Why Some People Respond to Stress by Falling Asleep

Extracts

• “If, during early development, a living thing comes to understand that it is helpless, it will continue to perceive a lack of control, no matter if the context changes.”
• “Our feelings are always in the past,” says John Sharp, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. “This is something that’s really outlived its adaptive value.” As an adult I should have control over my current situation, but I don’t.”
• “While we might be able to temporarily stave the flow of conflict by falling asleep, we’re not really escaping anything. In fact, sleep in some ways forces us to not only relive the emotional experience but to process and concretize it”
• “You can be driven to sleep simply by having a lot of emotional memories to process.”
• “sleep disruption may prevent consolidation of potentially therapeutic memories, sometimes termed “fear extinction” memories. These are memories that can dull the effect of a traumatic experience by creating more positive associations with specific triggers”
• “Ever wonder why little kids nap so much? Researchers believe that it’s not just because they’ve been running around all day—it’s also due to the fact their short-term memory storage space is so small, and they constantly need to unload experiences and consolidate memories more often”