Why do adults and children have bad dreams every day?

Intrusive bad dreams that repeat night after night are a common symptom of an anxiety disorder. Those who struggle with the so-called VSD (vegetative-vascular dystonia, obsessive-compulsive, panic or generalized anxiety disorder) suffer from such visions.

Where there is neurosis, there are nightmares and bad dreams.

Now we will try to understand what to do if you had a bad dream. And this was not the first time I had a dream. Let's find out why this happens and how to get rid of the problem.

Why do I always have bad dreams?

Dreams pop up in our brain during every sleep. However, not everyone is able to remember them for a long time. Dreams are fragments of memories formed according to the script of your subconscious. Not everyone can consciously control their sleep. That is why the plot of dreams is often absurd and unrealistic.

The content of dreams in most cases is related to recent positive or negative moments in your life. Therefore, in many ways, bad and good dreams depend on internal experiences . For example, if you are under severe stress, this will most likely affect the quality of your sleep and result in nightmares.

Interestingly, bad dreams are associated not only with internal experiences, but also with external factors, for example, lighting in the bedroom, noise, temperature, etc. We will talk about this in more detail later.

Nutrition

Doctors around the world agree that overeating and an abundance of heavy fatty foods before bed provoke brain activity, preventing it from relaxing. But the brain absolutely needs this. Therefore, he “swears”, trying in every possible way to show us that he is dissatisfied.

Is it worth talking about the effect of caffeine on the quality of dreams, because it is a serious stimulant of the nervous system.

Internal causes of poor sleep

Stress, anxiety, psychotrauma . Stressful situations that occurred the day before impair falling asleep, promote night awakenings and provoke nightmares.
Fatigue . Physical or mental stress stimulates the nervous system, which interferes with healthy sleep.
Nervous system disorders . Neuroses, schizophrenia and other similar diseases can impair sleep.
Pregnancy . Changes in hormonal levels in the body of the expectant mother contribute to the occurrence of nightmares.
Alcohol . When alcohol enters the brain, it interferes with its proper functioning. As a result, frequent consumption of strong drinks can lead to poor sleep.
Medicines . Taking certain medications interferes with restful rest. Before using medications, carefully read the instructions and consult your doctor.
Binge eating . Eating a multi-course dinner before bed can make it difficult to fall asleep and increase the risk of nightmares. The body simply does not go into a sleep state because it is “busy” digesting food.
Caffeine . Stimulates the nervous system and prevents our psyche from relaxing. The substance is found in sufficient quantities in coffee, energy drinks, and black tea. Therefore, for good sleep, avoid drinking caffeinated drinks in the afternoon.
Excessive drinking at night . Any drinks taken at night in large quantities make it difficult to fall asleep and, in general, can worsen the quality of sleep.
Diseases . Causes of poor sleep often include pathologies of the cardiovascular and nervous systems. In addition, nightmares and waking up in the night are associated with chronic pain.

What harm can bad sleep cause to a person?

Poor sleep or lack of sleep can lead to irreversible consequences. The average person needs 6 to 8 hours of sleep per day. If you don’t get enough sleep regularly, this will not only lead to mild nervous disorders and extra centimeters in the waist area for girls. But it can lead to serious health problems - heart disease, increased risk of diabetes, headaches, joint problems, blurred vision, and so on.

From lack of sleep, people begin to overeat, since a small amount of it causes appetite and also provokes the choice of higher-calorie foods.

Poor sleep also leads to poor attention. Due to drowsiness, you can miss an important moment on the road and get into an accident. Emotional instability from overwork and loss of strength may occur. Thus, a person’s productivity decreases, and the likelihood of seeing a terrible nightmare at night becomes higher.

Researchers from Harvard and Berkeley medical schools conducted an experiment in 2007 and proved that if you don't sleep enough, the emotional areas of the brain become more than 60% active. This will lead to you becoming more irritable and harmful. Which is unlikely to please the people around you.

External causes of poor sleep

Noise . Extraneous sounds reduce the depth of sleep (deep sleep). In this case, the brain cannot relax, so sleep becomes superficial and restless.
Discomfort during sleep. A hard or too soft mattress, along with an uncomfortable pillow and bedding that is unpleasant to the touch, disrupts sleep.
Light . Even low lighting in the bedroom interferes with healthy sleep. Light makes it difficult to produce melatonin, a sleep hormone that is produced in the body when it gets dark.
Unventilated bedroom . Lack of fresh air impairs brain function. The result is bad dreams.
Watching movies or reading books . The plot of book and movie thrillers can make it difficult to fall asleep, especially if you watched or read them right before bed.
Weather . For people with weather sensitivity, nightmares are associated with changes in the weather, be it an increase in air temperature or jumps in atmospheric pressure.
New place to sleep . Spending the night with relatives or, for example, in a hotel can turn into nightmares.

What does the body warn us about when we have nightmares?

If scary dreams are not associated with the influence of negative environmental factors on the body, then you should carefully consider their content. The human psyche thus sends signals about complexes, problems and real fears.

