How To Sleep When Horrific News Becomes The Norm

For victims’ loved ones, the grief is immeasurable. For African-Americans, the pain of watching police brutality against black people comes with a toll of its own. For people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, the hurt of an attack against their own community is agonizing.

People intimately affected by these tragedies experience emotions that others of us cannot fathom. 

But even for those without a personal connection to these terrible events, sadness and pain are still a reality.

We feel pain even if we’re not involved

If you see, hear or even read about something traumatic ? even if you’re not directly involved ? you can still have an emotional response, Robert Hawkins, an associate professor at the Silver School of Social Work at New York University, told The Huffington Post.

“This is trauma that doesn’t necessarily happen to you or you didn’t necessarily experience, but you become affected by it,” he said. 

It can be worse if you identify with those affected, explained David Kaplan, chief professional officer at the American Counseling Association.

“If you relate to the person who was attacked in any way, you’re going to grieve because it’s also part of you,” Kaplan told HuffPost previously. 

But that grief, while normal and expected, can lead to stress and sleeplessness. 

“With the frequency of shootings and terror attacks there is a sense of anxiety that’s building in people,” Anita Gadhia-Smith, a psychologist in Washington, D.C., told The New York Times ? “a sense of vulnerability and powerlessness.”

Traumatic life events are among the biggest causes of anxiety and depression, research suggests. But experts say taking steps to care for yourself ? including taking care of your sleep ? is what helps you cope best with that stress.

Stress causes chemical changes in our bodies

Not sleeping is the body’s natural response after hearing about and watching disturbing events, according to sleep psychologist Jason Ong of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

When the body releases stress hormones, the emotion-processing areas of the brain stay on, suppressing some of its sleep-promoting systems, he said. Even though your body knows you’re tired, your brain knows something is wrong and you need to deal with it.

The bottom line: research shows that when we’re stressed, the chemical and biological changes in our bodies can interfere with our sleep.