Causal Circle of Insomnia

You wake up in the night from a nightmare and can’t fall asleep again.

So, after some twisting and turning, you go to the fridge and grab a snack. You still can’t sleep.

In the morning you feel wasted, anxious and even depressed. And it is no wonder what.

But what if this was all the reverse? What if it wasn’t really the nightmares that woke you up or insomnia that prevented you from falling asleep?

In a new study, Korean researchers decided to investigate whether people with anxiety or depression are more likely to have nightmares than the general population.

After all, if we can identify the cause of the nightmares, we can stop the nightmares, the night eating, and the insomnia.

They recruited 171 female undergraduate students with an average age of 21.7.

They gave them a barrage of questionnaires to complete, including the Disturbing Dream and Nightmare Severity Index, the Night Eating Questionnaire, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, and the Insomnia Severity Index.

Once they had all this information available, they were able to crunch the numbers.

As expected, they found that participants with the most severe nightmares were the most likely to suffer from night eating syndrome, insomnia, anxiety, and depression.

They didn’t unearth the direction of these relationships, as they were probably bidirectional in most cases.

For example, anxiety brings about nightmares, but nightmares can also create subsequent anxiety that, according to one of the studies reviewed, can last for three days.

Similarly, nightmares can cause insomnia, as you are too disturbed to go back to sleep. However, insomnia can also produce the feeling that you’re having a lot of nightmares, because if you wake up after every dream, you are more likely to remember them, including the scary ones.

When they took insomnia out of the picture, they discovered that the girls who experienced the highest levels of anxiety were the most likely to have nightmares and have night eating syndrome. Depression was not relevant when insomnia was excluded.

This means that we can open the door to addressing these three conditions by removing anxiety: insomnia, nightmares, and night eating.

Fortunately, there is a simple 10-minutes trick that will tackle all these aspects in one blow. Click here to learn more…