotions

213 points by laurex 4y ago

ianandrich 4y ago
Huh. So sleep plays the role of EMDR?
mirceal 4y ago
Emotions run on the same circuitry as thoughts / knowledge. I'm going to speculate that the same mechanism that works to consolidate memories is at work with emotions (and emotions are encoded in memories) The distinction between thoughts/emotions conscious/unconscious is entirely arbitrary and made up.
- deepsun 4y ago
  And those who think a lot often have problems with emotions.
  - loceng 4y ago
    Or is it those highly sensitive and therefore more emotional - said neutrally - leads to more thinking?
- kekebo 4y ago
  Sharing circuitry doesn't necessarily negate differences between systems
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> Emotions run on the same circuitry as thoughts / knowledge. I'm going to speculate that the same mechanism that works to consolidate memories is at work with emotions 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.
FailMore 4y ago
My own view on dreaming in REM sleep is very opinionated! And I think there is a lot to be gained from actively reflecting on the contents of ones dreams. The article gives a clue as to why: "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 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). ** 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. ** If you are interested in reading more please see my paper Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering, https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz. It was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
mrsmee89 4y ago
This is very much my experience. 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”.
matwood 4y ago
Sleep or time? I find that time softens the edges of emotions which then makes them easier to deal with. Sleep is a way to accelerate the passage of time - assuming you can get to sleep.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Sleep (article)
- lanstin 4y ago
  I do meditation and it has many advertised benefits, but most of the benefits end up just being the normal growth of perspective and equanimity that aging and experience gives one. Tho I was told by my father that one may have twenty years of experience of one year of experience twenty times, so maybe meditation (and good sleep, which for me has most of the same benefits as meditation, perhaps because it enables me to sleep when I am tired) just tilts it towards the former.
kosyblysk666 4y ago
eureka!!!
nly 4y ago
Sadly, negative emotional dampening in a single sleep cycle is limited. 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.
- randall 4y ago
  I feel the opposite. I have dreams about my deceased brother fairly frequently (monthly since 2006) and in my dream he's always pretending to be dead, but secretly lives in another state abandoning all of his family. When I wake up, it's respite.
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    Would you try telling him, in the dream, that "you are dead, you have to go now, go" ? [0] 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.
- pizza 4y ago
  I’m not sure if this perspective will or will not be helpful to you, as a particular individual, but I would like to try. 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.
version_five 4y ago
It's ironic that stress makes it harder to sleep then. I find exercise (running) to be very helpful, if I try to sleep when I'm upset or stressed I can't, or best case I sleep briefly if I'm really tired and then wake up and start worrying too much to sleep again.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago
  Stress is not an emotion but a complex and very broad and vague mental and physical state.
  - metadat 4y ago
    I agree except about the vague part- it's trivial to measure stress through BP, heart rate, and other physiological measurements.
    - SnowHill9902 4y ago
      I can reach those values by exercising or even constricting muscles (e.g. sphincter) but you wouldn’t say that I’m stressed. Stress as I understand it is a complex state characterized by among others, excess anxiety, increased basal metabolic rate, heightened awareness. Essentially an increase in most dimensions from a basal rest state.
      - __blockcipher__ 4y ago
        Usually what is really meant by stress is a state of chronic sympathetic arousal / insufficient parasympathetic activation (I agree that people use the word vaguely and in a lot of different ways)
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    How does that differ from, say, anger or sadness?
    - 4y ago
claylimo 4y ago
To do dream recall it is suggested to do keep a dream journal but if you instead before falling asleep right down the memories of your day AND do the dream journal in the morning… my experience was seeing very clearly the links between the dream content and the memories of the day previous. The unconscious mind trying to make sense of it all, sometimes going in circles.
gareth_untether 4y ago
Mindful meditation helped me understand the connection between emotions and dreams. Dreams cause a surge of emotion that makes us react. Through mindful meditation I was able to stop reacting in the dream and allow the emotion to surge through my body. The sensation is similar to the tingle in the spine/neck/head from a creative idea. 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.
sammalloy 4y ago
I’m a big proponent of this idea, having seen the radical changes getting enough sleep has made in my own life. I’m also concerned about the prevalence of sleep deficits in the US population, and how much this is contributing to social problems.
tastysandwich 4y ago
Here's something that's fascinating. 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.
