Answer: Try practicing a mindfulness-based approach where you non-judgmentally accept the emotions you experience during the day.

Experiential Versus Analytical Emotion Regulation and Sleep: Breaking the Link Between Negative Events and Sleep Disturbance.

Abstract

Despite a long history of interest in emotion regulation as well as in the mechanisms that regulate sleep, the relationship between emotion regulation and sleep is not yet well understood.

The present study investigated whether “an experiential approach”-defined by coping through affectively acknowledging, understanding, and expressing actual emotional experience and affective feeling about a situation-compared with a “cognitive analytical approach”-defined by the cognitive analysis of the causes, meanings and implications of the situation for the own self-would buffer the impact of an emotional failure experience on (1) emotional experience and (2) sleep structure assessed by EEG polysomnography.

Twenty-eight healthy volunteers participated in this study. A direct comparison of the two emotion regulation strategies revealed that participants who were instructed to apply an experiential approach showed less fragmentation of sleep than participants who were instructed to apply an analytical approach.

The use of an experiential approach resulted in a longer sleep time, higher sleep efficiency, fewer awakenings, less % time awake, and fewer minutes wake after sleep onset. Implications of the differential effects of these two forms of emotion regulation on sleep are discussed.

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Mindfulness and dream quality: the inverse relationship between mindfulness and negative dream affect.

Abstract

The aim of the study was to examine the relationship of mindfulness to the emotional quality of dreaming.

In our questionnaire-based study, comprising the data of 587 undergraduate students we examined the association between trait anxiety, perceived stress, trait mindfulness, negative dream affect and dream anxiety.

Our results indicate that mindfulness is inversely related to disturbed dreaming and predicts less severe dream disturbances after controlling for trait anxiety. Moreover, the results of the applied hierarchical regression analysis suggest that mindfulness is associated with reduced dream anxiety by moderating the extent of waking anxiety.

Our findings extend previous research relating mindfulness, emotional regulation and sleep quality to the domain of dream research. We suggest that mindfulness is a possible protective factor against dream disturbances.