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With my heart pounding, I sat up straight on my bed, flushed, sweaty and completely panicked. My brain robbed me of nightmares — dreams so terrifying that I woke up.
I’ve only had one or two such night terrors, but for people who suffer from trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or anxiety, terrifying dreams come and go every night, causing them to lose sleep. can ruin your health and ultimately harm your health.
Visions from nightmares can creep up like dark shadows in the next day’s light, disrupting a person’s ability to concentrate and think. Days of intense fear of falling asleep may follow, triggering another frightening dream.
Such symptoms can lead to the diagnosis of nightmare disorder, a sleep condition that affects about 4% of adults. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Treatment may include Stress reduction, counseling, gradual desensitization, medication, but the gold standard is image rehearsal therapy. It’s a form of cognitive-behavioral training that teaches people to re-imagine nightmares with positive endings. Still, not everyone with nightmare disorder responds to treatment, experts say.
Now, a new study adds a twist — human memory plays sounds associated with more positive outcomes during the REM (rapid eye movement) or dream phase of sleep. was four times Less nightmares than basic treatment alone.
“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first clinical and therapeutic study to use targeted memory activation to accelerate and enhance therapy,” said lead author, the Institute for Sleep Research at the University Hospital of Geneva and the University of Switzerland Psychiatry. Physician Dr. Lampros Perogamvros said. Geneva.
“This is a promising development. Appropriately timed addition of sound during REM sleep appears to enhance the effectiveness of imagery rehearsal therapy … This is the standard and probably the most effective non-pharmacologic therapy currently available.” is one of the latest American Sleep Society medical guidelines about nightmares.
“We need to replicate the results,” said Morgenthaler, who was not involved in the study. “But I was a little excited about this new possibility.”
Imagery Rehearsal Therapy has four basic steps that can be taught in one day. experts sayFirst, you’ll be asked to write down all the details of your nightmare. Each person then rewrites the nightmare in positive arches, ending with a comfortable and powerful solution or solution.
Now practice begins.A remade dream must be rehearsed 5 to 20 minutes each day until it is woven into your brain’s memory circuits. Once that’s in place, rehearse and act on your new dream just before bedtime.
In a new study released Thursday in the journal Current Biology, the researchers put a twist on the treatment. 18 of his with nightmare disorder listened to neutral sounds (piano chords) and recreated nightmares in a more positive way. A control group of 18 people, who also had nightmare disorder, heard no additional sounds while recreating their dreams.
All 36 were given a headband, called an actimator, to wear at night for two weeks. In addition to monitoring sleep stages, the device produced sounds via bone conduction in a manner that would not wake the sleeping person.
“One of the key aspects of this study’s intervention is the use of a relatively new technique that can more precisely time stimulation of true REM sleep,” says Morgen, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine. Sarah says.
“Most wearable devices do not accurately measure actual REM sleep,” he added. “Of course, further research may prove that timing is less important, but that has not yet been determined.”
Sounds were delivered to both groups every 10 seconds during the dream stage of sleep over a two-week period. In this case, “imagery rehearsal therapy worked for all participants, including the control group,” Perogamvros said.
“But in the experimental group, When the sound was positively associated, the reduction was quite large, almost a quarter as many nightmares,” he added.
Image rehearsal therapy also reduced measures of overall distress, mood, and sleep quality in both groups, but the reduction in nightmares occurred faster in the experimental group and was sustained at 3-month follow-up, they said. In addition, members of the group who heard the sounds reported experiencing more pleasant dreams in their dreams than members of the control group.
Additional studies are needed to validate these results and extend the concept, but we hope this technology will lead to a breakthrough for the approximately 30% of patients who do not respond to imaging rehearsal therapy, also called IRT. Yes, says Perogamvros.
“There is merit to the idea that supports the hypothesis that targeted memory reactivation may enhance the effects of IRT,” Morgenthaler said.
