Nathalie, a 55-year-old woman, went through a breakup that marked the end of her relationship after nine years of marriage.
We discussed the impact that this type of highly emotional event—sometimes extremely so!—can have on sleep. On this occasion, I refrained from sharing my personal experiences with Nathalie to avoid influencing her. However, I have sprinkled the following text with my own impressions and experiences in order to offer some points of comparison and to show that each breakup is unique, despite the existence of commonalities.
NATHALIE’S SLEEP THEN AND NOW
From the outset, during her romantic relationship, Nathalie maintained a sleep routine. She always went to bed around 9 p.m. and woke up around 5 a.m. A morning person by nature, she enjoyed the sustained exposure to natural light that her lifestyle afforded her and described her nights as “satisfying and restorative.” As a seasonal worker, she energetically devoted herself to physical tasks during her shifts, while being available in the early evening for her family and loved ones. The hours before bedtime were spent away from screens, doing crossword puzzles, listening to radio shows, solving puzzles, or reading. During quiet periods at work, i.e., during the off-season, she managed to maintain the same sleep schedule. It was during one of these periods that she separated from her partner.
Immediately after her breakup, Nathalie found herself unable to sleep more than three or four hours per 24-hour cycle. She described falling asleep as “difficult, around midnight, waking up between 3 and 4 a.m.” Her sleep became “non-restorative.” “I was exhausted,” she said. When she woke up, she couldn’t call her loved ones to confide in them, as everyone was asleep, nor could she check items off her to-do list, as the stores were closed. To pass the time until sunrise, when she could finally go swimming at the pool, she started doing guided meditations.
If the breakup had happened during a busy season at work, I could have used work as a distraction and taken my mind off things. Since I had more free time, I ruminated.
I asked her if, during that difficult period, she remembered her dreams when she woke up. She assured me that she didn’t.
I didn’t ask her this question by chance. I remember experiencing heartbreak myself, which was accompanied by a number of emotionally charged dreams, some of which recurred for several months. For example, I remember a recurring dream in which I tried to get close to or touch my ex-partner without success. In fact, while doing research ahead of my presentation at a webinar co-organized with members of the Quebec chapter of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD-QC), I learned that trying to do something without success or feeling subject to gravitational forces beyond our control are recurring themes in the accounts of dreamers across all cultures around the world (Bulkeley, 2016). Several authors suggest that sleep and dreams play a role in regulating emotions and consolidating emotionally charged memories (Lara-Carrasco et al., 2009; Nishida et al., 2009).
What’s more, after informally browsing virtual forums dedicated to the topic of breakups, I noticed that a good number of internet users reported having dreams similar to mine after their own breakups. That said, one scenario came up more often than others: seeing ex-partners in dreams with new partners, seemingly exchanging secrets, laughing, mocking, or pointing fingers.
In the field of dream studies, the “continuity hypothesis” asserts that dreams reflect elements found in waking life. It may therefore seem logical that people going through a difficult breakup dream about situations they fear in order to prepare themselves mentally.
However, I was surprised to find a number of online testimonials about a very common scenario, one that is far from nightmarish. Internet users reported dreaming of reconciliation or other pleasant moments spent with their ex-partners.
Unexpectedly, dreams about ex-partners sometimes have positive connotations, “which could indicate that dreams about current partners are more mundane [than those about ex-partners]” (Shredl and Wood, 2021). One significant fact remains regarding this unexpected positive connotation: when sharing their pleasant dreams about ex-partners, the internet users whose testimonials I read wrote that they felt difficult emotions not during these dreams, but afterwards, upon waking up, when they realized that “unfortunately, it was only a dream.” The reality of their breakup then hit them hard.
If studies that include testimonials provided virtually under the cover of anonymity appeal to you, you may be interested in “netnography,” a qualitative methodology inspired by ethnography (i.e., the direct observation of groups, cultures, customs, practices, and rituals). Netnography focuses on communities connected on the web (hence the prefix “net”; Kozinets, 2020). Data can then be collected from virtual spaces such as Reddit, TikTok, Wikipedia, or Discord.
