Skip to main content

Bad Dreams, Disturbed Sleep

Image
By

 


A good night’s sleep, so essential to rest your body and mind, and restore ‘energy” and vitality, is becoming a casualty for many these days.

Last week a 58 year old lady complained that she woke up with a startle in the middle of the night dreaming of “drugs”, something she had never been exposed to all her life. Another reported a nightmare in which he felt someone was “strangulating” him by tightening something around his neck, till he woke up feeling choked! Yet another reported dreaming that he was in an ICU of a hospital with PPE draped figures surrounding his bed while he was being prepared to be hooked to a ventilator.

Bad dreams can be disturbing to say the least. One wakes up with a startle or in sweat, feeling disturbed and uneasy, and feeling drained. The mood in the morning is usually uneasy and snappy. Creative thinking has usually gone for a toss…postponed to yet another day when one feels more cheerful and positive. 

Several factors could be contributing to “bad dreams” and “restless” sleep.

1.      The thoughts and feelings that engage the ”conscious” mind before you fall asleep, especially if they are intense, often impact what the unconscious mind throws up as dreams during sleep.

Watching an “intense” TV program or a movie depicting heinous crime or cruelty, in the late evening before sleep could be a culprit. A heated argument the previous evening could do just do that too.

Experts therefore advise switching off electronic devices and turning your mind to calmer positive thoughts for an hour before sleeping as a preparation for good quality of sleep.

2.      Physical conditions matter too. If the bed is uncomfortable, room is stuffy or hot, or there is too much light or noise…the sleep quality suffers.

3.      Late night heavy dinners are often a cause of disturbed sleep, especially for “refluxers”, that is those with GERD. Light early dinners have been shown to enhance the quality of sleep.

4.      If a person with diabetes wakes up in the night with bad dreams and in sweat, a dangerously low blood sugar could be the cause. A blood sugar test at that time helps pick up episodes of “nocturnal hypoglycemia”.

5.      Patients with hypertension could often complain of throbbing headaches associated with bad dreams when they wake up. A quick BP check could help resolve the matter.

6.      Several medications are known to disturb sleep or cause bad dreams, some Beta blockers for example. Check with your doctor, or read the drug pamphlet if you are having problems.

7.      Calming the mind and feeding it with pleasant calming thoughts before sleeping is a good idea. For readers, a few pages of PG Wodehouse could be therapeutic.

8.      Music lovers have quite a choice these days. Apple music or You Tube provides a wide range of soothing “music for sleep” that we and our dogs enjoy best.

A good bit of sleep research has focused on quality of sleep and dreams, and have gone on to study the effect on our performance and mood the next day, and in our lives. It is time to pay attention to your sleep!

Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 13, 2020 at 6:50 AM

    Very informative article sir.
    Sir i m also taking ciplar 10 ( beta blocker) n i also have sleep disorder. What to do ???

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching and Learning – is there a trick?

By
One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential. That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages. With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing.  He...
1 comment
Read more

The Doctor’s Dress

By
The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...
2 comments
Read more

Food Fads in Liver Disorders

By
In an attempt at trying to do well to those they love, spouses and parents often enforce diets on patients of liver diseases that often turn out to be detrimental. The commonest food fad is pale insipid boiled cabbage being doled out to nauseous patients suffering from hepatitis that makes them puke even more.  The liver, in a way, is a buzzing manufacturing unit that requires lots of energy to keep its multiple functions going. And it derives all this from the food we eat. During disease, such as during an attack of jaundice, when many of the liver cells get killed, the liver attemptsdamage control by trying to regenerate quickly. For its cells to multiply however, it requires a generous supply of energy that comes from carbohydrates, and protein, the building block for its cells and tissues. Boiled green vegetables unfortunately have neither of these. Hence the situation often progresses to that of a starved liver unable to recuperate due to cut-off food suppl...
2 comments
Read more