Can Quitting Smoking Cause Nightmares?

Can Quitting Smoking Cause Nightmares? (Revealed!)

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Quitting smoking can certainly disrupt your sleep, and make it harder for you to get a good night’s rest. This can then lead to nightmares, vivid dreams, and nasty experiences at night. There are things you can do to combat it, though, and rest assured that they will not last forever.

 

So, yes, quitting smoking can cause nightmares, if indirectly.

The mechanisms of dreaming and its functions are still quite poorly understood, but we can make a few essential assumptions about the relationship between dreaming and quitting smoking.

Let’s look further into this.

Can Quitting Smoking Cause Nightmares?

Does quitting smoking give you nightmares?

While not directly, the relationship is clear enough that we can say, with some caveats, that quitting smoking can indeed give you nightmares.

There’s no guarantee it will happen, but it is quite likely.

Even today, our understanding of dreaming is still fairly limited.

We have several working unified theories of dreaming, some more robust than others.

Our best one is that dreaming serves as a way for your brain to figure out the important from the unimportant memories.

It helps you to compartmentalize, and work out what is important to remember and what isn’t.

In terms of the actual mechanism of dreaming, it seems that our dreams occur in the memory centers of the brain.

So, dreams are simply our brain remembering things.

With all this in mind, we can say that yes, quitting smoking can cause nightmares—or at the very least, vivid dreams.

Why, then, should quitting smoking give you nightmares?

 

Why does quitting smoking cause nightmares?

The simple answer is to do with how quitting smoking affects your sleeping pattern.

When we sleep, we go through cycles of sleep, the deepest of which is REM sleep.

This is where most dreaming tends to occur.

How much we dream, or how vivid our dreams are, is more often to do with how deeply asleep we are—and thus how well we remember our dreams.

Quitting smoking disrupts your body in a number of ways.

If you are struggling with cravings, then your body is going to have a harder time shutting down properly.

Because you are more awake, less restful, you will be much more aware of your dreaming.

Your dreaming itself will be stranger and more vivid as a result of this, and this could, for many people, mean outright nightmares.

So, it’s really all to do with how quitting smoking disrupts your sleep.

It’s not as though quitting smoking causes nightmares because it affects your brain chemically, although it does do this.

It’s simply that you aren’t in as deep of a sleep.

Let’s look into how you can put a stop to these nightmares.

 

How to stop nightmares from quitting smoking

The first thing to note is that the nightmares will ultimately go away on their own once you are out of the woods with quitting smoking.

It isn’t something that will linger for a long time.

But that doesn’t help you while they’re still bad.

But there are a couple of things you can do to help your sleep be as restful as possible.

Firstly, try and stick to a regular routine.

It helps you get to sleep a lot more soundly if you are in bed and waking up at roughly the same time every day.

This will mean you’re less likely to have nightmares.

Beyond that, there are many basic techniques you can employ to get yourself the best rest possible.

Meditation, yoga, and aromatherapy are some of the simplest and most effective, and will go a long way to getting you a good night’s sleep.

Exercise throughout the day is another really excellent way to get your body properly ready to sleep, especially if you work at a desk or an otherwise sedentary job.

Being active and using up your body’s energy gives you a better chance of being tired and falling asleep soundly at night.

What about night terrors?

 

Does quitting smoking cause night terrors?

It’s very unlikely.

Night terrors are vanishingly rare in adults, and if you aren’t already predisposed to them, it’s unlikely you’ll experience them as a result of quitting smoking.

That said, if you do have a tendency towards night terrors already, then there’s a good chance you could experience them more when you’re quitting smoking.

By and large, though, quitting smoking will not cause night terrors.

Quitting smoking can be a really turbulent time, then.

It can be very difficult to get a good night’s rest, and this is one of the leading causes of bad dreams and nightmares.

There’s a good many things you can do to combat it, though, and you should always remember that you’ll eventually be out of the woods, and they will pass.

Quitting smoking is not easy, but if you’ve decided it’s the right time for you, then just be prepared for a little strangeness.

 

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