Healing Through Sleep
Talking about trauma may not always be beneficial; it can sometimes exacerbate emotional responses rather than alleviate them. Prioritizing the calming of the sympathetic nervous system before sleep is crucial for adaptive rest. During REM sleep, the emotional system is active, but the absence of norepinephrine allows for the separation of intense emotions from cognitive memories, facilitating healing and reducing the impact of traumatic experiences.In this clip
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Huberman Lab
Dr. Gina Poe: Use Sleep to Enhance Learning, Memory & Emotional State | Huberman Lab Podcast
Related Questions
I have a question about this episode Dr. Matt Walker: The Science of Dreams, Nightmares & Lucid Dreaming | Huberman Lab Guest Series and this clip Rewriting Nightmares. Andrew talks about a process to erase fear and traumas, and he says that first you need to extinguish the fear or trauma by retelling the narrative. The whole point of that is to diminish the physiological response, right? If the goal is to diminish the physiological response, then if the person works to change their physiological response immediately after being triggered, would that over time also diminish the physiological response and therefore break the conditioning? Am I right? For example, if a person had a traumatic experience with a spider, but every time the person sees the spider or gets activated through some trigger, and immediately after uses breathwork to calm the body, would that work like retelling a narrative to extinguish the fear? Did I miss something?
Explain in detail how changes in norepinephrine release during REM sleep are involved in PTSD and how elevated norepinephrine prevents the weakening of traumatic memories, hindering emotional processing and adaptation to new contexts, as discussed in the episode Dr. Gina Poe: Use Sleep to Enhance Learning, Memory & Emotional State | Huberman Lab Podcast and the clip Pgo Waves and Dreams.
Is it correct to say that if someone had a childhood trauma that wasn't processed, when they start to address this trauma in adulthood, they could begin to have dreams or nightmares about it, especially during REM sleep? Once the brain has new information that could potentially change the narrative around the trauma, and the person is consciously working to unload the emotional burden during their waking hours, could the brain also reprocess the old narratives and emotional trauma during REM sleep? This question is in relation to the episode Dr. Paul Conti: Therapy, Treating Trauma & Other Life Challenges | Huberman Lab Podcast #75 and the clip Confronting Emotional Arousal.