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- Welcome to Living Healthy Chicago.
I'm Jane Clauss.
A good night's sleep is such an important part
of taking care of our health.
So today we're finding out how nightmares
and sleep struggles can affect our overall wellness
and what we can do to get a better night's sleep.
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I am at Rush University Medical Center
with Dr. James Wyatt to talk about sleep.
Now, we all love getting an uninterrupted,
peaceful night's sleep, don't we doctor?
- Absolutely, absolutely.
- But please remind us why it's important
to get good sleep for proper health.
- Well, good sleep is important for our health
for all sorts of different organ systems in the body.
It's important for our brain
to replenish the nutrients it needs for tomorrow,
but also for the brain to reinforce memories
for information we learned today.
- Tons of reasons why we sleep,
but sometimes our sleep can be disrupted
because of a bad dream
or a nightmare. - Right.
- In medical speak, can you explain what a nightmare is?
- Now a nightmare comes when two things happen.
The dream is recalled to be very terrifying,
very scary to the individual, and it wakes you up.
If those two things happen, that's what we call a nightmare.
Very normal for children to have these
and persistent nightmares may be as common
as 20% in young children, let's say below the age of five.
So for adults, we don't see them as often.
Chronic nightmares you see in maybe 5% of adults
and there's different severity levels, of course, as well.
- So when you talk about severity levels,
you've got the nightmare, but there's a night terror.
Is that the same thing?
- Yeah, different things.
Sleep terror happens typically in the first half
of the sleep episode.
It's in what's called non-rapid eye movement sleep
or non-REM sleep.
It's very deep sleep.
And it's when the individual may sit up, eyes wide open,
look like they're terrified.
They go right back to sleep later.
And in the morning they have no recollection of it.
Whereas the nightmares, it's in the middle of a dream,
almost always during rapid eye movement or REM sleep.
And this is typically going to occur in the middle
to end of the night.
And we call it nightmare disorder when it goes
on frequently enough for longer than a month
and causes some degree of excessive worry
or concern to the person.
- What causes nightmares?
- Well, there are many different things
that cause nightmares.
So for example, one of the classic examples
is post-traumatic stress disorder.
If somebody has nightmare disorder,
we want to see what are the variety of circumstances
that might be making it worse
or starting it off in the first place?
So is it a side effect of a medication?
Other times it may come from passive observation,
watching the scary movie before you go to bed
and it might come back during the nighttime.
Once it goes on to a week or two weeks,
it really starts interrupting your sleep,
it starts freaking out during the daytime,
or you start dreading going to sleep at night.
Absolutely, that's the time to go see somebody.
- [Jane] Are there tips and tricks that you could recommend
for somebody who is experiencing some bad dreams?
- At home things people can do if they're having nightmares
is just to take a look and see if there's anything
that correlates or goes along with it.
For example, is it just the night
after a heavy night out drinking?
When it comes to things that we're going
to help them with in the sleep clinic,
one of the leading treatments we'll do
is something called imagery rehearsal therapy.
We'll have them write it out for us.
And then we'll have them write it again.
They start with the initial stem of that nightmare
and then partway through we have them change it.
It doesn't have to be rosy and positive.
It just has to be different.
And they'll practice that type
of re-scripting a different end to the dream.
Eventually because they are taking the content
of the nightmare and changing the ending,
and they're doing it when they're awake,
it becomes we think a new memory that pushes out
or squeezes out that nightmare.
- What is the one thing you want everyone
to remember when it comes to good sleep
and having a nightmare?
- Nightmares can be a natural phenomenon
we can all be subjected to at some point in our life.
And they are a real validated concern
or you're worried about it,
or it's having a negative impact that carries
over into your day time, and it's been more
than probably a week or two,
that's the time to go see somebody about it.
- Great information.
Thank you so much, Dr. Wyatt.
- Thanks for having me.
- For more health inspiration and expert advice,
just head to our website, livinghealthytv.com.
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