Can't Sleep Due to Anxiety and PTSD Triggers

Maybe taking naps works, also stay hydrated, try comfort food, yogurts, probiotocs, make sure to try to stay clean. 🤗 maybe get an adult coloring book? Puzzle book. Go to a library. Go for a walk. Go to the park.

@ZappyRacc thank you for the advice, it makes a lot of sense and hopefully it helps.

There's no such thing as being anxious for no reason, especially with PTSD. You can almost think of trauma as an injury to your brain. When something traumatic occurs, such as violence, disaster, or abuse, you get a little "ding" on that spot in your brain. You can grow around the ding to where you can function just fine in spite of it, but every now and then, you run into a situation which reminds you of that incident in some way, and the ding gets touched- this is when you get triggered, usually by something completely unrelated; for example, I feel physically sick when I hear a child cry because it reminds me of my childhood trauma; the kid is usually throwing a tantrum in a grocery store, but it still hits my ding. That general anxiety and jumpy feeling you get between triggers is hypervigilance. You're watchful for something else scary to happen. Your brain thinks it's just protecting you by being nervous all the time, but that anxiety poisons you, making you tense and queasy and unable to get decent sleep. Lack of sleep certainly makes it worse; you can't think as rationally when you're sleep-deprived, so it's easier to feel like those emotional thoughts, like your anxiety, make more sense than they might if you were better rested. I'd be willing to bet a night or two of decent sleep would have you feeling more capable of logically countering your fears. As for the dreams, I get how hard it can be when your brain connects someone innocent to past abusers in dreams. I've had dreams where my dad assaulted me, and they always scared and confused me until I got my degree in psychology and learned the brain will often recycle old plots with different people, particularly if that plot is one you have yet to entirely process. And the more unsettling you find the dream, the more it persists because it's tugging at your mind. My therapist has helped me adapt techniques she typically uses for her child and adolescent trauma patients to suit my issues, because most of my trauma was during childhood and she said pediatric skills are often helpful for adults with C-PTSD. A trick she says helps a lot of kids with recurring nightmares is to imagine a different ending or funny/wacky element to reduce the dream to just an episodic misadventure rather than a replaying of traumatic themes. Like, say you've got a kid who was in a car wreck and has regular nightmares about being trapped in that car when it gets hit might try imagining that their mom's car turns into a space ship and flies away before it gets hit. The trick is to imagine this new plot every night before bed; the idea is that you're sort of practicing those thoughts having a pleasant resolution while awake so that they can be less threatening when they happen in your sleep.