When I was working out the other day, I saw a blurb on the TV about sleep deprivation and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) memories. The sound was off, so I couldn’t tell much about it at the time. I made a mental note to research the topic online later.
I found an article entitled PTSD Study: Sleep Deprivation May Help You Cope With Traumatic Events that explained this article from Business Week. In a nutshell, a study was conducted in which healthy volunteers watched videos of safe driving and traffic collisions. Half of the participants got a good night’s sleep while the other half were deprived of sleep. Those who were sleep-deprived did not develop fear-associated memories from viewing the videos. Researchers are hopeful that “sleep deprivation can eliminate the fear-associated memories.” ~ Sleep Deprivation May Help Treat PTSD
I see a few flaws with this study. First, watching a traumatizing video of a car crash is nowhere near as traumatizing as living through one. When a person has experienced trauma, sometimes the person feels a strong need to sleep to “shut down.” I don’t think that making a soldier stay awake for a few days after watching his buddy get blown to bits is going to magically prevent PTSD symptoms from setting in. This is not something you can test just by having people view a video.
Second, I was sleep-deprived quite a bit when my abuse was happening. My mother would pull me out of my bed in the night and drive me to the cult gatherings, where I was awake for several hours being abused. I didn’t have the opportunity for much sleep before I had to go to school the next day. There is no question that I have many fear-based memories stored in my brain after those events.
Third, I frequently deal with insomnia when I am working through my fear-based memories, and the lack of sleep does not seem to purge the fear. The only thing that has worked for me is to allow myself to experience the memory, claim the experience as “mine,” and give a voice to the emotions and feelings that result. Getting less sleep during this process only makes me feel more “crazy.” I wind up trying to shift my schedule around to build in naps because I am never plagued with nightmares during a nap.
I don’t mean to be a wet blanket here. I would love to find any cure for PTSD. I just don’t think that sleep-deprivation is the answer. I also don’t think that we can equate the experience of watching a scary video to living through severe trauma. What are your thoughts on this?
Photo credit: Hekatekris
What I find weird in the first place is that they’re trying to find a cure for PTSD. PTSD is a perfectly natural reaction to a traumatizing experience. Everyone that went through something horrible has so-called PTSD. The only thing that the modern world doesn’t allow is to HAVE IT and deal with it. We live in a fast-paced world where there’s no time to deal with our problems. No matter how horrible they are. Because of this you drag the problem along with you, and the longer that happens, the more difficult it becomes to deal with it and give it a place.
After a traumatizing event people should take time off, as long as necessary, to turn to themselves and deal with what they just went through. That’s the “cure” for PTSD.
Ridiculous study. The things they pay people for nowadays. Seriously…
I concur 100% with your response. I get very tired of being labeled as “disordered” for a perfectly normal “reaction” to trauma. I am going to have the opportunity this summer to present at a national conference for child abuse professionals, and I intend to tell them that they do survivors a grave disservice (albeit unintentionally) by using diagnostic categories that make us feel “less-than” the rest of the population.
The only way out of the pain is through the pain – and it is not an overnight fix that our “hurry-up” society thrives upon.
It is absurd to think that depriving someone of the healthy sleep they need to think more clearly makes them any better. The lack of sleep probably gives the illusion of coping, when it is simply just the cloud that hangs over your brain after tossing and turning all night.
Another gripe I have is how researchers who have never been abused want to “prove” things in studies by trying to simulate experiences that do not come close to replicating the actual trauma (Faith’s great point). Of course, it is unethical to create trauma for anyone, so how about we do something new and unusual in research circles, like actually listening to what works from the people who have lived through it and have developed successful coping strategies.
But I guess we are too “disordered” to be taken seriously…
And that’s something else. They should remove the ‘disorder’-part. It’s post traumatic stress, which is perfectly normal. There’s nothing disordered about that.
It’s exactly as you say: the nowadays quick-fix society believes that everything is fixable overnight and they’ll pay big bucks for any “genius” that can prove his point. Society needs us to be productive, there’s no place for trauma, sadness, weak moments. We need to be robots and be productive; stimulate the economy. That’s all that matters.