- nazavo 4y ago
  Second "The Body Keeps The Score" book! Not only it helped to think about my own past and current behaviors, but also grew loads of empathy towards other people - realizing how much shit some of us go through during their lives.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    Third the "Body Keeps the Score". The concept of left hand writing, and speaking to your inner child is fascinating (and was coined by the author)
    - tbalsam 4y ago
      Janina Fisher extends the concept of plurality focused communication in her book really well too, which is a modified version of IFS tweaked with empirical evidence over the years. TBKTS is really good but the anecdotes can be retraumatizing for many, so I just recommend "Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors" as a good starter. Works always from PTSD through DID, which is a great range! :D
alliao 4y ago
someone told me this so I'll pass it on. When you feel the world hates you, go get some sleep. When you hate the world, go grab some food. And drink plenty of water in between. Worked for me.. and don't binge on the news and food too much lol
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Gained 50 pounds eating to fill that void, not always the best plan, took years to reverse that trend. (Sometimes my anxiety was hunger and I was underweight, usually it wasn’t and I’m heading back towards a normal mass)
state_less 4y ago
Perhaps in dreams the brain can recreate emotions without scaring or overwhelming itself too much since at some level we know it’s insubstantial.
cbanek 4y ago
As someone with multiple mental health diagnoses, I wonder if this is why I get so sleepy when depressed. I just want to sleep all day. Is this my body maybe unconsciously knowing it's time to process some emotions?
pyentropy 4y ago
Fun fact: staying up for 24h+ causes a relief of symptoms in >50% of depressed individuals. However, almost all relapse the moment they sleep again (even if it's a 'micro-sleep'). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy#Response_rate_to_wake_therapy_in_depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy#Response_rate_to_...
- annyeonghada 4y ago
  So I'm self-medicating? I've never felt that sleep helps as much as people claim and if I sleep too much I actively feel worse. Another thing to look out in a depressive episode.
  - pyentropy 4y ago
    Take a look at Scott Alexander's article on sleep deprivation and mood disorders: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-d... 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.
    - jpgvm 4y ago
      Damn I need to read this, thanks for the link. I feel like my depression is intrinsically linked to sleep yet so much of the discussion of how the two are linked is skin deep.
  - tbalsam 4y ago
    There's a lot of increased entropy in the brain of sleep deprived people, but long term the effects are negative, and the antidepressant effects are transient. So it can help but really sort of a risk from whst I've seen, unfortunately (spoiler alert, I self medicate this way too).
    - sureglymop 4y ago
      I think we shouldn't forget that when you don't sleep enough, you might have difficulty doing ordinary, everyday task. It might be more difficult to focus, to socialize etc. And this can then again affect ones self esteem which can affect the depression negatively. So i would be rather careful with "abstaining from a regular sleep cycle" in order to help with depression.
tomcam 4y ago
<bitter>We need to change the name of this site to “Sleep – is there anything it can’t do?”</bitter> (My sleep is absolute garbage despite years of attempts to fix it, and all of these articles both scare and dismay me)
- xmprt 4y ago
  I'm sure you've probably tried everything but the thing that helped me the most was being extremely strict about forcing myself to wake up and sleep at regular times (even if I wasn't feeling tired. A little melatonin can help with that). Also, restricting screen time before bed. For the first week it's really tough especially when you have a lot of other things going on in life, but you'll quickly notice gradual improvements - like sleeping at 1am instead of 2 or 3am.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Thanks kindly for sharing. I will absolutely listen to and try just about anything. 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.
    - xmprt 4y ago
      If you're getting less than 4 hours of sleep a night then you might want to see a sleep therapist or neurologist specializing in sleep. That seems out of the realm of things that you can fix with sheer willpower and determination.
      - tomcam 4y ago
        Hey! Never thought about a neurologist! All sleep specialists have been useless. Great idea! Thank you, I shall.
Geee 4y ago
Sometimes dreams 'hit differently'. It feels like they're reinforcing a lost emotion or feeling, like a calibration. You get reminded what's it's like to feel, usually in the extreme sense. I've had the experience of being 'fixed' emotionally by these dreams. 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-really-give-you-vivid-dreams https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211117-does-cheese-real...
- pizza 4y ago
  In some sense, readiness, probably. But who knows really what that means. Perhaps it’s just the right flux of the electric field coursing through your neurons, or perhaps it’s something even less intelligible. 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 :) [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23697225/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23697225/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

213 points by laurex 4y ago

Huh. So sleep plays the role of EMDR?

