Hot and humid weather has long been a culprit for a bad night’s sleep, and may also be the cause of more vivid — or even scary — dreams.
People dream most often during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, which starts about 90 minutes after you fall asleep and occurs in cycles throughout the night.
As New Zealand rolls into the summer period, Auckland Sleep founder Sumit Samant told Breakfast the heat caused more disruptions to normal sleep cycles, which can in turn make dreams feel more vivid.
“So people are waking up a lot more easily after the REM cycle, and if you wake up right after it you are more likely to remember the dreams.
Sleep expert Sumit Samant explains why your dreams may be more vivid than usual during warmer weather. (Source: Breakfast)
“Whereas if your sleep is uninterrupted then most people won’t remember as much. So it’s a combination of those two things.”
He said the heat was likely interrupting the loss of heat from our core — which was a key process for maintaining the circadian rhythm.
“So if you’re not able to lose heat from the body during the course of the night then it’s disrupting our sleep.”
Anxious dreams? Write your thoughts onto paper
Asked about how to combat experiences of more prevalent ‘anxiety dreams’, Samant said people having heightened anxiety during dreams were likely stressed about these same things in their daily lives.
“Anxiety during the day can also translate into anxious dreams or dreams where we are in very uncomfortable, dangerous, scary scenarios.
“What I love to tell people is constructive worry time, where you spend just five minutes with a sheet of paper and write down what is bothering you, so you’re downloading your worries from your brain to the paper. And just solutions on the side of each problem, and if there is no solution that is also a solution, because there’s no point worrying about it.”
“But if you’ve done that for five minutes then it’s a debrief at the end of the day and you don’t have to keep worrying about it.”
He said it was good to process these things earlier in the evening — and put the phone down — as stimulating content was often what kept people’s minds whirring long after they want to be asleep.
“Because the content stimulates the brain, and then you’ve been thinking about what you’re scrolling, and listening to, or watching, for longer than that.”
A fan of the fan
Samant encouraged people to keep the room nice and cool, and said a fan could be useful for circulating air around the room.
“Especially in Auckland, and up north it’s humid, so getting a bit of air going is important.
“But again if you’re really under the covers for the start of the night, the breeze is going to hit our faces but not the rest of the body. So it’s a combination of a few simple things.”
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