Can Exercise Cause Nightmares?

Can Exercise Cause Nightmares? (Helpful Content!)

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There are a few ways that exercise can at least lead to intensely vivid dreams, if not nightmares. Somewhat paradoxically, intense exercise can disrupt your sleep which ultimately will lead to increased dreams and nightmares. It’s much to do with how well we remember our dreams more than anything else.

 

Exercise is naturally an important thing that we all need to do, but it’s also somewhat sensitive.

There are many ways we can apparently get it wrong, and even the experts largely cannot agree on many of the finer points.

Let’s find out more.

Can Exercise Cause Nightmares?

 

Does exercise give you nightmares?

In the simplest sense, no, exercise does not give you nightmares.

Obviously, not everyone who regularly works out gets persistent nightmares, so it’s more a question of the particular circumstances in each case.

That said, there are certainly a number of things that exercise does that can lead to increasingly vivid dreams.

Nightmares are often a different matter—for most people, nightmares tend to reflect something going on in waking life that is causing you to worry.

Dreams in general, though, are mostly a mechanism of brain activity during a particular part of our sleep cycle, REM sleep.

This is the deepest part of our nightly sleep cycle which we will go through multiple times and is where most dreaming tends to occur.

If something disturbs our sleep and makes REM more restless, then we are more aware, and thus we remember our dreams more clearly.

You may have heard it said that dreaming is something we do every night, and how much we feel we have dreamt is more a question of how well we remember the dreams.

The more disturbed and restless your sleep is, the more aware you are of your dreams and the better you remember them.

Exercise is highly stimulating, causing your brain to be extremely active even though it simultaneously exhausts you.

This stimulation, especially if the exercise is done late at night, can lead to incredibly vivid dreams and even nightmares.

On the flip side, it can cause you to sleep more deeply, and this can increase the vividness of your dreams.

In all this, though, it’s important to note we have mainly been talking about vivid dreams.

Nightmares, while certainly can be made more prominent with something like exercise, generally reflect something more going on.

There is some fear or anxiety going unaddressed.

 

Does exercising at night affect sleep?

Exercising at night will certainly affect your sleep.

In most cases, a workout at night is a good way to help yourself drift off into a deeper sleep.

This, for most people, will mean a more restful and fulfilling sleep.

However, as I’ve said, it can be different for each person, and nighttime may not always be the best time to do your exercise.

It all depends on the intensity of the exercise.

A quick yoga practice before bed, for example, to stretch out and destress should deepen your sleep.

It won’t have many other effects, though, but deeper sleep can mean more vivid dreams for some people.

However, aerobic exercise has been shown to be directly linked to dreams and nightmares in some people.

As I said, this sort of exercise can be highly stimulating to the brain, and though you are tired afterward, you are still pumping up your brain to high levels of activity.

This can carry over to your sleep, which can increase the frequency and intensity of your dreams.

It may seem an unfortunate catch-22, then, that exercising can affect sleep both by making it deeper and by making it less restful.

If you notice such effects from high-intensity exercise at night, the simple solution is to try and exercise at a different time of the day.

 

Does exercise help nightmares?

In some cases, exercise can certainly help with nightmares.

Stress, of any kind, can lead to nightmares as you’ll have a harder time getting to sleep when you are stressed.

Exercise can be a good way to take your mind off whatever it is that’s worrying you, and thus give you a better night’s sleep.

This isn’t guaranteed to eliminate nightmares, but finding a way for you that works to destress is really important.

You’ll have to experiment with things and try them a few different ways.

 

Does exercise cause night terrors?

Exercise is not very likely to cause night terrors unless you’re already predisposed to them.

They are very uncommon in adults, and even more so in adults that did not already suffer with them as children.

For children, though, exercise could interrupt sleep in a way that might influence night terrors.

You’ve got to be even more careful with children exercising at night, especially intense aerobic exercise.

As children get older if they have not already had issues with night terrors they are unlikely to start experiencing them.

Nonetheless, you should always be careful with this problem as night terrors can be extremely debilitating and stressful for anyone.

 

It can be different for every person and in every situation, then, and so it becomes difficult to give a simple answer.

Broadly speaking, exercise can certainly have a very profound effect on our sleep cycle, and this is the main reason we may feel our dreams to have increased or become more vivid or nightmarish.

But this is also down to the kind of exercise we do, when we do it, and a variety of other factors.

 

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