Hello Autumn!
I am sorry it has taken so long to get back on here and update my blog. Time seems to be whizzing by at the moment. After a lovely warm summer, the autumn weather and dark nights can come as a shock for many of us. When our mood is low, we often find that our sleep is affected. We can struggle to fall asleep, wake up in the night, and sometimes struggle to get up in the morning. Sleep plays such an important role in our mental health. We need sleep for so many reasons, but during our REM cycle, the brain processes the events of the day. During this tidy up at night, our experiences become narrative memories instead of emotional memories.
This why we often wake up feeling better about the problem than the night before. We have ‘slept on it’.
Because REM is such an exhausting process, we cannot spent our entire sleep doing this. Therefore, if we have a lot of negative thoughts to process, the chances are we aren’t going to be able to process all of them in the allocated time (20% of our sleep pattern). This is when we might wake up in the night – because our brain has sneakily tried to overdo it.
In a nutshell, the less negative thoughts we are having, the better we can sleep. The better we sleep, the less negative thoughts we have.