Insomnia and Sleeplessness After Trauma & Stress

Natural Sleep Remedies and Tips For Better Sleep

Tanya Zajdel
Tanya Zajdel
5 min readDec 20, 2023

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Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

How Stress and Trauma Affect Sleep and the Nervous System

Whether it’s surviving the loss of a job, a relationship breakup, the aftermath of a car crash or a violent experience, most people struggle to sleep when their nervous system has been overwhelmed in some way. Insomnia and sleeplessness are the body’s way of struggling to process its past.

To put it simply, the nervous system has been imprinted with either one big shocking jolt or a series of smaller jolts over time that leave our body stuck for a while in a confusing survival response of fight/flight/freeze/fawn.

During this period of shock, because these events changed the way we see and exist in the world, our body is trying to update how it processes the world anew.

This can take weeks or sometimes even years for our body to re-learn safety and rest again, in a world that it must re-enter and understand differently through the updated narrative of the new experience that our body is still trying to contend with.

I experienced firsthand the exhausting struggle of falling asleep, staying asleep and even dealing with nightmares after surviving a sexual assault and going through the day-to-day draining conflict of an extremely difficult divorce.

How REM Sleep Heals Traumatic Memory:

Similarly, my friend Joey confided in me recently with a similar story but because he’s a man, his sleep issues came from a different trauma. Namely being held up at gunpoint as his car was being stolen. He was told to get in the car to be held hostage but refused and risked being killed during the carjacking.

Not surprisingly, he complained of insomnia and sleeplessness, being unable to stay asleep as he’d wake up with a terrifying jolt and then even when he slept, his body could not relax enough to enter the most important, healing and reparative phase of sleep called the ‘Rapid Eye Movement’ phase of sleep where the brain.

During this phase, the brain actually diffuses trauma memory, making our emotionally charged memories feel less scary, less intense and a bit more distanced from our lives according to sleep researcher Matthew Walker.

It’s as if our bodies try to revisit these traumatic or stressful events while we are less conscious as a protective way for our psyche to explore how we’d like to relive or rewrite the narrative.

While unconscious, our brain could explore what we would have liked to do differently if we could have, or how we’d see and process the event differently when we have our unconscious creative imaginations running completely wild and there are no rules of gravity, time or space to take into consideration.

Tips For Better Sleep After Trauma And Stress

To improve insomnia and Sleeplessness at night, we first need to help the body relearn how to slowly turn off the survival responses throughout the day and reorient the nervous system to what safety feels like in this new ‘post-traumatic stress’ world.

This is best learned by the body not through talk therapy, but through body-based movement therapies that bring the nervous system back into the present moment.

The good news is that these body-based movement therapies also help the body stop living with other PTSD related symptoms. These other related symptoms often include flashbacks, triggers, exaggerated startle response, difficulty focusing, mood changes and anxiety, in addition to the already present insomnia, sleeplessness and nightmares at night.

Tips For Better Sleep include:

Body-based therapies and movement

  1. Rewire Trauma Therapy offers self-paced follow along, 10-minute therapies online of Trauma Informed Yoga, Karate and Martial Arts, Qigong, Tai Chi, Somatic Therapy, Vagal Toning, Art Therapy and Dance Therapy. These are carefully designed by trauma therapists to train the body and nervous system to reorient back out of the past and into the present moment.
  2. Anxiety or depression can creep up on us if we’re suffering from insomnia, sleeplessness and nightmares so make sure to keep the body moving out of these heavy, slow and frozen states by moving in whichever way feels right for you including walking, swimming or dancing.

Nutrition:

  1. It’s important to drink 6–8 cups of water per day because this dilutes the high cortisol levels which is the body’s stress hormone.
  2. Eat a low sugar, but high protein and high fiber diet to avoid blood sugar crashes which can trigger the nervous system to go right back into its stressful survival response again.
  3. TraumaSoothe is a herbal supplement specially designed to help those suffering from insomnia, sleeplessness and nightmares which soothes the nervous system after trauma and supports deeper, reparative REM sleep. TraumaSoothe supplement includes the following herbal remedies to improve sleep: Hops, Melatonin, B6, California poppy, Valerian extract, GABA, Magnesium, 5 HTP, L- theanine and Ashwagandha.
Courtesy of Traumasoothe.org

Navigating insomnia and sleeplessness after enduring stress or trauma is often an arduous journey for both the body and mind.

The impact of these traumatic experiences often leaves individuals struggling to find rest and solace as their nervous system grapples with an overwhelming survival response. Through personal experiences and shared stories, we’ve highlighted how trauma affects our ability to achieve restorative REM sleep — a vital phase for diffusing traumatic memory and rewriting emotional narratives.

The path to better sleep involves relearning safety and guiding the nervous system out of survival mode. Body-based movement therapies, such as those provided by Rewire Trauma Therapy’s online therapy programs and TraumaSoothe’s herbal supplement aid in this reorientation, offering a way back to the present moment.

Moreover, maintaining physical activity and a balanced diet play pivotal roles in managing stress hormones and preventing recurring survival responses.

Remember, the path to better sleep after trauma is multifaceted, requiring patience, self-care, and holistic approaches to help the body and mind find comfort and healing. Trust in your body’s healing journey and follow the solutions that make your nervous system feel the most supported.

Most importantly, remember to be patient and kind to yourself.

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Tanya Zajdel
Tanya Zajdel

Free Trauma Therapy Link: https://rb.gy/nxr1xk. Psych nurse. I write about new ideas. My life has been told by CBC, VOX, IheartRadio, Amazon Books 🧠