The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep." - E. Joseph Cossman
- karenburrett
- Apr 17
- 2 min read
We all face challenges in life, sometimes they are small, and sometimes they feel huge. They cause us to feel anxious and to have negative thoughts, Unsurprisingly, the size of the challenge is generally reflected in the amount of negative thinking.
In solution focused hypnotherapy, we say that negative thoughts go into a stress bucket. We can all cope with a little negative thinking and little bit in our stress bucket. But the huge challenges, or even lots of little challenges, cause our buckets to fill up with negative thoughts.
Fortunately, we have a mechanism to empty the stress bucket. You may be aware of something called Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, also known as dreaming. During the REM part of our sleep, we re-run events of the day in dreams, and when we wake up in the morning, we have either forgotten about the challenges of the previous day or they no longer upset us.
REM sleep is very intensive for our brains, however, and so there is a limit to how much of it we can do. So if our stress bucket is fairly empty, REM sleep can process the contents during the night. If our stress bucket is more full, only some of the contents can removed during the time available for REM sleep. If our brain is trying to empty an over-full stress bucket, there will be one of two consequences. We either wake up during the night and struggle to get back to sleep, and this is often around 2 or 3am, or we wake up tired and perhaps depressed.
Sleep is the opportunity to reset ahead of the following day. If we don't sleep well, we wake up in the same state that we were the night before. Here's some advice from the NHS website: