![]() ![]() Shift work, due to the regular alterations of the daily light profile, disrupts the normal circadian sleep-wake cycle and is associated with impaired health among rotational shift workers, with nurses on the frontline. Due to the wide heterogeneity of studies, with most including only some of these terms, we proceeded to single data extractions after analyzing the studies case by case and decided to conduct a narrative mini-review. We explored the PubMed, EMBASE and Google Scholar electronic databases using the search terms 'Nursing', 'Stress', 'Sleep disturbances', 'Nightmares', 'Circadian rhythm', 'Desynchronization', 'Chronotype', 'Performance', and 'Sex/Gender'. The aim of this narrative mini-review was to check the available literature to collect findings on the interrelationships among these aspects, as well as to determine the possible consequences for performance. Moreover, shiftwork, sleep disturbances, nightmares, and health issues are closely related to individual circadian preferences ('chronotype'). Nursing is a high-stress occupation, and recent research of circadian rhythm desynchronization has focused on its consequences for nurses' health. These findings highlight the crucial role of fear of sleep in the etiology of nightmares and sleep disturbances, while pointing to the importance of pursuing individual, personalised models that explain heterogeneity in the process of triggering nightmares. Pre‐sleep arousal, however, did not show expected within‐person associations with nightmares or fear of sleep. Furthermore, we found individual differences in the strength of these associations, which implies that factors proximate to nightmares may vary across individuals. Multilevel modeling showed that higher levels of fear of sleep and lower subjective sleep quality were significantly associated with higher levels of nightmare distress. Participants also wore an actigraph, which provided objective sleep parameters. Young women with regular nightmares (n = 16) maintained a sleep diary for around 30 days upon awaking, the participants reported on nightmares and sleep quality during the past night as well as the pre‐sleep levels of arousal and fear of sleep (which resulted in 461 observations). Therefore, we used intensive longitudinal assessments to investigate the night‐to‐night within‐person associations between nightmares on the one hand and fear of sleep, somatic as well as cognitive pre‐sleep arousal, and sleep quality on the other hand. However, not much is known about the immediate antecedents and consequences of nightmares. Nightmares are considerably prevalent in the general population and are known to be closely associated with a variety of mental disorders. ![]() Thus, a novel effort towards a new governance of scientific and research activities with a gender-specific perspective has been claimed for all areas of medicine, and more research on sex-differences is strongly needed also on this topic. In women, a strong association has been shown between nightmares and evening circadian preference.įor many years, and for many reasons, laboratory experiments have been conducted mainly, if not exclusively, on male animals. ![]() ![]() Nightmares are more frequent in women too, and they are often associated with sleep disorders and even with psychiatric disorders, such as depression and/or anxiety. As for the former, differences make reference to dream content (men: physical aggression, women family themes), self-reported perspective (men dream in third person, women in first person), dream sharing (more frequent in women), lucid dreaming (women more realistic, men more controlled), and daydreaming (young men more frequently have sexual themes). On the other hand, sex-related differences exist for either dreams or nightmares. On one hand, sleep disorders seem to be more frequent in women. Due to the relative paucity of studies including separate analysis by sex, and especially to their wide heterogeneity, we decided to proceed with a narrative review, highlighting the sex-related findings of each topic into apposite boxes. Moreover, other supplementary terms for the searching strategy were 'chronobiology', and 'circadian rhythm'. We explored the PubMed, EMBASE and Google Scholar electronic databases, with regards to the searching terms 'sleep', 'dreams', and 'nightmares' associated with 'sex' and/or 'gender'. The aim of this study was to review the available findings on sex-related differences for sleep disorders, dreams and nightmares. ![]()
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