How Deep Sleep Makes a Calm AND Comfortable Home
Of all the factors contributing to poor health and unsatisfied relationships, stress is perhaps the most overlooked.
At home, while the stress response can be a helpful biological function, enabling you to respond to daily tasks, demands, and and urgencies, this "lifesaving" reaction ends up doing far more harm than good when continually triggered.
And many of the small everyday details at home can trigger stress: financial worries, clutter, juggling multiple tasks, overwhelming demands, even if they are from our loved ones…
Emotional Resilience Reduces the Impact of Stress
Stress is an inescapable part of life; it's how you address it that will determine whether it will translate into health problems later on. The stress reaction should dissipate as quickly as possible after the perceived danger has passed. The scientific term for this is "resilience" — your ability to rapidly return to normal, physically and emotionally, after a stressful event.
Resilient People Are More Tuned in to Bodily Cues of Stress
During times of stress and uncertainty, your resilience is a crucial factor for how well you get through things; “resilience” is the scientific term for your body’s ability to rapidly return to normal or a harmonious equilibrium.
Some people are naturally more resilient than others, and researchers have long pondered the reasons why. One hypothesis is that people who are more resilient have learnt to listen to their body.
Deep Sleep Builds Emotional Resilience
Exposure to trauma can weaken your emotional resilience. The good news is you can rebuild or improve it as well. One solid strategy that can help build emotional resilience is good sleep. Research shows people who get more deep sleep are less fearful.
The study,6 published in the Journal of Neuroscience, claims to be the first to demonstrate that sound, deep sleep helps buffer against emotional distress, while sleeping poorly raises your risk of experiencing a difficult event as emotionally traumatizing. According to the authors:
"Sleep, and particularly rapid-eye movement sleep (REM), has been implicated in the modulation of neural activity following fear conditioning and extinction in both human and animal studies. It has long been presumed that such effects play a role in the formation and persistence of post-traumatic stress disorder, of which sleep impairments are a core feature …
In the current study, we employed long-term mobile sleep monitoring and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to explore whether trait-like variations in sleep patterns … predict subsequent patterns of neural activity during fear learning.
Our results indicate that higher baseline levels of REM sleep predict reduced fear-related activity in, and connectivity between, the hippocampus, amygdala and ventromedial PFC during conditioning. Additionally, skin-conductance-responses (SCR) were weakly correlated to the activity in the amygdala.
Conversely, there was no direct correlation between REM sleep and SCR, indicating that REM may only modulate fear acquisition indirectly. In a follow-up experiment, we show that these results are replicable, though to a lesser extent, when measuring sleep over a single night just prior to conditioning. As such, baseline sleep parameters may be able to serve as biomarkers for resilience, or lack thereof, to trauma."
The link between mental health and REM sleep (deep sleep)
Long-standing clinical observations demonstrate that nearly all mood and anxiety disorders co-occur with one or more sleep abnormalities.
And for Mothers, post partum depression and emotional resilience
Much of “post partum depression” is in fact sleep deprivation that wears at our ability to cope with the range of physical, psychological, and hormonal changes—that occur at least well over the first year of having baby.
For the woman whose nervous system is frozen and suppressed, the intensity of birth (despite being a worthwhile experience to bring their baby earth side) can expose, provoke, or stir up stored survival stress from old trauma resulting in the labels PPA or PPD.
(And if you didn’t know, suicide is the leading cause of death for new moms.)
When I became a mother, the bone-deep exhaustion that comes with it coloured my world. Even though I learnt to function daily with it, my mind battled a continual fog.
There is nothing quite like new parent sleep deprivation. It can be a shock for new parents, and even for second (or third, fourth...) time parents.
Rather than adding emotional demands on the new, emotionally worn, parent, I believe it is more effective to prioritise space for quality rest.
Create emotional resilience at home with deep sleep
Sleep post-children will probably never be the same. However, recharging looks different as a mom, and I have learnt to expand my definition of rest to include relaxing activities and naps instead of believing that night-time sleep is the only good form of rest.
Here are some ways to create small spaces to rest at home during the day:
Comfortable seating areas around the house. If you have a few minutes on the couch, close your eyes and allow them to rest by taking in less light and visual stimulation.
Uncluttered areas where you can relax into a soothing stretch or yoga pose, such as a child’s pose or legs up the wall. This allows your parasympathetic system to kick in as your breathing slows down.
Baby’s nap area is not just a space reserved for childish slumber. It’s a vital spot to replenish your nurturing energies. When you do get to nap with your nap, avoid television, radio, and looking at your clock so you aren’t counting the moments to do the chores (or when baby has broken the nap). A cool, dark environment is also optimal for napping, if it is calm for adult as well as children’s sensibilities.
Create a bedroom sleep sanctuary. Have fun with this and make it a place for rest beyond your wildest dreams.