Dr. Matt Walker

Yet on the other hand, when we think about noradrenaline and serotonin, they are both shut off.

So the stress-related chemical within the brain is switched off during REM sleep.

However, if you look at other parts of the brain, the memory-related centers of the brain, such as the hippocampus that we've spoken about before, and the amygdala that I just mentioned too, those are very active during REM sleep.

So we laid out this biological model that is almost beautiful.

That REM sleep is this perfect condition for emotional overnight therapy, where you can reactivate and sort of experience and reprocess those emotional memories.

But you're doing it in a neurochemically, quote unquote, safe environment that allows you to strip away the emotion from the memory.

Exactly.

And in some ways, that's the perfect description of this overnight therapy process, that it becomes a memory that is no longer triggering an emotional reaction.

And in some ways, that's what you want.

If you go back to my description from an evolutionary perspective, I told you that one of the functions of emotions is to red flag and prioritize the memory at the time of learning to say that it's important.

That's a very adaptive process.

It helps us prioritize which things we really should be focusing on and remembering.

But it's not adaptive for you to hold on to that emotion long-term once you've stored it.

And there has been some suggestion in the literature before we were doing this work that maybe one thing you can do with trauma and trauma memories is sleep deprive individuals the very first night after the trauma because we knew at the time sleep is important for memory.

And what you would like to do, and it's very similar to that movie, Sunshine Spotless Mind.

I always forget the... Eternal... Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I didn't see the movie, but I hear it's good.

Yeah.

And what they try to do is target in the brain these, you know, difficult, painful experiences and just excise them from the brain.

And...