Emotions run on the same circuitry as thoughts / knowledge. I'm going to speculate that the same mechanism that works to consolidate memories is at work with emotions (and emotions are encoded in memories) The distinction between thoughts/emotions conscious/unconscious is entirely arbitrary and made up.

deepsun 4y ago
And those who think a lot often have problems with emotions.
- loceng 4y ago
  Or is it those highly sensitive and therefore more emotional - said neutrally - leads to more thinking?
kekebo 4y ago
Sharing circuitry doesn't necessarily negate differences between systems
phkahler 4y ago
>> Emotions run on the same circuitry as thoughts / knowledge. I'm going to speculate that the same mechanism that works to consolidate memories is at work with emotions 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.

FailMore 4y ago

My own view on dreaming in REM sleep is very opinionated! And I think there is a lot to be gained from actively reflecting on the contents of ones dreams. The article gives a clue as to why: "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 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). ** 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. ** If you are interested in reading more please see my paper Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering, https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz. It was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590

mrsmee89 4y ago

This is very much my experience. 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”.

matwood 4y ago

Sleep or time? I find that time softens the edges of emotions which then makes them easier to deal with. Sleep is a way to accelerate the passage of time - assuming you can get to sleep.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
Sleep (article)
lanstin 4y ago
I do meditation and it has many advertised benefits, but most of the benefits end up just being the normal growth of perspective and equanimity that aging and experience gives one. Tho I was told by my father that one may have twenty years of experience of one year of experience twenty times, so maybe meditation (and good sleep, which for me has most of the same benefits as meditation, perhaps because it enables me to sleep when I am tired) just tilts it towards the former.

kosyblysk666 4y ago

eureka!!!

nly 4y ago

Sadly, negative emotional dampening in a single sleep cycle is limited. 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.

randall 4y ago
I feel the opposite. I have dreams about my deceased brother fairly frequently (monthly since 2006) and in my dream he's always pretending to be dead, but secretly lives in another state abandoning all of his family. When I wake up, it's respite.
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  Would you try telling him, in the dream, that "you are dead, you have to go now, go" ? [0] 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.
pizza 4y ago
I’m not sure if this perspective will or will not be helpful to you, as a particular individual, but I would like to try. 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.

version_five 4y ago

It's ironic that stress makes it harder to sleep then. I find exercise (running) to be very helpful, if I try to sleep when I'm upset or stressed I can't, or best case I sleep briefly if I'm really tired and then wake up and start worrying too much to sleep again.

SnowHill9902 4y ago
Stress is not an emotion but a complex and very broad and vague mental and physical state.
- metadat 4y ago
  I agree except about the vague part- it's trivial to measure stress through BP, heart rate, and other physiological measurements.
  - SnowHill9902 4y ago
    I can reach those values by exercising or even constricting muscles (e.g. sphincter) but you wouldn’t say that I’m stressed. Stress as I understand it is a complex state characterized by among others, excess anxiety, increased basal metabolic rate, heightened awareness. Essentially an increase in most dimensions from a basal rest state.
    - __blockcipher__ 4y ago
      Usually what is really meant by stress is a state of chronic sympathetic arousal / insufficient parasympathetic activation (I agree that people use the word vaguely and in a lot of different ways)
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  How does that differ from, say, anger or sadness?
  - 4y ago

claylimo 4y ago

To do dream recall it is suggested to do keep a dream journal but if you instead before falling asleep right down the memories of your day AND do the dream journal in the morning… my experience was seeing very clearly the links between the dream content and the memories of the day previous. The unconscious mind trying to make sense of it all, sometimes going in circles.

gareth_untether 4y ago

Mindful meditation helped me understand the connection between emotions and dreams. Dreams cause a surge of emotion that makes us react. Through mindful meditation I was able to stop reacting in the dream and allow the emotion to surge through my body. The sensation is similar to the tingle in the spine/neck/head from a creative idea. 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.

sammalloy 4y ago

I’m a big proponent of this idea, having seen the radical changes getting enough sleep has made in my own life. I’m also concerned about the prevalence of sleep deficits in the US population, and how much this is contributing to social problems.

tastysandwich 4y ago

Here's something that's fascinating. 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.

