Stress can alter your dreams and sleep quality, but there are evidence-backed strategies to help.
Key Points
- Having something stressful coming up can affect how well you sleep.
- In a new study, researchers examined whether dreams might be a pathway through which stress affects sleep quality.
- Scientists have identified the best remedies for sleep problems, including those caused by stress.
Monty, anticipating the vet
This has probably happened to you. You fall asleep just fine—but in the early morning hours, you drift into stressful or negative dreams. Your sleep is restless.
This pattern may feel familiar. Perhaps you have something stressful coming up tomorrow—a doctor’s or dentist’s appointment, an important presentation, or the dreaded work performance feedback.
I have definitely experienced this.
Years ago, my husband and I took a seven-day live-aboard sailing course in the San Juan Islands off Washington State. Our training included learning how to deal with potential catastrophes: cabin fires, hypothermia, and repeated “crew overboard” drills. The water temperature was 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Unfortunately, we never managed to rescue “Bob,” the life preserver that stood in for the overboard sailor.
I knew that toward the end of the week, we would compete in a sailing “race,” which meant going way too fast and “heeling” at about a 30-degree angle.
By day five, I was having nightmares every night.
Eventually, my poor sleep and growing dread led me to abandon ship—literally and figuratively.
To be fair, sailing wasn’t the only factor. My anxiety likely came from a perfect storm: disaster training, my husband making me watch All Is Lost (Robert Redford alone on a boat, and it does not go well), and a poorly timed white-water rafting trip with my book club, where we flipped the raft.
And so, I can relate to anticipatory anxiety and disturbed sleep, though I didn’t know the science behind it. Why did this happen?
Could Dreams Be Rehearsing Tomorrow’s Stress?
Recently, a Swiss research team, Sandrine Baselgia and Björn Rasch, explored whether dreams might hold part of the answer.
They predicted that when people expected a distressing task the next day, dreams would show extra stressful content—especially as morning approached.
Previous research already hinted at this connection.
For example, a team of researchers in France documented a pattern most students can relate to. They found that right before an entrance exam for medical training, about 60% of the students dreamed of the exam. These were mostly bad dreams. Participants also reported worse sleep than usual that night.
Other investigators have looked at how anticipating a stressor impacts brain activity during sleep. In one experiment, the research team included EEG measures of high-quality sleep, like slow-wave (deep) sleep and sleep spindles. They discovered that anticipating a stressful event caused reduced indicators of quality sleep. Interestingly, the disturbances mainly occurred at one time: later in the sleep period, as the wake-up time drew near.
To researchers, this pattern of findings raised a question: could stressful dreams help explain why sleep deteriorates toward morning when we’re worried about the next day? If that idea is correct, it means the worries we carry into bed may literally reprogram what our brains do while we sleep.
What Did Scientists Discover?
Baselgia and Rasch wondered if it was the bad dreams that drove the harmful biological changes in later sleep periods. As a first step in assessing this, they tested whether an anticipated stressor would cause more stressful dreams in later sleep.
They invited young adults to spend three nights in a sleep lab:
- one adaptation night
- one night anticipating a stressful performance
- one night anticipating a relaxing activity
Participants learned about the next day’s task before going to sleep.
The stressful condition involved preparing a speech and solving difficult math problems while being evaluated. The relaxing condition involved an immersive virtual environment, such as a beach or meadow.
During the night, participants were awakened up to eight times—four times earlier in the night and four times later—and asked to report what was going through their mind and then to describe any dreams.
Independent raters later judged the intensity of stress in the dream reports.
Read More Here: How To Hack Your Brain: 4 “Forbidden” Tricks Your Mind Doesn’t Want You To Know
Do Stressful Dreams Appear as Morning Approaches?
When participants expected an upcoming stressful task, their dreams became more stressful as the wake-up time drew near. Examples of stressful elements in dreams included things like having a phobia about stairs but having to use them, having an oral exam in class, and even explicitly stating that they were stressed.
