researching

AFRAID TO SLEEP / FEAR OF SLEEPING

Sleep anxiety is the fear of falling asleep. Other names for it include somniphobia, hypnophobia, sleep phobia, and sleep anxiety. Because of the fear and anxiety associated with falling asleep, the person suffering from it may find that they’re unable to fall asleep, despite being exhausted. And when the sufferer does happen to fall unconscious, their rest is often fitful, low-quality, and frequently interrupted. People with this condition often have an abundance of stress hormones like cortisol in their system, which further acts to keep them wired and awake which can lead to insomnia. (for some insomniacs it's actually a side effect)

1.1 After doing research on specific user group a lot of my assumptions got discarded cause they didn’t really apply. Some of the assumption are correct though, like having excessive nightmares being a sign of mental health problems. However anyone with these problems have their own causes. So most of my assumptions were correct, but don’t apply to everyone with excessive nightmares that lead to insomnia of course.

1.2 Nightmares are something I’ve always found interesting so researching about people who suffer from insomnia because of them is really interesting to me. I’m really curious about what kind of nightmares these people that are so bad that they are afraid to sleep, nightmares can be about literally anything of course. I definitely wouldn’t want to be apart of it considering I don’t like having actual nightmares.

2.1
Stereotypes about my user group that I have ran into are mostly the classics, what do you think of when you think about people with nightmares nightmares? Most people will say that they’re just people who watch too many horror movies or people who have had super intense trauma's. The first 100 googles results are all about horror movies.

2.2
Nightmares can be stereotyped by a lot of things, advertisements for example, see the image of the advertisement saying that even nightmares would go te sleep if you’d buy their mattress (and no the need of a new mattress is hardly ever the cause of nightmares). Another example is that people are very quick to link nightmares with children.

3.1
I don’t think my user group is being discriminated against at all, however discrimination can have a major impact on your nightmares as some people face so much unjust that they have actual nightmares about it. Nightmares is a very broad topic which people can easily underestimate, cause after all no one can experience someone else’s thoughts.

3.2