Sleep is our body’s natural way of recovering and recharging, but stress and trauma can disrupt this delicate process. When the brain perceives a survival threat, it activates powerful stress systems that keep you alert and ready for action, overriding the signals that help you relax and fall asleep. Here’s how trauma affects your ability to get restful sleep:
· Stress triggers the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, causing a release of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.
· These hormones are great for keeping you alert during danger but make it difficult to wind down.
· High cortisol levels also disrupt REM sleep, which is crucial for emotional healing.
· The amygdala, your brain’s fear center, becomes overactive during trauma.
· It sends signals that amplify arousal and keep you hypervigilant.
· This heightened state prevents the brain from shifting into the restful phases of sleep.
· The ventrolateral preoptic area (VLPO), a part of the brain that promotes sleep, gets shut down by stress.
· Without its calming influence, it is harder to enter the deeper, restorative stages of sleep.
· Stress activates the brain’s innate alarm system (locus coeruleus, raphe nuclei, and tuberomammillary nucleus), brainstem regions that release neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, serotonin, and histamine (see diagram 2)
· These neurotransmitters keep you awake and alert, counteracting the signals that normally help you relax.
· The lateral hypothalamus produces a neurotransmitter called orexin, which stabilizes wakefulness.
· Under stress, orexin levels remain high, leading to insomnia and fragmented sleep.
· Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, increasing heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing, which are relayed to the Parabrachial Nucleus (PBN)
· This “fight-or-flight” response makes it impossible for your body to enter the relaxed state needed for sleep.
· Stress interferes with the production of melatonin, the hormone that helps regulate your sleep cycle, as the PVN now switches from promoting melatonin production to promoting activation for defense.
· Without enough melatonin, your body does not get the signal to prepare for rest.
· Stress prevents the thalamus from reducing sensory input, keeping your brain overly responsive to sounds, lights, or other environmental cues.
· This heightened awareness delays sleep onset.
· In addition, the activation of the Locus Coeruleus (LC) provides norepinephrine to cortical areas, stimulating a state of hyperarousal and run-on thoughts.
· When trauma disrupts sleep, you miss essential deep sleep stages like slow-wave sleep (SWS) and REM sleep, which are critical for emotional regulation, memory consolidation, and physical and energetic recovery.
· Over time, poor sleep can become chronic, making you even more vulnerable to negative effects of stressors and trauma.
· Thus, poor sleep perpetuates the vicious cycle of a hyperactive brain both during the day and at night.
By understanding how stress and traumatic experiences affect sleep, you can take steps to help your brain and body relax. Sleep problems do not simply go away with the passage of time. Practices like mindfulness, therapy, and maintaining a calming bedtime routine can reduce the effects of stress and help you reclaim restorative sleep.
These interventions are integrated into the TABS model, as described in our book, Putting Trauma to Sleep. ‘TABS’ refers to targeting all four factors that prevent recovery from trauma: unresolved Traumatic events, Attachment wounding, Body symptoms, and disturbed Sleep. Most trauma treatments have not paid attention to the critical role of fixing sleep problems of people suffering from excess stress and trauma.
Please refer to Chapter 1 of Putting Trauma to Sleep for more ideas about how to fix your sleep problems.