Struggling with Sleep? Consider Dream Remembrance!

October 11, 2010 – In this high stress world, many of us have a hard time either getting to sleep at night or staying asleep. In addition to making you feel terrible, not getting enough sleep puts your health at risk. A Wake Forest University School of Medicine looked at the sleep habits of individuals over a five year period. They found that in individuals under 40, getting less than six hours of sleep at night was related to an increase in abdominal fat, visceral fat (organ fat) and body mass index. So, even if you think you can deal with sleepwalking through your days, it is important that you seek out ways to fall asleep.

If you don’t have a problem falling to sleep but find that you wake up in the middle of the night and are unable to get back to sleep, you may be suffering from what is known as middle insomnia. According to Woodson Merrell, MD chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center, a great solution for this is dream remembrance. The truth is that when you wake up in the middle of the night, whether you think you are or not you are always waking up from a dream. Merrell has found that if you can hold on to this dream, you can get back into REM sleep at least half of the time. It is when we allow ourselves to being having conscious thoughts that our minds start to work overtime and getting back to sleep becomes difficult if not impossible. Even if stressful thoughts do try to make their way in, crowd them out with thoughts of your dream. Focusing on breath awareness is also a great way to fall asleep fast both when you wake up in the middle of the night and when you are initially trying to get to sleep.

 

 

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