Anxiety In the Morning: What Does It Mean?
Sam’s eyes snap open from sleep. He rolls over and checks his alarm clock. It’s 5 am and his alarm isn’t scheduled to go for another 30 minutes. He feels unsettled and panicky. His breathing is quick. He feels his heart throbbing in his chest. A disturbing feeling of anxiety and fear hangs over him. Sam has woken up anxious, but he is not sure why.
Sam, like many people, will properly push himself out of bed. The anxiety will slowly fade and return to his subconscious mind. Just like we haven’t been trained to pay attention to our dreams, we haven’t been trained to pay attention to our emotional state when we wake up in the morning. However, both our dreams and what we feel when we wake up provide insight into our mental health issues in our waking life.
Waking Up Anxious From REM Sleep
To understand the significance of dreams and our waking emotional state, we have to understand a bit more about the third stage of sleep. This stage of sleep is known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. It occurs in the later stages of the sleep cycle, usually in the early morning before waking up anxious.
Many important functions are related to the upkeep of the body occurring in this phase of sleep. One of these functions is memory consolidation. Not only has academia validated that this occurs, but it’s also self-evident by the eye movements themselves.
We move our eyes in specific directions when we access or write memory. This has been used as the basis for trauma desensitization techniques like EMDR and Brainspotting. It is also used in NLP Eye Movements for reading when a person accesses memory.
Waking Up Anxious Because Of Venting Dreams
Okay, so the mind is performing memory consolidation during the third stage of sleep. You are probably wondering what this has to do with waking up anxious. Well, this has to do with something the hypnotherapy community has observed in dream analysis for decades. A specific type of dream called a venting dream occurs during this stage of sleep.
Venting dreams are dreams which are symbolic of the mind attempting to resolve a past emotional conflict. In other words, when the mind is performing memory consolidation, it’s trying to process past events. The point of this process is to update how our nervous system fires off in response to the world. The mind is calibrating our emotional responses to better serve us.
This is the theory, at least. While the academic world hasn’t fully validated this, there has been acknowledgment in books that the content of dreams changes in the different stages of sleep. Daniel Pedro Cardinali writes “Although [REM] percentage is higher than those recorded in NREM sleep, what changes is the content of the dreams.” in his book “Autonomic Nervous System: Basic and Clinical Aspects”.
Waking Up With Unfinished Venting Dreams
We often think of a negative emotional experience as a singular emotion such as sadness or hurt. However, it’s a cascade of emotions that shift from negative to positive. This is the subconscious mind processing an event we don’t like. The goal of this process is to take new positive lessons that allow us to move from a place of negative emotion to a place of positive emotion.
If we all just sat with our emotions and allowed them to run their course, all of our mental health would be significantly better. However, we can’t always do that, leading to a negative emotion being repressed or suppressed, preventing the process from completing. When this happens, the mind will use venting dreams to try and finish the process.
It’s not always able to complete the process in one dreaming cycle though. Sometimes we wake up with the process unfinished. When this occurs, we wake up in an unresolved negative emotional state instead of the resolved positive emotional state.
Repeatedly Waking Up Anxious
If this just happens once, there is no need for concern. Sometimes heavy emotional conflicts can take several dream cycles to work through. The mind has capacity limits in how much it can process at one time. This is evidenced by limitations in the nervous system’s ability to exchange information.
There is a need for concern if you are repeatedly waking up in the same anxious emotional state or you keep having the same reoccurring dream. This is evidence that the mind has gotten stuck and cannot complete the processing of the event. This may be because the intensity of it is too strong or the subconscious mind lacks belief structures that allow it to resolve. For example, if a person believes that revenge is required for resolution, they may not be able to reach a positive emotional state.
Reach Out To a Hypnotherapist For Help
If your mind has gotten stuck in a negative emotional state, there is help. Board-certified hypnotherapists can work with you to analyze the dreams to understand the true conflict beneath them. Once the conflict has been identified, we can take you into hypnosis to help the mind resolve.
Waking up anxious may seem like a relatively benign issue, but unprocessed traumatic events can cause issues in waking life. The unresolved negative emotions buried in the subconscious come out during our day in various ways. It’s, for this reason, several of my clients have decided to go off anti-depressants with the aid of their doctor. They realized what was labeled as a mental illness or disease was just an unresolved painful event from their past.
If you found this post on waking up anxious helpful, you may also find these posts on sleep maintenance insomnia, reoccurring dreams, and waking up in the middle of the night to be useful.