Until they realize otherwise, suicide rates, crime rates, illness rates, burn-out rates, etc. etc. will keep rising.
And yes, we (the people that actually know something) are too disordered to be taken serious. PLUS we are not saying what society is saying, so why should we be taken serious?
I want a grant to do a study that proves studies do not prove anything. Smile.
There is also a study that shows sleep deprivation cures postpartum depression.
I expect that sleep deprivation does have a very powerful effect on the brain and it is temporary if the person does not have PTSD. Studies that study the short term effect are not valid for the effect long term.
I have been sleep deprived since I was at least 2 1/2.
Other than having a therapist that understands I was terribly hurt and does not think she was taught how I experience the most importing thing I did was learning to sleep. Ignoring good sleep hygiene for someone what has not experienced extreme trauma and is healing from it.
I discovered that I could sleep when I did not know I was tired. We would intellectually decide to lay down. We slept for up to 16 hours a day and by all current understanding were depressed. We needed to sleep. A lot.
For a year we went with if we were tired we would sleep. The last few months we decided if we can sleep we should be sleeping. For the last few weeks I have slept a minimum of three times and often 4. The healing has accelerated to a degree that we have not ever known. Meaning never as we have been sleep deprived since at least we were 2 1/2 and expect longer than that.
This new accelerated healing has not yet stood the test of time and may be one of those temporary fixes that seems to work and then was a wrong turn. It does not feel like that at all.
The sleeping is not goal related it is because we have a need that needs to be met. The results are positive for us and yet negative if the goal is to accomplish tasks. The tasks we do accomplish are much easier and more fun. There are not many of them other than healing as we are sleeping so much.
It seems to be that much of what is seen as a way to heal is like getting a loan to pay off debt.
I could make a strong case that my PTSD is caused by doing things in a conscious state that should be done in an unconscious/sleep state. That the trauma I experienced is seen as the same as experiencing trauma when not sleep deprived. That experiencing trauma when not sleep deprived is an event with a beginning and and end and experiencing trauma when sleep deprived causes there to be no beginning and no end until processed in a sleep state. That by re-experiencing trauma in a conscious state allows the experience to be processed in an unconscious state.
The notion that sleep deprivation can help anything is completely ridiculous! It sounds like some clown trying to get grant money…
I’m with you on this.
Peace,
m
Not everyone who goes through a traumatic experience develops PTSD…this isn’t to say that they are not affected by the trauma, everyone is affected by trauma.
I think this is why they are studying PTSD, because they are trying to determine why some develop it and others do not…..remember, a diagnosis of PTSD is when the symptoms have persisted for more than 6 months after the event OR if the symptoms occur months, years, or decades later.
I am no expert, and I don’t even think the “experts” really know much either. But I do agree that sleep deprivation sounds like a strange “cure” for PTSD….afterall, it seems that those of us who have PTSD are sleep deprived on a regular basis.
Hey Barbi,
Not picking a fight with you just exploring.
Is there any experience serious enough cause PTSD that can be quantitatively be said to be equal in any meaningful way that would lead to understanding or the effects of trauma ?
First each person brings to an event their history.
Second no one has the same recent past or the same experience after an event. Using sleep as an example two people do not bring the same amount of restfulness to a traumatic event not have the same opportunity for rest after the event.
Michael,
I’m not sure I understand the question…I can be a bit slow on the uptake at times
Are you asking if I think research on PTSD is worthwhile?
I was more just thinking about that there are so many factors in developing PTSD that qualifying and quantifying the causes is futile. It could even lead to more blame.
Perhaps go with no one has PTSD for no good reason. That it can not be developed with out trauma.
oh…I don’t think I was quantifying or qualifying the causes of PTSD. And I totally agree with you that it cannot be developed without trauma.
Take care,
barbi
Barbi,
I am sorry if I indicated that you were which is not what I thought you were doing.
