Are you having challenges resolving your sleep issues? It can feel so challenging to go through life without the proper rest. Disruptions through the night, problems falling asleep, sleeping a lot but not feeling rested are all sleep imbalances that may be a symptom with a root cause of trauma. The good thing is that you can heal and resolve this.
Trauma in Your Life or Intergenerational
Many experiences in our lives or the lives of our ancestry may affect the nervous system’s perceived sense of safety. If experiences are incomplete because they were overwhelming, terrifying, or difficult, trauma might be experienced. Trauma is not the actual incident itself, it’s how the situation was responded to.
Often, we have experiences that become traumatic because there is an instinctual need to have done something different in a situation, and we either couldn’t, or it was safer to do what we did. The spectrum of our family ancestry needs to be accounted for in this as well – what doesn’t get integrated or completed in the history of our family’s lives gets passed down or connected with those who are living and in the younger generations now. You can learn more about this in the Family Constellations Healing Work or in intergenerational trauma research.
It may be interesting to note the kind of sleep issues you have, as this may be a clue to the trauma that happened. It could also be a symptom of an overall lack of safety in the nervous system (whether or not you are literally safe in this reality).
How Trauma Affects the Nervous System
If you have trauma – and with the understanding that trauma is an incomplete response in the system or the lineage I believe that most people do – the nervous system may have a higher baseline level of activation and settling, causing an experience of compromised safety, relaxation and grounding in the body. You may experience more anxiety, overwhelm, numbness, depression, and other imbalances.
A Healthy Nervous System
In a healthy nervous system, during sleep, the parasympathetic nervous system brings the body to a relaxed state for rest. The sympathetic system, or the fight- flight-freeze system, is responsible for staying alert and responsive to threat. The sympathetic nervous system calms for sleep when it perceives safety.
Your Sleep and Baseline of Rest
Many people who have experienced trauma may have a hard time arriving at a baseline of rest and recovery, and may have more unsettled or restless sleep.
If the nervous system is in a state of overwhelm, shut down, or numbness, called tonic immobility, it is in a more activated state than fight or flight. This state can cause depression over time, which may be related to excessive sleep or lethargy and exhaustion.
Somatic Experiencing, somatic therapies, and Poly-Vagal theory describe in more detail the workings of the nervous system and their relationship to bodily function and sleep.
Gift to You and Sound Sleep Alchemy
Many people experience troubled sleep, which is what inspired me to create the Sound Sleep Alchemy Album. The Album provides guided meditations, healing experiences, resources, yoga and acupressure recommendations, and sleep hygiene from a holistic perspective, addressing digestion of food on all levels of the physiology.
As a gift to you, I’d like to offer one of the tracks on the Sound Sleep Alchemy Album so you can enhance the quality of your sleep. This specific meditation, Digesting the Day, supports metabolizing the day’s experiences so that you may begin to feel grounded, peaceful, clear, and restful. This is part of a completion of what needs to be completed in your daily dosage of life.
Please note that this is a practice that will support you over time, especially if you feel you have many undigested experiences. As the saying goes, “It didn’t happen overnight, so it won’t be resolved overnight.”
Check out What your Insomnia Might Be Telling You from a holistic perspective. Feel free to reach out with any questions and/or consider if the Sound Sleep Alchemy Album will support you in better sleep or grounding.
Featured image by cuncon from Pixabay.
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