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Struggling to wake up & fall asleep. Stress response? Hypo-arousal? Avoidance?

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Crysalis

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For some time now I have struggled with waking up to alarms, falling asleep due to an overactive headspace and having a routine. When in a low period I tend to shut down and avoid everything, making waking up get especially hard. My alarms are very loud and usually set about 20 on multiple different devices, placed in different locations around my room.


My previous partner had told me I can walk around, switch off alarms and talk to them quite coherently upon waking brefily, but have I no recollection of doing any of this atall, which is quite worrying. I'm struggling to understand this

I've spoken to my counsillour about this and she explains I go into something like a hibernation protective mode where my body shuts off when I'm extreme overwhelmed as a protective stress response. Or something like this.

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Does anyone else experience this or have any more information for me? Is this related to hypoarousal? Is this avoidance? I have only very recently begun talked about my multiple traumas and, starting trying to understand my C-PTSD more. Primary? and secondary traumas.

I'm struggling to understand and learn about how and why I do this, and I have not read any other post, information, resources, I want to find ways to manage this. It increasingly makes me anxious about going into another period like this since it affects my work and studying.

Any info, I would be extremely grateful!
 
Have you read "healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors" by Janine Fisher? It covers many many areas, but might be helpful in terms of understanding responses to trauma.

When I'm more stressed: yep, wanting to not exist, or totally wipe out reality, or shut down in some way is my go to. Prob the reason I drank and did drugs before. Now I want to sleep or not move my body at all. All variations of hypo arousal. And freaze response.

What is good (and healthy) is being aware of it.
And working with it.

If you are talking about trauma for the first time, might help to prepare for some of these symptoms to be here whilst you are doing that.

I can imagine it must be worrying to have done thing like walk around and turn alarms off but not be aware you did that. I don't know what to say to help with that, but it's good you know this might happen and you can speak with your T about it, to get reassurance and to think about how to manage it?

Is there also a way of maybe slowing down therapy a bit. Because if you are getting overwhelmed like this, and you and your T can pin point triggers, it might help to go a bit slower, manage the triggers a bit, which might then help the triggered hypo response to calm or lessen?
 
Does anyone else experience this or have any more information for me?
That’s my entire life, but I’m ADHD, in addition to PTSD.

I was part of a sleep study, a million years ago, that kept getting extended (overnight, to stay the week?, to stay the month???) that found my sleep cycles just aren’t “normal” in any sense of the word.

- I often drop into unconsciousness, and only hit REM & other useful cycles after I’ve been woken up. So the only time I’m getting the restorative benefit of sleep is between however long I’ve set between alarms.
- Conversely, I CAN switch from full sleep to fully awake with no transition in less than 1/5th of a second, but I can also be experiencing full out “sleep cycles” for several hours after I’m up and ambulatory and interacting with people/life.
- Brainwaves that “shouldn’t” be active during sleep cycles are running full tilt… sometimes. But not always. Or following any kind of pattern. Which explains why I feel pain in my nightmares, and can read in my dreams, and can be entirely aware of my surroundings (accurately) whilst my brain waves read I’m in deep sleep / “the waking doze” thing that the military trains.
- The whole “you can’t catch up on sleep” thing is apparently just not true, for me. As I can blitz through twice to 5 times as many sleep cycles, or “stick” in one sleep cycle (like I’ve been logged as more than 11 hours of REM straight = Ha! I TOLD YOU I was dreaming all night) as “normal” if I stay awake several days, and then sleep around the clock; or have some big explosive thing and then sleep 2-3x as long as normal.

What’s PTSD, ADHD, just me? No idea. They couldn’t even begin to parse what the results meant &/or were tied to, at the time. But knowing these patterns -and others I’m not recalling off the top of my head- have proved useful over the years.

For example, when I’m only dreaming after I’ve been woken up? I can set my alarm for multiple times throughout the “night”. As the interrupted sleep actually allows me waaaaaaay better “sleep” than an alarm at the end of the time I’ve allotted to sleep.

Another EXTREMELY useful thing, is that I conpletlwy ignore recommendations for “sleep hygiene”. Because I don’t sleep like most people do, it makes sense I don’t FALL asleep the same way, either. And I’m okay with that. What works? Works. What doesn’t? Doesnt. And I don’t have anything to prove, or feel incorrect about. I’ve certainly TRIED a zillion different things, but when I find what works and what doesn’t? I don’t question it. A lot of things work… sometimes. But not always. A lot of things don’t work… sometimes. But not always. Some things never work. Nothing always works (that I’ve found, to date).

Which is a super loooooong way of saying? My sleep is jacked. Pretty much always has been. And has developed new and interesting -read: frustrating- ways to be jacked over the years. I just roll with it. My sleep needs vary, and my abilities vary, depending on a whole helluva lot of outside circumstance, and internal WTF

The sleep study was invaluable, as it let me have concrete proof/evidence that my sleep is highly variable. So I DGAF. It’s just me. Doing my thing. So when I find myself in pattern ABC or XYZ? I can roll with it, instead of fighting it.
 
I did this and it changed my whole approach to everything and gave me a WAY better understanding as to a) when I can do what b) when I can't, c) when I can push things, and d) when I absolutely should not.

If it's not working, don't force it?
 
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