nazavo 4y ago
Second "The Body Keeps The Score" book! Not only it helped to think about my own past and current behaviors, but also grew loads of empathy towards other people - realizing how much shit some of us go through during their lives.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Third the "Body Keeps the Score". The concept of left hand writing, and speaking to your inner child is fascinating (and was coined by the author)
  - tbalsam 4y ago
    Janina Fisher extends the concept of plurality focused communication in her book really well too, which is a modified version of IFS tweaked with empirical evidence over the years. TBKTS is really good but the anecdotes can be retraumatizing for many, so I just recommend "Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors" as a good starter. Works always from PTSD through DID, which is a great range! :D

alliao 4y ago

someone told me this so I'll pass it on. When you feel the world hates you, go get some sleep. When you hate the world, go grab some food. And drink plenty of water in between. Worked for me.. and don't binge on the news and food too much lol

colechristensen 4y ago
Gained 50 pounds eating to fill that void, not always the best plan, took years to reverse that trend. (Sometimes my anxiety was hunger and I was underweight, usually it wasn’t and I’m heading back towards a normal mass)

state_less 4y ago

Perhaps in dreams the brain can recreate emotions without scaring or overwhelming itself too much since at some level we know it’s insubstantial.

cbanek 4y ago

As someone with multiple mental health diagnoses, I wonder if this is why I get so sleepy when depressed. I just want to sleep all day. Is this my body maybe unconsciously knowing it's time to process some emotions?

pyentropy 4y ago

Fun fact: staying up for 24h+ causes a relief of symptoms in >50% of depressed individuals. However, almost all relapse the moment they sleep again (even if it's a 'micro-sleep'). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy#Response_rate_to_wake_therapy_in_depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_therapy#Response_rate_to_...

annyeonghada 4y ago
So I'm self-medicating? I've never felt that sleep helps as much as people claim and if I sleep too much I actively feel worse. Another thing to look out in a depressive episode.
- pyentropy 4y ago
  Take a look at Scott Alexander's article on sleep deprivation and mood disorders: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-death https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/sleep-is-the-mate-of-d... 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.
  - jpgvm 4y ago
    Damn I need to read this, thanks for the link. I feel like my depression is intrinsically linked to sleep yet so much of the discussion of how the two are linked is skin deep.
- tbalsam 4y ago
  There's a lot of increased entropy in the brain of sleep deprived people, but long term the effects are negative, and the antidepressant effects are transient. So it can help but really sort of a risk from whst I've seen, unfortunately (spoiler alert, I self medicate this way too).
  - sureglymop 4y ago
    I think we shouldn't forget that when you don't sleep enough, you might have difficulty doing ordinary, everyday task. It might be more difficult to focus, to socialize etc. And this can then again affect ones self esteem which can affect the depression negatively. So i would be rather careful with "abstaining from a regular sleep cycle" in order to help with depression.

tomcam 4y ago

<bitter>We need to change the name of this site to “Sleep – is there anything it can’t do?”</bitter> (My sleep is absolute garbage despite years of attempts to fix it, and all of these articles both scare and dismay me)

xmprt 4y ago
I'm sure you've probably tried everything but the thing that helped me the most was being extremely strict about forcing myself to wake up and sleep at regular times (even if I wasn't feeling tired. A little melatonin can help with that). Also, restricting screen time before bed. For the first week it's really tough especially when you have a lot of other things going on in life, but you'll quickly notice gradual improvements - like sleeping at 1am instead of 2 or 3am.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Thanks kindly for sharing. I will absolutely listen to and try just about anything. 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.
  - xmprt 4y ago
    If you're getting less than 4 hours of sleep a night then you might want to see a sleep therapist or neurologist specializing in sleep. That seems out of the realm of things that you can fix with sheer willpower and determination.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      Hey! Never thought about a neurologist! All sleep specialists have been useless. Great idea! Thank you, I shall.

Geee 4y ago

Sometimes dreams 'hit differently'. It feels like they're reinforcing a lost emotion or feeling, like a calibration. You get reminded what's it's like to feel, usually in the extreme sense. I've had the experience of being 'fixed' emotionally by these dreams. 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-really-give-you-vivid-dreams https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211117-does-cheese-real...

pizza 4y ago
In some sense, readiness, probably. But who knows really what that means. Perhaps it’s just the right flux of the electric field coursing through your neurons, or perhaps it’s something even less intelligible. 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 :) [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23697225/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23697225/

deleted 4y ago

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