I was just thinking about the studies goal and wondering if it was unachievable.
Michael,
no worries
some of those studies certainly could be quite useless, but I am glad to see them because it helps validate that PTSD is real and can be devastating. It also sheds light on the seriousness of PTSD for the general public to be exposed to, and in a round about way, educates the public on the realities of child abuse, effects of war, and other traumas.
[...] off, so I couldn’t tell much about it at the time. I made a mental note to research … sleep deprivation – Google Blog Search This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged between, Connection, Deprivation, Memories, [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Faith Allen, Nick Montgomery. Nick Montgomery said: Study: Connection between Sleep Deprivation and PTSD Memories … http://bit.ly/hrWgcE [...]
Just wanted to add a thought: I totally agree that sleep deprivation does not seem to be a realistic means to ‘cure’ PTSD (whether simulated rather lamely with a movie as in the study or ‘the real thing’ that many of us know from personal experience). But I think I have an idea how the study got the conclusions it did: sometimes I am VERY sleep deprived and almost force myself to catch up on sleep (only works if my husband lets me sleep in while he takes the kids to school, that way I can sometimes get up to eight hours in a row, usually it is closer to 3-5). If I do this for 2-3 days, I KNOW that I am sleeping more so SHOULD feel more rested, but then usually after my next ‘short’ night I feel a lot more awake than after the longer nights. My theory is that when I sleep more, my body catches up on some sleep, but because it would need a lot more, it feels more tired than before. When I go back to shorter nights, ‘adrenalin’ (or whatever) kicks in and then I FEEL more alert although I guess my body is a lot more tired than it feels. Maybe they got this ‘feeling more alert state’ in their study and now think that could be a cure for PTSD? I don’t know, if I am making sense – the last two weeks I have been quite low on sleep…
Hi, N7.
I think think the other piece is that watching videos of car accidents might give you nightmares, but it is not serious enough to cause flashbacks six months or a year later. Whenever a person has been through trauma (especially severe and ongoing trauma), that trauma has to be processed at some point. I don’t think just not sleeping much for a year is the answer. As you pointed out, it will just catch up with you later instead of earlier when you do start sleeping again.
- Faith
Study: Connection between Sleep Deprivation and PTSD Memories ……
Here at World Spinner we are debating the same thing……
[...] Study: Connection between Sleep Deprivation and PTSD Memories [SEO: Discussing a study premised on healthy volunteers' reactions to watching traumatic car crash [...]
Today it seems that you can find a study to support just about any theory. Tomorrow you can find a study that says just the opposite. I don’t agree with there findings. When you have been through trauma, I would think that being sleep deprived would just add more trauma to your mind and body, not heal it. Just my opinion. I am often sleep deprived when I am working intensely on my incest issues because the feelings are so intense and my mind just won’t shut down so that I can go to sleep. That just adds to the stress. It doesn’t make it go away.
I agree with everyone else here. how could adding more stress on the brain help it cope with something difficult? More likely it just gets stored away somewhere to bit them later. Also, I too was abused at night and didn’t get much sleep as a result, and got PTSD just fine. And I agree that watching a video of a car crash (while probably the most they can get away with in a study) is not at all the same as experiencing a credible threat to your life.
I wonder if this study is explainable by the fact (I think it’s a fact I read somewhere) that if you’re sleep deprived, when you do get to sleep you sleep differently, more of some levels of sleep and less of others. If that’s the case, then it seems like something like that would affect whether a person had nightmares or not.
How could adding more stress to the brain help? Well, it’s about how sleep is involved in the processing of memory. One should at least try to read the scientific article rather than the news report on it before deciding it’s silly. Sleep deprivation facilitates extinction of implicit fear generalization and physiological response to fear.
Kuriyama K, Soshi T, Kim Y.
Source
Department of Adult Mental Health, National Institute of Mental Health, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Tokyo, Japan. kenichik@ncnp.go.jp
Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Neuroendocrine hormones, which regulate both homeostasis and stress responses, provide homeostatic recovery and sleep suppression to brains under stress. We examined the effects of total sleep deprivation on subsequent enhancement of aversive event memory, implicit fear recognition, and fear conditioning in healthy humans.
