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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't just have to be the eye movements. They'll also use little tappers or paddles that sit in your hand and vibrate alternately. They also have ones with sound that do something similar. For me, the vibrating paddles plus the sound works best, but they all work.
This reminds me of a thing I do when I prepare for a cold shower. I rhythmically start walking in place. Just moving my weight from one foot to the other at a constant pace. At the same time, I breathe in and out at the same pace.
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.
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."
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.
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
EMDR has nothing to do with REM or eye movement (alone).
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.
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').
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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”.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
I think emotions are more a philosophical matter while stress is more medical. Stress in general is a heightened state with respect to a basal rest state. It’s mentioned a lot nowadays but I think it’s too unspecific to be useful as it doesn’t allow for much introspection. Emotions can be dissected, felt, recalled, and analyzed by oneself.
As I understand it, emotions are a representation of a train of thought which may or may not then cause physiological effects. If I’m watching a sad movie, feeling the emotion of sadness may not stress me. It may actually be exhilarating because it’s allowed me to feel an emotion that I hadn’t felt in some time. Stress on the other hand is by definition an effect which may have many causes. Think stress of materials. An emotion may be one but also trauma or even a tumor.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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
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)
I've also struggled a lot with insomnia and the best advice I can give is:
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.
Thank you. 1. I had ~15 years' therapy with multiple approaches & therapists w/out success. 2. I used to happily try any sleep medication but none works for more than a week or so, and now I take the same attitude as you. 3. I do get up and do something else when not sleeping, but lately the sleep has been so ratched I'm not as successful.
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.
Look all I gotta say is you’re in very good company. Insomnia is extremely common, your body is designed to have it and is super equipped to deal with sleep deprivation.
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.
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.
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.
You can try experimenting with supplements. I’ve been taking l-theanine and I’ve been sleeping throughout the night now, whereas before I would wake up within 3 hours. I think my GABA levels are low which also manifests as anxiety so you can look into which neurotransmitter(s) you suspect are the issue for you and experiment accordingly.
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
Thanks much. My body is evil and quickly adapts to any kind of supplement or medicine. They sometimes work for a week or so, then fail in 2 weeks at the latest.
You might look up Dr Gominak on Youtube. She figured out that higher levels (60 - 80) of D3 correspond to much better sleep. It worked for me and that first night when you get good sleep is just amazing. Her website has all the specifics.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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), 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.
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.
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.