Dream involving a dead person

Such a dream indicates that a person does not perceive reality, lives in the past or future and is not in the moment. A person should let go of events that can no longer be changed, and stop calculating every next step to the smallest detail.

Disaster dreams

The apocalypse is seen in a dream by people who spend a lot of energy on unnecessary worries and are in a constant feeling of anxiety. They are in a state of increased mobilization of strength, are afraid to show their weakness and cannot ask for help from other people.

Limited mobility, sleep paralysis

A nightmare in which you cannot move your arm, leg, or scream may indicate that the person is passively experiencing an aggressive situation. In real life, danger awaits him and he should not let his guard down.

Why does my child constantly have bad dreams?

Family quarrels. Conflicts between mom and dad affect the child’s psyche. This in turn impairs sleep.
Fear of the dark or “monsters.” Both phobias are characteristic of preschool children, and they appear relatively often. Sometimes it is because of them that children sleep with their parents in the same room until they are 7 years old.
Changes in external conditions. Moving or visiting kindergarten or school for the first time can disrupt a child’s sleep. After all, a new unknown environment is often stressful for him.
Psychological depression. Constant reproaches against a child from parents, caregivers or teachers can easily provoke sleep disturbances. This also includes pressure from classmates or other children from the environment.
Lack of parental attention. Fear of loneliness prevents a child from sleeping well. Fear is especially pronounced if the mother constantly works and has little contact with the child.
Puberty and relationship problems. In teenagers, bad dreams are often associated with puberty. A surge of hormones and unrequited love can become prerequisites for sleep disorders.

Scientific research

Scientists from Switzerland tried to figure out why people have nightmares. To this end, they tested the theory of threat modeling in practice. According to its principles, dreams have an important neurobiological function. They help the central nervous system work out behavioral reactions in conditions of a real threat.

The study was carried out in 2 stages. First, experts conducted an EEG to measure the activity of different parts of the brain in 18 volunteers. Periodically, they woke up the experiment participants and asked them to talk about their dreams. By comparing the stories with the EEG pattern, they tried to understand which parts of the brain are responsible for emotional experiences during sleep. As it turned out, the feeling of fear nests in the anterior cingulate cortex. The reaction to threats during waking moments is also formed there.

89 volunteers took part in the second part of the experiment. Over the course of a week, they recorded their dreams and described their emotions. Then they were shown various creepy sights on video and at the same time they underwent brain tomography. It turned out that frequent nightmares are typical for people who have a low level of fear in real life.

Emotions that accompany a person in a dream and in reality use similar neural mechanisms. Nightmares act as a good simulator for the central nervous system.

I have bad dreams every night. What to do?

After waking up, realize that everything you saw was just a dream and most likely far from reality. If you wake up in the middle of the night, don't go straight to bed. Get out of bed, turn on the night light, this will help you come to your senses faster. If your partner wakes up with you, tell him about the nightmare. The words of your loved one will calm you down and after a while you will be able to fall asleep again.

Did your child have a bad dream? Hug and comfort him, offer tea with sedative herbs.

If you notice that your child is tossing and turning in bed, calm him down in a whisper, trying not to wake him up. If he doesn't calm down, wake him up and hug him. Explain that it was just a dream. You can give the child herbal tea, and then put the child to bed.

To help your baby fall asleep, read a good story or sing a lullaby. A good option would be to have your baby sleep with you in the same room or in the same bed.

Stop waiting for nightmares

It is necessary to realize that if you had a bad, scary bad dream, this does not mean that now it will always be like this.

In fact, the more you think about a bad dream during the day, the more likely you are to have it again the next night.

For people who do not have obsessive thoughts about their night visions, dreams are quickly forgotten.

But if we obsess over them, we turn the night's adventure into a daytime event. The more we think about our sleep during the day, the more energy we give it.

And sleep becomes part of our daily life experience. And at night the brain will again begin to transfer this experience into long-term memory. And this explains why the bad dream I had the day before repeats itself again. It became our real day experience. And our brain processes this experience.

But it was turned into reality neither by the Higher Powers nor by our incredible prophetic abilities, but by a banal obsession with one’s experiences.

How to get rid of bad dreams: advice from a psychologist

Nightmares are directly related to life's difficulties and inner experiences. This means that by working with your own psyche, you will be able to improve your sleep.