SUFFERING… THAT WON’T LAST FOREVER
Nathalie shared these observations with me about the second week after her breakup: “I woke up with numb hands because I had clenched my fists while sleeping, as well as pain in my jaw. My teeth were chattering during the night.”
The impact on her daily life was significant. She told me she felt less alert and had several memory lapses due to her reduced sleep. She made more mistakes, struggled to find the right words, forgot her keys…
Then, time began to do its work:
At first, I was so exhausted that I just collapsed, and that’s what made me fall asleep. From the third week after my breakup, I finally fell asleep more willingly than out of necessity. I gained about thirty minutes of sleep per night from that point on, then an hour from the following week.
During this first month of single life, Nathalie tried different ways to improve the quality and duration of her sleep, but with mixed results. Her usual modus operandi is to try alternative medicine and over-the-counter products before consulting a medical clinic: acupuncture, valerian herbal teas, chamomile, melatonin, CBD solutions, aromatherapy, antihistamine sleep aids… For Nathalie, all these interventions could target something other than sleep, such as rumination and anxiety. But she emphasized that she understood there was a definite link between rumination, anxiety, sleep, and overall health.
In fact, her entire health suffered following her breakup: she lost weight, experienced vision loss and pain in her eyes and eyelids, and had to deal with chills and a persistent feeling of being cold. It should be noted that most of these symptoms are consistent with a sharp decline in the duration and quality of sleep.
Concerned about what she perceived to be an accelerated heart rate—a post-breakup experience that she and I share, and which gives full meaning to the expression “heartbreak”—Nathalie finally visited her local clinic to have an electrocardiogram and get expert advice from nurses and doctors.
Today, it seems obvious to her that the emotions stirred up by romantic breakups can cause changes in both mental and physical health, even when the grief is neither complicated, prolonged, nor pathological. However, this may not be obvious to everyone.
Reading Nathalie’s list of symptoms can be both reassuring, especially for those who recognize them from their own experience and have recovered over time, and worrying, especially for those who have never experienced such grief or who have gone through this ordeal in a very different way.
Nathalie, who says she is currently unsure whether she will ever return to her normal sleep routine, hopes that her sleep story will be added to a range of other equally valid stories.
WAYS FORWARD
- Embrace and acknowledge diversity in samples: According to Nathalie, one way to discuss breakups and their potential effects on sleep would be to continue collecting different stories, for example by specifying the duration, quality, and nature of the relationship that ended, whether the partners shared a bed, whether the breakup was predictable or not, and whether it was mutual, to see if these factors influence the impact on daily life, dream content, and sleep.
In addition to naming these variables, Nathalie would find it interesting to explain the diversity of the effects of breakups, especially since we know that several symptoms and their opposites can occur. For example, it is just as possible to:- sleep less (like Nathalie) as it is to sleep more;
- lose weight (like Nathalie) as it is to gain weight;
- forget your dreams completely (like Nathalie) as it is to have intense dreams that leave lasting impressions when you wake up;
- react immediately after the breakup (like Nathalie) as it is to having a delayed emotional response;
- experience linear grief, constantly improving (like Nathalie), than to experience oscillating grief, with ups and downs, and even a few returns to square one…
Grieving a lost love can be one of the most difficult experiences in life. It is not always easy to know when suffering should prompt us to seek help and, if so, what forms of help are available and appropriate.
- Have open conversations about romantic grief starting in adolescence: Nathalie also thought it would be a good idea to provide teens with a number of resources. She believes that schools should equip teens with the tools they need to deal with breakups, whether they have already experienced it or not (combining prevention and support): “Loss is something that happens in all of our lives, and it doesn’t necessarily start at a certain age. Experiencing it is one thing, understanding and managing it is another. It should be part of our civic education: preparing ourselves to experience grief, as well as respecting and supporting others.”
- A directory of professionals qualified to provide support for both breakups and sleep disorders: This would be a valuable resource, as many professionals have training in both psychology and neuroscience.
