Trauma - Its effect on sleep

Trauma is defined as a deeply troubling or disturbing experience.

What is the role of trauma in your sleep? Does trauma affect the quality, nature, and duration of your sleep? 

We have probably all experienced it at some point. A set of circumstances caused sleepless nights. If it lasted for a few days, perhaps you forgot about it. But there are people who sleep poorly, regardless of their current circumstances. 

In such cases, is there an underlying trauma from the past that is affecting their current sleep habits? 

Sleep is that time of your daily routine when we switch off. Our bodies relax, our heartbeat, and our breath slows down. Our brain can switch from a state of high alertness to other tasks. 

But for some people, it does not happen. 

One possible explanation for this is past trauma, particularly childhood trauma. If your childhood trauma persisted for an extended period of time, your brain was unable to switch off. You remained in a heightened state of alertness. 

Slowly, it crept into your sleep. Your brain believed it needed to remain alert, lest some lurking danger overpower you. 

According to a study, trauma can last up to fifty years. So what can you do? 

The first obvious thing to do is to identify it as such. In my experience, we tend to assign several reasons for sleep disturbances. Our thoughts do not always flow to childhood experiences. 

If there was trauma, especially as a child, we were more likely than not to suppress it. We were perhaps unequipped to deal with it and simply stored it as something we would not deal with or deal with later. 

If this statement is accurate, there are numerous potential solutions available.

One solution that I like a lot is what I call "exposure to micro trauma." Exposing yourself to just a little bit of the trauma will help you cope better. Obviously, expert guidance is the most effective approach, given the inherent traumatic nature of trauma.

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