Exercises for bad dreams:

Describe all your dreams in a diary or smartphone notes . No matter how terrible the dream was, after waking up, write down its plot with all the details in a notepad or notes on your mobile phone. Try to understand what is written that scares you the most. Such an analysis of dreams will help you reconsider your attitude towards a situation that has deprived you of normal rest. In addition, daily record keeping will help a psychologist quickly solve the problem of poor sleep if you seek help from a specialist.
Tell your loved ones about your nightmares. When a person shares a problem with someone, he feels better. Tell those closest to you about your nighttime experiences. Tell us what's bothering you. If this doesn't help, consult a psychologist. A professional will identify your phobias and work through them with you.
Change your thinking. Think differently. Not the way you did it before. Change. A person does not develop if he does not change his thinking. Books, personal growth trainings, interest groups, etc. will help you with this. Be sure that by changing your thinking, your fears, along with nightmares, will disappear into oblivion.
Create the image of a nightmare. One of the exercises in the psychologist’s arsenal. Draw or write the scenes of your nightmares on a separate sheet of paper. Then burn or tear this piece of paper into small pieces. This approach is often effective, which is why it is included in the psychotherapy program. By the way, when playing with fire, remember fire safety.
Changing the scenario. An exercise similar to the previous one. Write or draw how you would like the bad dream to end. Come up with a good ending, get it down on paper, and visualize the happy ending in your head. This technique is also used in psychotherapy.

Alarm Signals

- What about prophetic dreams? Some believe that when we fall asleep, secrets of the future can be revealed to us.

“It all depends on imagination, on how a person interprets what he sees. It is not surprising that interpretations actually come true. But science also has explanations for this. The person sets himself up - he interprets the dream as a bad sign and waits for something bad to happen. And the fact that the mechanism of suggestion works has long been proven: we are preparing for a tragedy, and it will happen. Here's more with ailments. A man saw in a dream that he was going to get sick, and he got sick. Many people think it’s a prophetic dream! In fact, everything is different - at the time of sleep, everything in the body was no longer in order, and in this way he tried to attract the person’s attention. By the way, disturbing dreams very often indicate some kind of disease.

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- It turns out that only those who have pain have nightmares?

— Basically, yes, they are caused either by illness or by some kind of anxiety, sometimes even unconscious, that is, outwardly a person can be cheerful and cheerful, but if something oppresses him inside, he may have nightmares. Another reason is emotions that are suppressed or not expressed in the way we would like. After all, nothing goes anywhere from us. Everything is piling up. Psychologists help find out what exactly causes nightmares. So in dreams you can look for some symptoms and causes, but you should not consider them prophetic.

- How else can a dream make it clear to a person that something is wrong with his body?

— In Moscow and St. Petersburg they study dreams, sometimes they even invite volunteers to sleep, and at this time they connect special equipment to their heads and see how the phases of sleep change. Violations are often detected. It happens that a person’s sleep duration is not disturbed, but the phase change occurs incorrectly; this usually indicates some kind of illness, most often mental. Or else - if a person dreams all the time, this means that he is in the REM phase, and due to the fact that the slow phase does not occur, he does not rest, and the body does not recover.

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How to make bad dreams good

Avoid stress or learn to deal with it. Take a bath before bed, meditate, exercise. In other words, find an activity that will relax you.
Be positive . Positive emotions help cope with nightmares. Also, set yourself an achievable goal that inspires you and work towards it. The desire for results will charge you with positive energy and get rid of bad dreams.
Maintain a strict sleep schedule. Always go to bed and get up at the same time. Even on weekends. This will help the body “get into rhythm” and reduce stress levels in general.
Get at least 8 hours of sleep. Lack of sleep increases the body's susceptibility to stress. And if you don’t constantly get enough sleep, there is a high probability that you will only have bad dreams.
Create a ritual and stick to it before bed. In our case, a ritual is an activity after which you feel strongly drawn to sleep. Such a ritual could include reading books, taking a bath with aromatic oils, or walking near the house. Rituals will only work if you perform them daily.
Don't drink alcohol before bed. Alcohol interferes with the functioning of the brain, which results in nightmares. Therefore, if you constantly have bad dreams, you will have to give up strong drinks until your sleep normalizes.
Avoid drinking coffee or strong tea in the afternoon. Caffeine in tea or coffee stimulates the nervous system. This in turn provokes nightmares.
Relax after work. When you get home in the evening, switch to “rest mode” and don’t think about anything related to your professional activities or what upsets you.
Don't quarrel with your household. Conflicts within the home make it difficult to relax after a hard day. Be patient and don't talk about sensitive topics if you're having nightmares. Save this for later.
Create comfortable sleeping conditions. 20-30 minutes before going to bed, ventilate the bedroom, then close the curtains tightly. Remove all luminous devices from the room with the bed, get rid of extraneous sources of noise. Sleep in complete darkness, turn off the TV in the bedroom if you are going to sleep. Buy a comfortable orthopedic mattress for your weight, a pillow with neck support and bedding that is comfortable to the touch.

Write down all the bad things

One of the reasons why you regularly have bad dreams is that you fixate on negative thoughts throughout the day.

This fixation is characteristic of all neurotic patients. It is quite difficult to completely get rid of it. This requires long-term hard work on yourself. But it’s quite possible to make night visions easier and more pleasant.

To do this, before going to bed, write down all your bad thoughts. Record everything that worries you and gives you no peace. It has been proven that those obsessive thoughts that we entrust to paper begin to bother us much less.

But you should write it down on a piece of paper with a pen or pencil. And not in electronic form. This is fundamentally important.