In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explain the important role that sleep and dreams have in learning, regulating emotions, and recovering from trauma. I discuss how dreams during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep contribute to emotional learning and the processing of traumatic experiences. I also discuss the similarities of REM dreams to clinical treatments like ketamine and EMDR therapy. I explain how non-REM dreams function differently to support other types of learning. Additionally, I describe science-backed strategies to optimize both types of sleep for improved learning, mood and emotional regulation. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes (approximately 30 minutes) focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will still be released every Monday. Read the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman More Huberman Lab Huberman Lab Premium: https://go.hubermanlab.com/premium Huberman Lab Shop: https://go.hubermanlab.com/merch Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Dreaming, Learning & Un-learning 00:01:04 Types of Sleep 00:02:57 Slow-Wave Sleep, Motor Learning 00:06:23 Sponsor: AG1 00:07:30 REM Sleep, Paralysis, Unlearning of Emotional Events 00:12:29 Lack of REM Sleep, Emotionality 00:15:02 REM Sleep, Learning & Meaning 00:18:54 Sponsor: Joovv 00:20:08 EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing) Therapy, Trauma 00:26:48 Ketamine Therapy, PCP, Trauma 00:29:52 Sponsor: Eight Sleep 00:31:23 REM Sleep as Therapy, Emotions 00:33:40 Tool: Improve Slow-Wave & REM Sleep 00:37:05 Recap & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures
Full Episode
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today, we're going to talk about dreaming, learning during dreaming, as well as unlearning during dreaming, in particular, unlearning of challenging emotional events. Now, numerous people throughout history have tried to make sense of dreams in some sort of organized way, the most famous of which, of course, is Sigmund Freud, who talked about symbolic representations in dreams.
A lot of that has been kind of debunked, although I think that there's some interest in what the symbols of dreaming are. And this is something that we'll talk about in more depth today, although not Freudian theory in particular.
So I think in order to really think about dreams and what to do with them and how to maximize the dream experience for sake of learning and unlearning, the best way to address this is to look at the physiology of sleep, to really address what do we know concretely about sleep? So first of all, as we get sleepy,
we tend to shut our eyes, and that's because there are some autonomic centers in the brain, some neurons that control closing of the eyelids when we get sleepy. And then we transition into sleep. And sleep, regardless of how long we sleep, is generally broken up into a series of 90-minute cycles, these ultradian cycles. So early in the night,
These 90 minute cycles tend to be comprised more of shallow sleep and slow wave sleep. And we tend to have less so-called REM sleep, R-E-M sleep, which stands for rapid eye movement sleep. For every 90 minute cycle that we have during a night of sleep, we tend to start having more and more REM sleep. So more of that 90 minute cycle is comprised of REM sleep and less of slow wave sleep.
Now this is true regardless of whether or not you wake up at the middle of the night to use the restroom or your sleep is broken. The more sleep you're getting across the night, the more REM sleep you're going to have.
And REM sleep and non-REM, as I'll refer to it, have distinctly different roles in learning and unlearning, and they are responsible for learning and unlearning of distinctly different types of information. And this has enormous implications for learning of motor skills, for unlearning of traumatic events, or for processing emotionally challenging, as well as emotionally pleasing events.
And as we'll see, one can actually leverage their daytime activities in order to access more slow wave sleep or non-REM sleep, as we'll call it, or more REM sleep, depending on your particular emotional and physical needs. So it's really a remarkable stage of life that we have a lot more control and power over than you might believe.
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