Can Recurring Nightmares be Treated?
August 25th, 2010 | No Comments | Source: Wall Street JournalIn Victorian times, dreams were believed to represent repressed sexual desires or random brain activity. Now scientists believe they reflect an attempt by the unconscious mind to process and store emotion-laced events from the day.
“We take our problems to sleep and work through them during the night,” Rosalind Cartwright, a neuroscience professor at Rush University Medical Center told the Wall Street Journal.
According to Cartwright, during dreams the mind juxtaposes unprocessed emotions encountered during waking hours with older, related memories. “That’s why dreams look so peculiar. You have old memories and new memories Scotch-plaided into each other,” she added. “They are emotional connections rather than logical ones.”
If this theory is true, it may be possible for people to direct their own dreams. For example, people who experience recurring nightmares might learn to substitute happier endings or eliminate them altogether.
A small group of people who practice “lucid dreaming” believe this is indeed possible. According to these people, recurring nightmares are caused when people wake up from the frightening experiences, thereby interrupting the normal process of emotional reconciliation that takes place during dreaming. Without the reconciliation, the dream is left to repeat itself.
“Your brain seems to think that it’s helping you to prepare, but you don’t allow yourself to finish it so it becomes a broken record,” Shelby Freedman Harris, a Behavioral Sleep Medicine expert at Montefiore Medical Center explained to the Journal.
Harris runs a program that tries to help folks either rewrite or delete the script of recurring dreams using a technique known as Image Rehearsal Therapy. In implementing the technique, dreamers recreate the nightmare with better endings or more palatable story-lines (substituting dolphins for sharks, for example), and rehearse the new script several times per day.
While far from 100% effective, many of Harris’ patients are able to dream the revised script, while others stop having the nightmare completely.




One woman featured in a
To reach these conclusions, Mia Hashibi and colleagues pooled results from 9 previous studies which looked at coffee and tea drinking, as well as rates of head and neck cancers. In those studies, the behaviors of cancer patients were compared with either the general population or to patients that were hospitalized for reasons other than cancer.
The incentives are quite diverse. Some companies simply reward employees for getting a check-up evaluation or pay the costs of diet classes. Others pay employees that achieve certain exercise targets. Still others cut health-insurance premiums.
Numerous health officials, Michelle Obama and New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg have all recently urged food makers to cut out some salt in their food. The prestigious Institute of Medicine actually wants the feds to force food makers to do so.
City officials decided it was worth the extra few thousand dollars per year to encourage sexually active teens to practice safe sex.
To reach these conclusions, Leslie Seltzer created a stressful situation by asking a cohort 7- to 12-year-old girls to deliver an extemporaneous speech and solve difficult math problems in front of an audience of strangers.
To reach this conclusion, the scientists looked at 1,221 married couples who were at least 65 years old. The subjects had been enrolled in the
Mildly overweight people do not have an increased risk of death from cancer or cardiovascular disease-In a study published in JAMA, Katherine Flegal and colleagues from the CDC looked at mortality rates reported in NHANES, an annual health survey. They found that mortality among those classified as overweight was lower than they had estimated. By contrast, those classified as underweight and obese had higher mortality rates than had been predicted.
The unprecedented move would be implemented over a decade or more.
The scientists added that just a small square of chocolate per day is enough to reap the cardiovascular benefits…after that, it really is just an indulgence.
The scientists found that during that 10 year period, the mean age of bikers who were involved in crashes rose from 34 to 39, and the proportion of injured riders who were at least 40 years old increased from 28% to 50%.
Unfortunately, a recent study by Paolo Boffetta and colleagues at Mount Sinai School of Medicine does not substantiate the claim.
Unlike eating disorders which disproportionately affect women, BDD is nearly as prevalent in men as in women. In one form of BDD affecting guys (muscular dysmorphic disorder), people who are totally jacked from compulsive weight training actually think they look puny and weak.
But the programs, which range from pricey private sessions with therapists to anonymous group sessions on a conference line, may or may not work. Few studies have been designed to find that out.
The findings might seem counterintuitive for people that experience palpitations after drinking coffee, especially if they believe palpitations are associated with heart rhythm disturbances (they are, but the association is weak, especially in young, healthy people).




