Table of contents:
Nightmares can come at any time of your night. Not only for young children, nightmares can also occur in adults of any age. In fact, one in every two adults can have nightmares. Nightmares may not be a problem if you get over them right away. However, what if nightmares haunt your days? This is certainly very disturbing. Then, how do you deal with nightmares?
What causes nightmares?
Before you understand how to deal with nightmares, it's a good idea to know in advance what nightmares are and their causes. If you know why, it will be easier for you to deal with the nightmare.
Nightmares can make you wake up from your deep sleep. At this time, you may feel your heart pounding and a feeling of fear. Usually nightmares occur during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep stage, where most dreams occur.
Nightmares usually occur spontaneously. You can't choose what dreams of tonight. The causes of nightmares can be from various factors and disorders. Some of the things that can cause nightmares are:
- Eating before bedtime, this can increase metabolism and signal a more active brain so you can have nightmares.
- Some medications, such as drugs that affect the brain or non-psychological drugs, are also often associated with nightmares.
- Lack of sleep can also cause you to have nightmares.
- Sleep problems can also cause nightmares, such as sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome (restless legs syndrome).
- Psychological problems, such as anxiety and depression, can cause nightmares. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can also cause you to experience recurring nightmares.
How to deal with nightmares?
When you wake up from a nightmare, you may feel scared and don't know what to do. The fear and panic when you wake up can actually make you feel worse. You may need to do any of the following when you wake up from a nightmare:
- Calm yourself first, take slow, deep breaths
- Realizing and understanding that it was only a dream. You may need to talk to yourself that what you saw was just a dream. Now, you are in the real world and sleeping. Touching and looking around might help.
- Convince yourself that you are safe now. You can turn on the light and check your house keys or walk around to see your home situation.
- Try to watch and relax your muscles. Tense muscles are the body's natural response to bad things that happen in dreams.
- Drinking water may help you calm down.
- If you can't fall asleep after the nightmare, you can do other things that make you forget about the dream. Do your favorite activities that can calm you down, such as reading a book, listening to music, or watching television. After you calm down, try going to sleep again. You still need time to rest.
If the nightmare that happened last night is still looming over you to the point of interfering with your life, maybe you can take some of these steps.
- Prepare yourself for sleep. Before you go to sleep, maybe you have special things that you must do to make your sleep peaceful. For example, you have to clean yourself, read prayers, read books, and so on. After that, calm yourself down, take slow, deep breaths, then fall asleep.
- Find out the causes of nightmares. Nightmares can occur because there are triggers. Maybe there is something going on in your life that can trigger a nightmare. Think about it.
- Write your dream. Write down the nightmare that has been haunting you in as much detail as possible. However, you need to change the ending of the nightmare to your liking, of course, to your delight. Remember your dream story, and read it every night before you go to sleep. If this method helps you to overcome your nightmare, you can continue this method to overcome your other nightmares. Maybe you need to write down every nightmare you have in a diary. However, if you are afraid to recall your nightmares, this may not be for you. You can choose another way.
- Tell me your dream with others you trust. This may reduce your fear.
- If these methods don't satisfy you, maybe you need to talk to your doctor.
