Everyone knows how important sleep is. It’s what resets you and allows you to have the capacity — emotionally, mentally, and physically — to make it through each day.
But a lot of factors can get in the way of getting a proper amount of sleep each night: too much caffeine during the day, watching TV, or mindlessly scrolling on social media too close to bedtime. Unsuitable bedroom conditions like a mattress or pillow being too soft or too hard or a room not being the right temperature can make it difficult for someone to fall asleep and stay asleep through the night.
But what about the factors that aren’t as easily controlled? PTSD can have a negative impact on someone’s sleep cycle and routine. Plus, it’s not something that is as easily controlled as cutting out caffeine, limiting screens close to bedtime, changing out a pillow, or turning down the temperature.
Let’s learn more about PTSD and its close relationship with sleep.
What Is PTSD?
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental illness that can occur in individuals who have experienced or witnessed a singular or series of traumatic events. Signs or symptoms of PTSD can be experienced as a result of the initial traumatic event. PTSD can negatively impact someone’s emotional, mental, physical, social, and spiritual mental health and wellness.
How PTSD Affects Sleep
There are many different types of sleep problems and disorders that can be tied back to post-traumatic stress disorder. Let’s dive deeper into how PTSD can affect sleep.
Anxiety
Anxiety is a common sign and symptom that can occur after experiencing a traumatic event. With anxiety can come sleep disruptions. Worrying about past and future events can make it more difficult to fall asleep at night or stay asleep during the night.
Depression
Post-traumatic stress disorder is also known to bring on feelings of depression in some cases. Similar to anxiety, depression is also linked to poor sleep in most cases. Changes in sleep schedule and routine are one of the main signs of depression.
Nightmares
Nightmares can occur after experiencing a traumatic event as well. These nightmares can disrupt someone’s sleep schedule and routine causing them to wake up in the middle of the night and make it more difficult to fall back asleep. After experiencing repeated nightmares or flashbacks, it can become more difficult to want to fall asleep at night out of fear.
Side Effects
Some medications used to help treat PTSD can cause sleep problems. It’s important for individuals who are starting new forms of treatment or medication to talk with their doctor about any potential side effects.
Sleeping Problems
Many different sleeping problems are associated with PTSD. After someone experiences a traumatic event, they can experience sleeping problems like sleepwalking, sleep talking, night sweats, sleep apnea, delayed sleep phase syndrome, and insomnia. And these are just a few of the many different forms of issues and disorders that could occur.
How Sleep Affects PTSD
What may be less obvious to some people, is that poor sleep will worsen the other symptoms of PTSD.
For any of us, getting good sleep is essential for good mental health, and this is especially true when we’re having to cope with something like PTSD. Taking steps to improve your sleep can help you deal with PTSD, even if your sleep still isn’t what you want it to be. Even a small improvement can help.
How to Improve Sleep
This is a big topic, something for its own blog post, but there are some basic steps you can take.
1. Wind down before bed
Setting aside time to do relaxing things before bed is an important strategy for improving sleep quality. This can be anything that helps your nervous system relax – formal relaxation techniques, taking a warm bath, or reading a book or listening to relaxing music.
2. Talk to your doctor about meds to help with nightmares
As a psychologist I cannot give medical advice, that’s for prescribers to do. I can tell you that there are medications that can help specifically with nightmares, so if nightmares are interfering with your sleep it might be worth talking with your medical provider about it.
3. Use a pleasant visualization
It’s said that our visual system can function like a bridge into sleep. Having a pleasant visualization of some sort can both help you relax more, and also potentially carry over into your dreams. It also is much more helpful for initiating sleep than letting our brain think about whatever it wants – often that can go to things like worry which interferes with sleep.
How to Cope with PTSD
As you can see, PTSD and sleep are closely related to one another. Luckily, there are many different treatment options. The treatment will be dependent on the manner in which PTSD is affecting someone’s sleep.
Sleep disruptions and disturbances can make it feel like you don’t have any control over this area of your life. I’m here to help you take back that control so that you can wake up feeling rested, recovered, and refreshed again.
One of the best things you can do to cope with PTSD and overcome these sleeping issues is to seek proper treatment with a trauma therapist. Reach out today to set up a consultation if you’d like to see if I can help.