Can Yoga Cause Nightmares?

Can Yoga Cause Nightmares? (Helpful Content!)

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Yoga cannot directly cause nightmares in any strict sense. There may certainly be a connection between beginning yoga practice and having intensified dreams or nightmares, but the relationship between the two is not direct. The yoga may simply be bringing things to the surface in some way.

 

Yoga is a powerful meditative tool, and it can have huge psychological effects.

While they are more or less universally agreed to be positive, at the same time the intensity of the change can often bring about uncomfortable side effects by bringing things to the surface.

Let’s find out more.

Can Yoga Cause Nightmares?

 

Does yoga give you nightmares?

Yoga is not likely to just give you nightmares all by itself.

That said, there certainly could be a connection between newly taking up yoga and a sudden influx of vivid dreams, if not outright nightmares.

It’s important first that we understand exactly how dreaming works, or at least our best theories about the mechanisms.

Every night during sleep our body goes through multiple cycles.

The deepest of these cycles is called REM sleep.

Most of your dreams will happen during this part of the sleep cycle.

Here, you are most deeply asleep, and yet your mind is simultaneously most active.

When it comes to dreaming, then, virtually anything that affects the deepness of this cycle of sleep is going to affect it.

There are many ways that yoga might make this sleep deeper or indeed have the opposite effect.

It may sound paradoxical that both deeper REM sleep and more disturbed REM sleep can lead to increased nightmares or vivid dreams.

However, it’s really a question of how well we remember our dreams.

If we frequently wake up at night, we tend to remember our dreams more clearly.

This makes us feel we have dreamt more on one night than on another.

Assuming you are doing the yoga right before you go to bed, there are two things that could be happening.

On the one hand, the simpler explanation is that your yoga gives you a deeper sleep and allows you to drift further into REM sleep.

This intensifies your dreams and can even turn to nightmares if you are naturally prone to them.

On the other hand, yoga as a form of meditation may be bringing something to the surface which you have been trying to avoid or ignore.

This could then manifest in your dreams as a nightmare, perhaps about something which has been troubling you even subconsciously recently.

As you can see, then, yoga is unlikely to be the direct cause of nightmares.

Rather, it is simply in the ways that it affects your sleep.

Nightmares usually are related to some kind of anxiety in your waking life, and addressing that is usually the only solution.

Let’s look further into how yoga affects sleep.

 

How does yoga affect sleep?

There are many aspects to yoga and it can look very different for different people.

In general, though, there are a few things at the core of yoga that can have a huge impact on your sleep.

In a general sense, it improves mindfulness.

Being present is a really important part of being able to get to sleep.

When our minds drift to the future or the past, it becomes harder and harder to drift off.

Yoga helps with this.

On a more specific level, though, the breathing involved in yoga is one of the biggest factors affecting our sleep.

Deep breathing, especially paired with the kind of movement you find in yoga, is hugely relaxing and can really aid restful and consistent sleep.

Yoga also increases melatonin levels, which is a hormone that regulates sleep cycles.

 

Can yoga help with nightmares?

Yoga can certainly help with nightmares.

Disturbed sleep is usually the bigger problem in the greater frequency of nightmares and yoga can help us to have a more restful sleep.

This alone can be enough to curb chronic nightmares for some people, though admittedly not for all.

When it comes to dreams and nightmares, everyone is different.

However, as I mentioned, frequent nightmares are usually the result of something giving you increased worry in your waking life.

Resolving this can mean enormously different things depending on the circumstances, but it is unfortunately the only real, long term way to address the problem.

Yoga can only bring this to the surface.

 

Can yoga cause night terrors?

Yoga is very unlikely to cause night terrors in someone who is not already predisposed to them.

Night terrors are vanishingly rare in adults, and are almost always carried over from childhood.

It’s uncommon to develop them later in life, and virtually unheard of to have them triggered by something as simple as yoga.

There’s a possibility that bedtime yoga might trigger night terrors in some people, in which case you should of course avoid doing it before bed.

But they could equally be beneficial to night terrors, so it’s difficult to say.

Consult a doctor on this question if you are not sure.

 

Yoga is an incredibly powerful thing, and it goes far beyond the normal confines of exercise.

There is a huge psychological and self-reflective aspect to it, and often this can bring to the surface things which we have been ignoring or attempting to put down.

While dealing with this can be unpleasant, ultimately it is far better than suppressing it.

Yoga may not cause nightmares that were not already there, but it can bring them to the surface.

 

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