This pattern in dream content and emotionality suggests that our brains may be reactivating concerns about the future during late-night dreaming.
As the authors note, this study cannot prove that stressful dreams directly cause poorer sleep.
However, drawing upon multiple studies, we now know that an anticipated stressor causes both stressful dreams and poor sleep as morning approaches.
Revealing a Broader Feature of the Mind
One intriguing implication of this research is that our sleeping brain may not simply replay the past—it may also prepare us for the future. When we anticipate something stressful, the brain may reactivate related thoughts and feelings in dreams to ready us for the upcoming stressful event.
We know that something similar occurs in the daytime when we want to remember an intention—what psychologists call a prospective memory task—such as remembering to take a pill.
Research on this “intention-superiority effect” from my lab and others’ has shown that intentions show higher activation in memory than other memory contents. And just as in stressful dreams, the intention-superiority effect seems to operate automatically and get stronger as performance time approaches.
And so, in both our sleeping and waking life, our brains unconsciously anticipate future events, but in sleep, this might be disruptive.
How to Get Better Sleep
Fortunately, there are a variety of effective—and drug-free—treatments to improve sleep.
Monty, anticipating the park
The treatment with the strongest evidence currently is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I).
Information about CBT-I and other evidence-based treatments is available through the Society of Clinical Psychology (Division 12 of the American Psychological Association). The Division 12 site includes information on research and training in CBT-I, but also recommendations for books and an app for those who suffer from insomnia.
Experts also recommend good sleep hygiene, including the following:
- sticking to a regular sleep schedule
- avoiding large meals as bedtime draws near
- creating a comfortable sleep environment (including a dark, cool room)
The National Institutes of Health publishes a helpful brochure on this.
Stress-reduction techniques can also help, including mindfulness meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, and miscellaneous therapeutic methods.
Read More Here: You Can’t Change the Past… Or Can You? Try This Revision Technique By Neville Goddard
I plan to try some of these strategies for better sleep, and maybe I’ll relax enough to even attempt sailing again. Though it’ll be in warmer water, plus I’ll be wearing an orange life vest and tied to the mast like Bill Murray in What About Bob. As long as I look forward to that scenario, I think I’ll have better dreams and better sleep.
For more insightful takes on memory, mindset, and everyday psychology, follow along here:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/memory-tour-guide/202603/why-worrying-about-tomorrow-can-disrupt-your-sleep-tonight
Copyright Suzanna Penningroth
References
Arnulf, I., Grosliere, L., Le Corvec, T., Golmard, J.-L., Lascols, O., & Duguet, A. (2014). Will students pass a competitive exam that they failed in their dreams? Consciousness and Cognition, 29, 36–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.06.010
Baselgia, S., & Rasch, B. (2026). Temporal dynamics of the influence of pre- or anticipated post-sleep stress on dream content. Neuropsychologia, 220, 109311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2025.109311
Beck, J., Loretz, E., & Rasch, B. (2023). Stress dynamically reduces sleep depth: Temporal proximity to the stressor is crucial. Cerebral Cortex, 33(1), 96–113. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac055
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National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. (2018, December). Sleep brochure. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/resources/sleep-brochure
Penningroth, S. L., Graf, P., & Gray, J. M. (2012). The effect of a working memory load on the intention-superiority effect: Examining three features of automaticity. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26(3), 441–450. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.2817
Rusch, H. L., Rosario, M., Levison, L. M., Olivera, A., Livingston, W. S., Wu, T., & Gill, J. M. (2019). The effect of mindfulness meditation on sleep quality. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1445(1), 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.13996
Schult, J. C., & Steffens, M. C. (2017). The effects of enactment and intention accessibility on prospective memory performance. Memory & Cognition, 45, 625–638. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-016-0677-9
Society of Clinical Psychology. (n.d.). Psychological treatments. https://societyofclinicalpsychology.org/resources/psychological-treatments/
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Tadros, M., Newby, J. M., Li, S., & Werner-Seidler, A. (2025). A systematic review and meta-analysis of psychological treatments 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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