A sleep trick that works for me

I know from the email messages I receive and from talking to people at conventions and other appearances that quite a few folks who read my work suffer in various ways from PTSD.  Many people with PTSD have sleep troubles.  Some have a hard time falling asleep.  Others have a hard time staying asleep, often waking many times in the night.  I have both issues.  What a surprise.

On this most recent trip, though, by pure happenstance I found a trick that helped me fall asleep, so I thought I'd pass it along in case it could help others. 

I need to explain first that my normal facial expression ranges from what I think of as neutral, which many call "angry," to what I think of as annoyed, which many call "Who the fuck are you looking at?  I'm going to kill you."  Put differently, I'm not the sort of person who walks around all the time with a smile on his face.  (I do laugh and joke a lot, but we're talking here about my face at rest.) 

The first night of this past trip, after turning out the bedside lamp, I thought of something that made me happy, and I involuntarily smiled at the thought.  I was exhausted, so I was lucky enough to fall asleep quickly, the smile still there. 

The next night, I was also exhausted, but I was having my usual trouble falling asleep.  I wondered why the previous night had been different, and then I recalled that I had smiled right before I fell asleep.  I figured, what the heck, it couldn't hurt to try again.  I thought about some things that made me happy until I found myself smiling again, and then I fell asleep quickly. 

This trick has worked for me on every night since then that the room I've been in has been quiet.  (It doesn't help in a noisy space, but that's a different issue.)  Admittedly, that's less than a week, but it does seem to help me and be repeatable, so I'm passing it along in case it works for you.

To my own surprise, I now plan to always try to fall asleep smiling. 

Child abuse changes your brain

If you were abused, you almost certainly already believed this.

If you read the March, 2002 Scientific American article (preview here), you were more convinced.

Now, though, the extremely respectable journal Current Biology has published an article, "Heightened neural reactivity to threat in child victims of family violence," that makes the point quite clearly with some excellent work from a group of top UK scientists. (Thanks to my pal, John Lambshead, for pointing me to this story.)

For an easy to read summary of it, check out this Wired piece, "How Abuse Changes a Child’s Brain." The article opens with this line:

The brains of children raised in violent families resemble the brains of soldiers exposed to combat, psychologists say.

Hell, many of my readers and Dave's already knew that. I sure did. Still, the scientific confirmation is good to have.

This bit summarizes the research:

His team compared fMRIs from abused children to those of 23 non-abused but demographically similar children from a control group. In the abused children, angry faces provoked distinct activation patterns in their anterior insula and right amygdala, parts of the brain involved in processing threat and pain. Similar patterns have been measured in soldiers who’ve seen combat.

The brain changes, of course, are not the only physiological adaptations to abuse (and PTSD of other sorts). As the Scientific American article and its sources made clear, key glands also change, one consequence of which is a heightened adrenaline response.

I do not mention all this to make excuses, because I don't believe any of it provides an excuse for anything I or any other abused person does. We are each responsible for our actions.

No, I'm bringing it out because I want people to understand that the cost of child abuse is high and lifelong, physical and mental, and most importantly, unacceptable.