Quote

When it comes to the reason why we have nightmares, we're still debating that. It's a new area of research, nightmares. And the way I like to think about it is, our brain - we have stress during the day and our brain needs to learn to process this stress.

Shelby Harris

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Shelby Harris
Age: 33
Born: 1991
Born: August 11
American Football Player
Football Player
Milwaukee City
Wisconsin
Thinking
Process
Nightmares
Like
Comes
Nightmare
Stills
Area
Still
Stress
Reason
Areas
Needs
Research
Way
Brain
Think
Learn
Debating

More quotes by Shelby Harris

Image
There's some debate as to whether you need to awaken from them because there are some patients who are actually starting to say, I had these horrible nightmares, but I never woke up from them. But they can still recall them when they get up in the morning. So there's still some debate in the field.
Shelby Harris
Image
So, sleep deprivation, and sometimes an insomnia, which is a little bit of a different form, but just getting a lack of sleep, can lead to a number of different decrements.
Shelby Harris
Image
So if somebody has chronic pain, we want to manage the pain, but we still want to treat the insomnia separately. So what we'll tend to do in our sleep lab is we'll do a thorough evaluation and we usually have myself, who is a Psychologist and a Sleep Behavioral Sleep Specialist, I treat the patients first.
Shelby Harris
Image
So there's a few different ways that we treat insomnia. The first thing that we always do is we look at the cause.
Shelby Harris
Image
We try not using medications initially, and we use something called behavioral therapy for insomnia. This changes behaviors people do in bed, none of the tossing and turning.
Shelby Harris
Image
So the older models, when you look at Freudian, when you look at Jungian thought, and there's still people who really - who really use the Jungian thought of dream analysis, is really that you would analyze the dreams. The dreams are there for a purpose.
Shelby Harris
Image
So people only focus on getting the really deep sleep, but in reality, we spend almost 60% of the night in the stage two sleep.
Shelby Harris
Image
So you have it, you awaken from it and you can recall, in detail, what just happened, that's a nightmare. So it's very different from a dream where you generally don't wake up from it and you don't have this dysphoric emotion.
Shelby Harris
Image
Nightmares are distinctly different from dreams in the way that people feel them and experience them. So a lot of people think that a nightmare is something where something is chasing them and you have to wake up screaming. Yes, that's one of the more common nightmares that we see is the person chasing someone or they're being chased.
Shelby Harris
Image
And you cycle throughout so that you do about five to six cycles throughout the night. And we spend more time in REM later on in the night than we do earlier on.
Shelby Harris
Image
There's a new line of research showing that people who don't get enough sleep, they're body doesn't metabolize as well. And so they actually - it leads to weight gain. So if you're not getting enough sleep, you might have difficulty losing weight.
Shelby Harris
Image
So you have Sleep Stage One, Two, and then Three/Four. One is a little bit lighter stage of the quiet, non-REM sleep and then Three/Four is really deep, deep sleep. And what you want is, you actually want a number of - you want to go through all of these stages throughout the night.
Shelby Harris
Image
There are some people who believe that dreams really are just kind of a throwaway thing. They are just a way of your brain processing what's happening during the day, but there's really no meaning to them a lot of imagery of just flashes of what happened.
Shelby Harris
Image
I'll work on patient's thoughts about sleep, So I must get eight hours of sleep tonight or I won't sleep tomorrow. That sometimes - or I won't function tomorrow. That sometimes makes it very difficult for you to sleep at night
Shelby Harris
Image
Really if it's an hour or two after you've fallen asleep because you're in such a deep sleep at that point.
Shelby Harris
Image
We actually don't know the function of sleep all that well yet, but sleep is a time of quiescence in the brain.
Shelby Harris
Image
So a lot of people who work rotating shifts and they work at night, their bodies are set to want to be awake during the day and sleep at night. So there are some people who have a lot of trouble adjusting their rhythms and they have trouble working the night shift, they're sleepy, they're drowsy driving home.
Shelby Harris
Image
There are people who have repetitive nightmares. And what happens is their brain is trying to process the stress and help their brain actually deal with what happens if this stress happens again, so their brain's preparing them to deal with it in case the stress happens again, but it's so scary that they awaken from it.
Shelby Harris
Image
So when you go to sleep at night, if you're someone who hasn't had any sleep deprivation, you have a very normal sleep pattern, what we tend to see is that, in adults, they go to bed and they start off by going into the deeper stages sleep.
Shelby Harris
Image
For some people they say, it's about wish fulfillment, it's about the things you are never able to do in your day you are actually fulfilling at night. There are other people who will say that it's actually telling you something.
Shelby Harris