355- Of Trauma, Sleep and Health

Sleep is an integral part for almost anything that is alive, and this includes us, humans. Science proves how important it is to sleep and have linked insufficient sleep with risk factors in development of physical disease such as the common cold, but also several others, due to reduced immune system which apparently replenishes best when the person sleeps well. This Harvard uni website describes these aspects. 

Health magazine discusses 11 surprising benefits from sleep, and although some also require a lot of personal effort and commitment, such as training for sports, proper sleep surely plays a role.

On any search engine, you can find countless websites with these and other benefits from proper sleep, as opposed to risks in insufficient sleep. I'll let you sort out pseudo-science and myth links to sleep (and dreams), and shall turn now to linking sleep with both physical and mental health, as pertains to my own case. 

I'll quote here entry 351 : A night, disturbed by CPTSD nightmares, or anxiety, creates a series of side effects: my rest is interrupted, often segmenting my night into several or even many portions, and by morning, I am tired. I invariably struggle with emetophobia on mornings, but this is multiplied in such cases of bad / not enough continuous sleep. Bad sleep has many other side effects, such as irritability, fatigue, falling asleep during the day, and more.

Before I discuss the present, let me backtrack some years, to the heart of my traumatic youth, childhood and teen years. During that entire span, my sleep wasn't sufficient, because I lived with extremely high anxiety, caused by an unsafe environment : a home with domestic violence, and abuse, both perpetrated by my father. As the years passed, this environment worsened with political upheavals from outside and further stress caused by ever-expanding religious duties in my father's cult (he was the founder and leader). 
The direct result from this kind of constant stress was anxiety as to what would occur next, and turned into many perturbed nights. 

However, the physical repercussions weren't felt severely, nor immediately and I assume this was because I was younger and had more energy. 

Two others factors that I think played their own role in keeping me afloat at the time pertain to the fact that I was sleeping more continuously (with fewer breaks) and also that experiencing trauma was somewhat, somehow, less taxing that resulting CPTSD's which manifested themselves after my return to my home and birth country. I cannot be fully sure of these, though. After-all, I have no clue when my CPTSD actually started and if it was a clear-cut "trauma period" followed by "cptsd period", or if there was any overlap.

Either case, once I came back here, I manifested more promptly all those symptoms which come with CPTSD's, and since they included nightmares at night, and intrusive thoughts + flashbacks during the daytime, the impact on my sleep started to be felt.

I passed years with growing frequency and intensity of each of these (nightmares etc), waking up at night more and more often, until it became systematic. As time passed, these symptoms had worsened so much that for about 10 years, I had constant bombardment of these disturbances, with an increasing number of interruptions in my sleep ; waking up in sweat and full of scratches, as my nightmares had been so vivid that I had apparently clawed and scratched whilst my nightmares were violent and gory. 

In parallel, my waking flashbacks and intrusive thoughts had also been very active, frequent and intense. Fatigued by day from these, I assume the cycle kept feeding itself in a loop, like a groundhog's day. Thus, it was no wonder that my sleep would be highly agitated and affected. As I grew older, these (and other mental health battles) all combined to weaken my physical and mental stamina, and it was no wonder than, that a few years ago they culminated in a mental breakdown - I'd been fighting for so long! 

The good news, though, in this process, my mind sorta rebooted, and I no longer experience the same intensity or frequency in either flashbacks, intrusive thoughts or nightmares which have lessened - even the scratching and clawing seems to have stopped. It is more than probable that having become more proactive in my recovery and having a new therapist who is actually giving me advice, have both played a role in reducing my cptsd symptoms, but the bad news about my mental breakdown and the accumulation of sleep disturbances over the years have all combined into memory loss and difficulty in concentration - which are 2 of the most common symptoms of lack of sleep. 

This is where I feel that my age and the constant mental battles have caught up with me: I no longer have the same stamina - not physical to be fully awake and do things, and not mental to remember things, to concentrate well and long enough. 

I don't have the same capacities I used to, and this can be worrisome in regards to my struggles, as I feel I cannot face all my various mental illnesses anymore, and I crumble faster. So, now that the walls are shaky, I had to accept to address one or two problems at a time, instead of all at once - but at least I address these issues with more hands-on and realistic way than the maladaptive coping that was my usual go-to : avoidance. 

One of the known costs to lack of sleep is a reduced immune system. I feel that during my younger years, this was less of an issue, up to a point towards the end of my toil under my father's religious cult and thumb: I fell gravely ill and my life was threatened. I told part of this story elsewhere, and may explain it more in a different post, eventually. But, apart for catching the common cold periodically, my immune system hadn't been compromised badly until that one time.

On the other hand, once back here, and under clearer manifestations of both my cptsd and of my sleep deprivations, my immune system reduced gradually in efficiency over the past couple decades, during which I caught the common cold more often than before, and instead of lasting up to 3 days like it had been in my youth, these colds could last a week, and then 2, or even 3 weeks on two separate occasions. 

This reduction in immunity have allowed a few other physical health issues to occur, thus confirming that a growing lack of sleep can be quite detrimental. 

I found throughout the years that sleeping habits have been also huge issues - in the sense of going to bed on regular hours, but I think this should be a whole other entry.

Although I may be at risk from insufficient sleep, I don't show any sign of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, nor obesity, although I gained some weight over the years. At least, this part counter-acted my underweight status upon my return to my birth-city, and was very slow - about 1kg or so per year., before stabilizing. Am now just at the top of my BMI range (only because I've also shrunk by 5 cm in the past few years, due to spine curvature, without which, I'd be considered even more balanced BMI, and not that am concerned with it much, only concerned about becoming less healthy with food and this is a whole other topic to discuss in a future post about the importance of a healthy diet and lifestyle.

As I want to keep this post medium instead of massive-length, I'll stop here and announce that several other posts shall follow with the topics mentioned here.