Can Low Blood Sugar Cause Nightmares?

Can Low Blood Sugar Cause Nightmares? (Find Out!)

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Low blood sugar will certainly have an effect on your sleep and, in turn, your dreams. Especially if you are diabetic, you can experience nocturnal hypoglycemia which will affect your ability to sleep and may cause excessive bad dreams. But it can affect non-diabetics, too.

 

Anything which affects the restfulness of your sleep has a good chance of indirectly causing bad dreams.

Blood sugar is one thing which is certainly going to impact the deepness of your sleep, so it has a strong chance of causing nightmares in this way.

Let’s look further into this.

Can Low Blood Sugar Cause Nightmares?

Does low blood sugar affect your dreams?

Low blood sugar can certainly have an impact on your dreams in a number of ways.

However, we should be clear that it doesn’t necessarily have a direct, biochemical or neurological relationship.

The mechanism of dreaming is still only rudimentarily understood—so low blood sugar doesn’t cause any kind of chemical imbalance which leads to more dreaming.

That said, the restlessness that results from low blood sugar certainly will have a direct impact on your dreams.

It isn’t guaranteed to cause nightmares, as such, but you will be at a much higher risk of experiencing bad dreams, or at least just remembering the dreams you do have more clearly.

In reality, anything that has a strong, altering effect on our body has a high chance of affecting our dreams.

It’s all largely to do with restfulness, and how deep our sleep is.

Let’s look at exactly why low blood sugar can affect your dreams in this way.

 

Why does low blood sugar cause nightmares?

When we sleep each night, we go through stages or cycles of sleep.

We rotate through each stage multiple times per night. The deepest stage of sleep, known as REM, is when most of our dreaming occurs.

Whether or not we feel as though we’ve had dreams, or dreamt a lot, is largely down to how much we remember them.

As I said, dreaming itself is still only quite loosely understood.

Our best theory for why we do it is that it is a way for our brains to compartmentalize information.

Decide what is important and what is not.

This all goes on in the memory centers of the brain.

Dreaming seems to occur here.

So, low blood sugar may cause us to have bad dreams because our body is never in a true state of rest.

It can’t be while it is low in blood sugar.

Thus, because we are not sleeping properly, we are much more aware of the dreams that are going on in our heads.

When we wake up, we are much more likely to remember them. this restlessness, too, will increase the vividness of dreams, and make them more nightmarish.

So, it’s really mostly about how restful your sleep is.

The more restful, the less likely you are to have nightmares.

So, how to prevent these nightmares?

 

How to prevent nightmares from low blood sugar  

This question is going to depend a lot on the person.

Naturally, for diabetics, maintaining healthy blood sugar is a much more vital point, and you need to be in direct consultation with your doctor for this.

For the average person, though, just make sure you are well fed long enough before bed.

Equally, don’t eat too close to bedtime, as the night time digestion will just mean your body is equally restless.

As long as you are eating sufficient amounts, the average person shouldn’t have any issue with low blood sugar at night.

A few basic relaxation techniques can be helpful in diminishing the effects of lower blood sugar.

Meditation, aromatherapy, even yoga can all be really helpful steps.

But, again, I can’t stress enough that if your blood sugar is constantly low, you need to speak to a doctor about your options.

 

Can low blood sugar cause night terrors?

Night terrors are a quite different beast, and generally won’t spring up for someone who isn’t already predisposed to them.

That said, for someone who already does suffer with night terrors, low blood sugar is very, very likely to make the situation worse.

Children are much more prone to night terrors, and are also not as able to treat their own diabetes.

It’s really important, then, that you keep an eye on your child if they are having night terrors as a result of low blood sugar.

 

Your blood sugar levels are really important to how restful your sleep is, then.

There are many things that can get in the way of a good night’s rest, and blood sugar is certainly one of them. whether you’re diabetic or not, it’s important to take stock of this and make sure it doesn’t fall to a level where it’s likely to impact your dreams.

As long as you follow the basic advice given here, you should have no problem.

 

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