Stress Can Change Your Dreams and Sleep: 3 Useful Tips

Stress can alter your dreams and the quality of your sleep, but there are evidence-supported strategies to help.

Highlights

Having stressful situations can affect your sleep.
In a new study, researchers looked at whether dreaming could be a way for stress to affect sleep quality.
Scientists have identified the best remedies for sleep problems, including medications that cause stress.

Worried about tomorrow, change dreams and sleep?

Monty, looking forward to the vet

This may have happened to you. You sleep well – but in the early morning you drift into stressful or negative dreams. Your sleep is restless.

This pattern can feel familiar. Maybe you have a stressful day tomorrow – a doctor’s or dentist’s appointment, an important presentation, or a scary job improvement comment.

I actually experienced this.

Last year my husband and I took a seven-day live boating course on San Juan Island, Washington. Our training includes learning how to deal with potential disasters: cabin fires, hypothermia, and repeated “crew on board” training. The water temperature is 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Unfortunately, we Never Rescued “Bob”, the lifeguard who stood for the ascending crew.

I learned that this weekend we will be competing in the “sailing race”, which means walking too fast and “heels” at an angle of about 30 degrees.

On the fifth day I had nightmares every night.

Eventually, my insomnia and increased fear led me to abandon the ship — literally and figuratively.

To be fair, sailing is not the only factor. My Anxiety Probably Comes From the Perfect Storm: My Husband’s Disaster Training Makes Me Watch All is lost (Robert Redford was alone on the boat and it did not work out well) and a white water raft trip that did not have enough time with my book club where we rafted.

Therefore, I can relate to pre-existing anxiety and sleep disturbances even though I do not know the science behind it. Why did this happen?

Can dreams rehearse stress tomorrow?

Recently, Swiss researchers Sandrine Baselgia and Björn Rasch. Find out if dreams can be part of the answer.

They predict that when people expect a difficult task the next day, dreams will reveal more stressful content, especially in the early morning.

Previous research has already suggested this connection.

Example group of Researchers in France Compiled as a sample document that most students can relate to. They found that before the entrance exam for medical training, about 60% of students dreamed of taking the exam. These are mostly nightmares. Participants also reported worse-than-normal sleep that night.

Other investigators look at how to anticipate the effects of stress Brain activity during sleep. In one experiment, the researchers included high-quality sleep EEG measures such as slow (deep) sleep and sleep spindles. They found that anticipation of stressful events caused a decrease in indicators of quality sleep. Interestingly, the disturbance occurs mainly at the same time: later in the period of sleep as the waking hour approaches.

For researchers, this model of discovery raises a question: Can stressful dreams help explain why sleep worsens toward the morning when we are worried about the next day? If the idea is right, it means that the worries we put in bed can rearrange what our brains do when we sleep.

What did scientists find?

Baselgia and Rasch wonder if it is Nightmare Which induces dangerous biological changes in later sleep periods. As a first step in this assessment, they tested whether the expected stress would make dreaming more stressful in later sleep.

They invited teens to spend three nights in a sleeping lab:

One night adapt
One night looking forward to a stressful performance
One night looking forward to relaxing activities

Participants learn about assignments the next day before bedtime.

Stressful situations involve making speeches and solving difficult math problems while being evaluated. Relaxation conditions are associated with great virtual environments such as beaches or meadows.

At night, participants are awakened up to eight times – four times earlier in the night and four times later – and asked to report what is going on in their minds and then to describe any dream.

Independent evaluators later judged the intensity of the stress in the dream report.

Do stressful dreams appear like in the morning?

When participants expect stressful tasks ahead, their dreams become more stressful as the time for awakening approaches. Examples of stressful elements in dreams include things like having a phobia about stairs, but having to use them, oral exams in class, and even making it clear that they are stressed.

This pattern in the content and feeling of dreams suggests that our brains may react to worries about the future during night dreams.

As the authors note, this study does not prove that stressful dreams directly cause insomnia.

However, drawing on many studies, we now know that the expected stress causes both dreaming, stress and insomnia in the early morning.

Comprehensive expression of the mind

An interesting side effect of this research is that our sleeping brain may not only recall the past, it may also prepare us for the future. When we wait for something stressful, the brain may reactivate the thoughts and emotions involved in the dream to prepare for the stressful events ahead.

We know that similar things happen during the day when we want to remember an intention that psychologists call a future memory task, such as remembering to take a pill.

Research on this “intentional effect” from my lab and others has shown that intention indicates higher memory activation than other memory contents. And as in a stressful dream, the influence of intention-superiority seems Automatic operation And Intensified as the running time approaches.

Therefore, in life, both asleep and awake, our brain unknowingly anticipates future events, but in sleep it can be disruptive.

How to sleep well

Fortunately, there are many effective and over-the-counter treatments for sleep disorders.

Monty, looking forward to the park

The most proven treatment today is Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I).

Information about CBT-I and other evidence-based therapies is available at Society of Clinical Psychology (Section 12 of the American Psychological Association). The Division 12 website includes information on research and training in CBT-I, but also instructions for books and programs for those suffering from insomnia.

Experts also recommend good sleep hygiene, including the following:

Adhere to a regular sleep schedule.
Avoid large meals near bedtime
Create a comfortable sleeping environment (including a cool, dark room)

National Institute of Health Publishing Aid Leaflet on ThyWhite.

Stress reduction techniques can also help, including Meditation, Progressive muscle relaxation, And Other treatment methods.

I plan to try some of these strategies for better sleep and maybe I will get enough rest to try boating again. Even though it was hotter, I would wear an orange life jacket and tie it to my chest like Bill Murray in What about Bob. As long as I look forward to that scenario, I think I will have better dreams and sleep better.

To gain a better understanding of daily memory, mindset and psychology, follow here:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/memory-tour-guide/202603/why-worrying-about-tomorrow-can-disrupt-your-sleep-tonight

Copyright Suzanna Penningroth

References

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Baselgia, S., & Rasch, B. (2026). Transient dynamics of the effects of stress before or after sleep expected on dream content. Neuropsychologia, 220, 109311. Https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2025.109311

Beck, J., Loretz, E., & Rasch, B. (2023). Stress actively reduces the depth of sleep: Temporary proximity to stress is important. Cerebral Cortex, 33 (1), 96–113. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac055

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National Institute of Heart, Lung and Blood. (December 2018). Sleeping leaflets. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/resources/sleep-brochure

Penningroth, SL, Graf, P., & Gray, JM (2012). The effect of running memory on the effect of intention – superiority: examine the three characteristics of automation. Psychology of Applied Cognition, 26 (3), 441–450. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.2817

Rusch, HL, Rosario, M., Levison, LM, Olivera, A., Livingston, WS, Wu, T., & Gill, JM (2019). Influence of emotional meditation on the quality of sleep. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1445 (1), 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.13996

Schult, JC, & Steffens, MC (2017). Impact of adoption and intentional use on future memory processes. Memory & Awareness, 45, 625–638. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-016-0677-9

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Tadros, M., Newby, JM, Li, S., & Werner-Seidler, A. (2025). Systematic review and meta-analysis of psychotherapy to improve sleep quality in university students. PLOS ONE, 20 (2), e0317125. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317125

Written by Suzanna L Penningroth Ph.D.
A version of this post was originally published at Psychology Today.

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