Impacts of Trauma: Nightmares & Flashbacks

Show Notes:

You guys, we are back and talking some more about early indicators for trauma and stress-related injuries that are common to front line workers. We’ve been talking about how important it is to be familiar with what to look for in yourself and those around you, so you can catch things early and ensure your wellness. For your sake, for the sake of the job you love, and for the sake of those who love you. This is crucially important stuff you guys, believe me, I know – because it’s what every client who ends up in my office for stress-related injuries says they wish they had known and done more about sooner to prevent having to get so deeply caught in it, where the impacts are incredibly damaging to them, their families, their potential to continue in jobs they have loved, and so much more. I have these conversations every single day, and I don’t want you to end up in an office like mine having the same regret-filled conversation if you don’t have to. We’ve talked about what to watch for around hypervigilance and dissociation and today we are talking about nightmares and flashbacks. Now, many people who think about traumatic nightmare and PTSD-related flashbacks likely think of what we see in movies – really intense experiences that make you wake up in a cold sweat or knock the wind out of you while engaged in some totally mundane task. While this can be what nightmares and flashbacks look like when traumatic stress has really taken hold, they aren’t the early indicator presentation, and that’s what we really want to focus on for today.Before nightmares ramp up to the level of cold sweats and screaming in your sleep, they begin with less intensity but should be an early alert that something is up for us. Let’s talk for a minute about what sleep and dreaming is all about, and that will help us to better understand why and how nightmares play a role as early indicators around our wellbeing. When you sleep, your brain begins a really important task called consolidation. I tend to think of this process, kind of like the mail room in a busy law firm on TV shows like the Good Wife. When you go through the day, you have a constant stream of input – data that is coming into your brain. Some of it is important, a lot of it is pretty meaningless, but your brain won’t necessarily know what it what until time has passed. For example, your brain might be aware of tree branches blowing outside your window while you are talking to your spouse or kids – and generally that input of the branches blowing would be pretty meaningless and unimportant…unless one of those branches suddenly broke and blew through your window…suddenly that background noise peripheral input becomes vitally important data that your brain is able to bring to the forefront and use to enact action to duck out of the way. Think of each piece of data – noises, visual input, smells, and so on – as a piece of paper in that busy mail room. By the end of the day it has amassed and there is a ton of material to sort through. Your brain doesn’t have time all day to deal with organizing and sorting all of that material, it’s too busy dealing with the next bit of input coming in and working to determine if, in that moment, it is background or foreground information that you need to interact with. So, in the quiet of night when your brain gets to tune out it’s high degree of perceptive awareness of things like sights and sounds, it goes to work dealing with the mass of material you collected that day. Again, think of the mail room and workers sorting through papers – deciding what goes where. Does this need to be kept? Do we need it soon, like a presentation I have to give tomorrow? That might go into our short-term memory stores. Or do we need it for sometime further in the future? That might get put into our long-term memory bank. Is it something that is related to our survival? That needs to be kept locke