Boulevard of Broken Dreams: the connection between dreaming and anxiety

Written by: Magdalena Styś

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Disney’s Cinderella had generations of children believe that a dream is “a wish your heart makes”. But in a world that doesn’t revolve around fairy godmothers and glass slippers, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a dream as “a series of thoughts, images, or emotions occurring during sleep.” The insane stories that our minds produce during sleep are intertwined with both culture and everyday life; many works of art, such as Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” and The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” came to their creators in dreams. “You won’t believe what I dreamt about last night” is an incredibly popular conversation starter, too. But is there a connection between dreams and our mental health?

Dreaming occurs in the final phase reached while sleeping, the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep phase. We enter the REM phase during the first 90 minutes of falling asleep; after that, the phase occurs several times in a night. As one can probably conclude from its name, during the REM sleep cycle the body acts a bit differently than during the rest of the night. The changes include rapid eye movement as well as increased heart rate and brain activity.

Our REM sleep plays a crucial role in the connection between dreaming and anxiety. There are two key factors that influence this: our levels of anxiety during the day and our ability to develop and use coping skills. A study from Rutgers University states that “the more REM sleep the subject had, the weaker the fear-related effect” was during the time when they were awake. The researchers followed it up with the statement: “Our results suggest that baseline REM sleep may act as a protectant against excessive activation in fear-related neural circuits.” The relationship between REM sleep and coping mechanisms was studied by a group of researchers in 2004; their research concluded that REM sleep deprivation in animals caused abnormalities in their coping responses. To put it in the simplest of terms: the more time we spend in the “dreaming phase”, the less anxiety we’ll have the next day.

Now that we can trace the link between our dreams and mental health, only one question remains: what can we do to increase the time we spend in the REM sleep stages? Unfortunately for all of us who pull all-nighters often, the answer is brutally simple: we have to just… sleep more. Sleeping more gives you more chances to complete the sleep cycle and enter REM; also, each REM phase gets progressively longer the more you sleep. So try to spend a good amount of time in the arms of Morpheus tonight. Good luck and sweet dreams!

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SOURCES

• Martinez-Gonzalez, Dolores et al. “REM sleep deprivation induces changes in coping responses that are not reversed by amphetamine.” Sleep vol. 27,4 (2004): 609-17.

• Lerner, Itamar et al. "Baseline Levels Of Rapid Eye Movement Sleep May Protect Against Excessive Activity In Fear-Related Neural Circuitry". The Journal Of Neuroscience, vol 37, no. 46, 2017, pp. 11233-11244. Society For Neuroscience, doi:10.1523/jneurosci.0578-17.2017. Accessed 1 July 2021.

• "Dream". https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dream. Accessed 1 July 2021.

• Leonard, Jayne. "What is REM sleep?". Medicalnewstoday.Com, 2017, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247927.