METHODS:
Three different recognitions (explicit event, implicit emotion, and physiological response) were assessed in two groups of 14 healthy young volunteers (sleep control and sleep deprived) with aversive (motor vehicle accident films) and nonaversive episodic memory stimuli. Both groups were tested on Day 1 of the experiment and again on Days 3 and 10; the sleep-deprived group was totally deprived of initial nocturnal sleep after the first trial on Day 1.
RESULTS:
Event recognition performances were similar in both groups throughout the study. Implicit fear recognition remained high for aversive stimuli, with generalization of implicit fear recognition occurring for nonaversive stimuli on Day 3 in the sleep control group. Physiological fear and generalized fear responses were observed for every episode, and delayed enhancement of physiological response was only observed for misidentified aversive episodes in the sleep control group on Day 3. However, in the sleep-deprived group, generalization of implicit fear recognition for nonaversive stimuli on Day 3 and all physiological and generalized fear responses on Days 3 and 10 were comprehensively extinguished.
CONCLUSIONS:
Clinically, trauma-exposed victims often experience acute insomnia, indicating that such insomnia might provide prophylactic benefits in reducing the development of posttraumatic stress disorder via extinction of the fear-magnifying effects of memory.
Copyright © 2010 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
PTSD: How to Fight Through Immeasurable Adversity
“PTSD” means different things for different people. The more that the psychological industry tries to “establish norms”, the more it seems to confuse people into believing they only need outside help. YOU need to do the hard work FIRST AND FOREMOST…YOU are your OWN BEST THERAPIST!
Sure you can seek advice and medication, but how many people ALREADY depended on others and would most likely take “medication” and seek others’ advice BEFORE the trauma occurred? You are your own best friend, and your own worst enemy. We all need friends and people who truly care, and I believe those who are short on those truly caring resources SHOULD seek out unbiased, professional help so they can discuss right from wrong…when you are wronged by bad people who you trusted would never hurt you, you are forced to reach out to others, whether they be professionals, clergy or others. Many times, you will find out peoples’ core characters by HOW they react to someone who has been injured. Look at animals in the wild…some will protect…some will devour.
The survival instinct needs to be inside of you, but so does your responsibility to DO THE RIGHT THING, no matter how horribly you have been victimized.
Report the incidents to authorities (when possible)…minimize your vulnerability, whether it means retracting original choices that LED to the increased potential towards experiencing the event, and start doing things for yourself that matter and build, instead of destroy. You ego is not as important as your deeper will to survive and to do the right thing. So just DO the right thing and walk away from adversity that serves no decent purpose…find those who TRULY help, not the ones who tell you how great you are for surviving…the BEST critiques and praise come from with inside you, not from others! BE the difference…BE the example, and be ready to take the heat for being a leader by DOING and SAYING the RIGHT thing! LIVE by example!
I trust my own mind far before I would trust professionals who BELIEVE they would know better how to treat PTSD/trauma…just don’t give up! Most psychiatrists depend on your illness for their income, so FIX YOURSELF FIRST, even though everyone around you may be trying to tear you down! YOU will do a better job than anyone else, at least for the most part. Treat yourself right and stand up for yourself, but walk away from those who would rather see you in a vulnerable state! THEY are the sick ones…NOT the victim!!!
The only thing that lingers is the sleep deprivation and the inability/difficulty to discuss the actual traumatic events. Once you become victimized by trauma, it is hard to break the pattern of vulnerability, but I KNOW some people who are stronger and wiser for NOT having depended on professional help, and those lucky few who HAVE REAL FRIENDS who are there for them no matter what, these are the people who will survive above others…it takes HARD WORK from insider yourself to fight the evils in this world…don’t contribute to it because YOU were wronged…bring back the balance of goodness, and make evil worthless, as much as you can!!!