Nightmares and Trauma
I love sleep. I look forward to my bedtime and I do my best to make sure to get my nightly 8 hours because it is key in restoring my brain and body from the stressors of the day. When I have a nightmare though, I wake up feeling crappy, stressed out, and I don’t feel rested. Luckily though I don’t have nightmares very often, however for individuals who have experienced trauma and for those who have PTSD symptoms, nightmares can be a common occurrence. In fact up to 96% of those diagnosed with PTSD have report having reoccurring nightmares that impacts their overall well-being.
When someone experiences reoccurring distressing dreams they may avoid sleep as much as possible or use substances to numb the negative feelings they experience. This in turn can make it hard to engage with the things that are important to you during the day and takes you away from living a life connected to your values. Unfortunately, the lack of sleep and substance use can actually worsen the occurrence and severity of the nightmares, creating a vicious cycle that can feel impossible to break. The more you try to escape it the worse it seems to get and you feel like you are constantly running, which becomes incredibly exhausting.
Nightmares that are associated with trauma tend to be different then other nightmares. They can be more challenging to work through because of the trauma symptoms. PTSD nightmares are often repetitive and carry the same storyline, repeating for years or even decades. It can feel like your brain is your enemy but actually that’s the furthest thing from the truth. Your brain and body are trying to cope however, traumatic experiences can leave your nervous system being highly sensitive and your body may struggle to not be on guard for danger at all times, which actually interferes with the body’s ability to rest and recuperate.
During a phase of sleep called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, our body turns down the adrenaline (adrenaline is connected the fight/flight/freeze response), and this allows us to process difficult emotions while sleeping without the nervous system kicking us into survival mode. One hypothesis is that one of the functions of dreams is that it is a way for our brain to process emotions so that we can make peace with them.
This is why we sometimes feel better about a situation after “sleeping on it”. However, when someone has PTSD their body does not decrease adrenaline production during REM sleep, which interferes with the brains ability to process the emotions and they end up cycling through the dream over and over. The repeating nightmares may be an indication that your brain is trying to process an experience but is not able to because the dream wakes you up and so you don’t end up completing the nightmare or your brain does not know what to do with the dream and how to resolve it.
This is like if you’re watching a movie but keep waking up at the most devastating part. Imagine watching “Finding Nemo” but instead the movie ends when Nemo gets separated from his father, Marlin, and all you’re left with is feeling like it’s all your fault that your son was taken away from you. This is similar to what someone with a reoccurring trauma nightmare experiences. The emotions feel too overwhelming to face during the day so you might avoid them by distracting yourself and when your brain tries to process them at night, it ends up getting flooded with adrenaline and you wake up before your brain can try to resolve the trauma. The process keeps getting interrupted over and over and it’s like watching your child being taken away from over and over again.
Next week I’ll provide some techniques and strategies that you can try to work on managing these reoccurring trauma related nightmares.
