Want to say goodbye to nightmares? To feel these big skills.

Nightmares not only affect the quality of our sleep, but also cause us to experience negative emotions such as depression and fear, and what psychologists have to offer to deal with nightmares? To rehearse a new dream instead of a nightmare, to learn to distinguish between dreams and reality, do these tall skills really work?

When you wake from a nightmare, perhaps with a scream, perhaps with a sweaty forehead and staring at the darkened room, you are not alone at this moment. Ordinary people spend 2 hours dreaming every night, that is to say, a person with a normal lifespan will spend six years in a dream. And 75% of our dreams are negative.

Nightmares, nature is not a good experience. It not only interrupted you a good night sleep, reduce the quality of sleeping, but also let people experience depression, fear and other negative emotions, bring insomnia, exhaustion and a series of physiological problems, affecting people's overall quality of life. About 4% of adults suffer from nightmares, which are higher among children and adolescents. Nightmares are a psychological torment for those with post-traumatic stress disorder. Post-Traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental illness that is maladjusted after a major traumatic experience. These experiences may include disaster, war, sexual assault and dystocia, etc. The nightmares that accompany these experiences make their hearts worse.

Now, scientists are using a variety of means to reduce the frequency of nightmares, as well as people a sweet dream.

From Freud's interpretation of dreams, psychologists began to cross-examine the meaning of dreams. In this battle to protect the good dreams of mankind, the psychological methods naturally show their skill. Barry Krakow, medical director of the American Institute for Sleep and Human health, and his colleagues have developed a Bally Colaco "1", a method called "Imagery Rehearsal Therapy" (Imagery rehearsal therapy). In their view, the nightmare is like a bad habit, which requires the practitioner to change it through repeated practice.

Researchers let those who suffer from nightmares write down nightmares that make it difficult to sleep and change the dream in the way they want. Changes in the way can be cheerful, for example, and lovers stroll on the beach, but also neutral, boring, as long as the original nightmare is good. People write down new dreams after a change, and spend some time (about 10-20 minutes) waking up each day, rehearsing the dream in their mind. So day after day, with a more positive new dream instead of old dreams.

Image Preview therapy can not only reduce nightmares, but also bring a series of psychological benefits. In a study published in 2001 by Bally Colaco and others, 168 of women victims of chronic nightmares, who had been sexually abused, had a three-month treatment that reduced their nightmares by about 6 times a week, down to 2 or 3 times a week, and they had fewer post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. , such as shame, emotional numbness and so on. Moreover, this technique not only reduces the nightmare of trauma, but also has some effect on some of the nightmares that are not clear.

Perhaps we can also find some inspiration from a popular global movie inception. Although we do not have to lurk in other people's dreams, but can we learn to control their own dreams? If we can make a dream that we want to do, then naturally we can avoid the nightmare. Indeed, psychologists have explored a technique called lucid dreaming (lucid dream) that allows Dreamers to control their dreams by realizing that they are dreaming. The therapist asks the healer to ask himself frequently in daily life-Am I dreaming or in real life? Every day to do this problem, the person will know in the heart, even in the dream can make judgments, so as to change the content of the dream according to their own wishes. A study published in 2005 by Utrecht University in the Netherlands confirms that the use of lucid dreaming techniques can indeed reduce the frequency of nightmares.

In addition, therapists use the system of desensitization to treat phobias in the treatment of nightmares. The so-called system desensitization, is to put people slowly, gradually exposed to the stimulation of their fear or anxiety. For example, someone afraid of spiders, you can first show him a spider photos, and then let him observe the spider in the glass, and finally remove the glass, and even directly let spiders climb to the hands of people. Use this principle in the treatment of nightmares, which is to eliminate the tension in nightmares by gradually exposing people to objects or events that are feared in nightmares.

Also, nightmares often keep up with stress. As a result, psychologists have also tried to reduce the frequency of their nightmares by relieving psychological stress for those who seek it. Progressive muscle relaxation is a method of decompression. It instructs people to tighten and loosen the muscles of different parts of the body and feel relaxed. For example, clench your fists and let your hands loose, or wrinkle your nose, close your eyes, and loosen your face ... So the whole body moves down, people will eliminate anxiety, with a relaxed into dreamland.

Of course, in addition to the psychological approach, scientists are also trying to reduce nightmares from a physical perspective. A drug called piperazine (Prazosin) is found to be effective in dealing with nightmares. Piperazine can reduce the anterior and posterior load of the heart, which is used to deal with high blood pressure drugs. Although it is not the first choice to lower blood pressure, but inadvertently inserted Willow Shady, people found that this drug can prevent people from dreaming, but also specifically for nightmares. After taking piperazine for a while, some veterans who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder were more soundly asleep, had fewer nightmares, and overall happiness increased as well. They took the dosage of piperazine, which was less than they used for high blood pressure, so there was no significant change in blood pressure in these subjects.

In addition, Bally Cola and his colleagues observed that nightmares were intimately associated with shortness of breath. Those who are haunted by nightmares often have varying degrees of sleep apnea, such as sleep apnea (apnea). As the name suggests, the breath stops during sleep, and the airflow in the mouth and nose stops flowing or slows down significantly. or upper airway resistance syndrome (upper airway resistance syndrome), which is the abnormal increase of the upper airway resistance during sleep, thus affecting respiration. Bally Colaco that the brain's nightmare may be the response to hypoxia caused by these respiratory disorders.

In this way, to eradicate nightmares, you can start with breathing disorders, for example, to allow patients to sleep with a continuous positive airway pressure ventilation ventilator. However, such scenes may be a bit ironic-after a night without nightmares, after a sweet sleep, open their eyes, but found that their mouth and nose inserted in the pipe, next to a quietly operating breathing machine, will it be another nightmare?