When the Mind Can’t Rest: How Trauma, Anxiety, and Emotional Strain Disrupt Sleep, and What You Can Do

Sleep should be a place of refuge, a time when the body restores and the mind quietly integrates the day. But for many people living with trauma, anxiety, depression, or emotional challenges, night can feel like anything but restful. It can bring racing thoughts, tension, nightmares, or an uneasy sense that the mind won’t switch off.

Whether the struggle is rooted in trauma, emotional or relational problems, or chronic anxiety, the pattern is similar: the emotional brain remains on guard long after the day has ended.

Why the Emotional Brain Struggles with Sleep

When we’ve lived through distress, whether overwhelming events, ongoing stress, or unstable relationships, our nervous system learns to stay alert.

As the thinking mind slows down at night, the emotional brain becomes more active, often expressing itself through dreams. In these moments, the brain is believed to process emotional experiences, linking feelings, memories, and meaning. It also consolidates new learning, organizing and strengthening the information we’ve taken in throughout the day. You may be thinking, I don't dream, but in fact we all dream throughout the night, we tend to only remember dreams when we wake during or just after them. As Mark Solms and other researchers have shown, dreaming is a continuous part of the sleep cycle. When sleep is disrupted, that process is compromised, learning, memory and emotional processing and consolidation can be impacted. This can show up as not recalling what we thought we had already learned, or as carrying the weight of emotionally charged events that haven’t yet been integrated.

For those with a history of unresolved trauma, the brain may replay painful memories through nightmares or wake the body at the slightest sound. In anxiety, the mind may loop through potential dangers in an effort to stay prepared. In depression, the brain’s drive for curiosity and motivation, what neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp called the SEEKING system, becomes blunted, leaving sleep shallow and unrefreshing (Panksepp, 1998). For those who experience intense emotional shifts, the body can cycle between hyperarousal and exhaustion. Each of these states interferes with the brain’s nightly repair work, and our rest.

All of this raises an important question: what’s actually happening in the brain when sleep feels so hard to reach?

Safety and the Emotional Brain at Rest

When stress or emotional pain goes on for too long, the body can forget what “safe” feels like. The stress response stays switched on, and cortisol, the hormone meant to help us recover, lingers too long. Normally, cortisol supports healing and balance, but when it’s high for too long, it interferes with melatonin, the hormone that tells us it’s time to rest. Over time, this confuses the body’s internal clock and makes real rest harder to find.

In anxiety, the brain’s threat-detection system keeps scanning for danger. In trauma, the body learns to stay on guard, even when nothing is wrong. Both make it hard to let go into sleep because part of you still believes it’s unsafe to rest.

In depression, the body’s natural rhythm can lose its flow. Cortisol levels may rise or fall at the wrong times, leaving people tired during the day and restless at night. The brain’s drive for motivation and curiosity can also quiet, which contributes to feeling flat and unrefreshed even after sleep. These disruptions, combined with the stress response, can make rest feel out of sync, broken, or difficult to sustain.

Understanding this can soften self-blame. Trouble sleeping or getting out of bed isn’t a failure of discipline; it’s the body doing what it learned to do to survive: stay alert, shut down, or conserve energy.

So how can we move towards a sense of safety that supports better sleep?

Creating Conditions for Safety

Even when life feels unpredictable, we can nurture micro-moments of calm that support recovery:

• Establish gentle rituals before bed such as slow breathing (four seconds in, six out), progressive muscle relaxation, light yoga or stretching, a warm shower, or soft music.

• Choose a resting space that feels least exposed or most contained and safe.

• Modify your environment to reduce sensory or emotional stressors.

• Use sensory cues such as a calming scent, weighted blanket, or familiar object that signals comfort.

• Rest at quieter times when others are less active or when the environment feels more peaceful.

• Practice emotional regulation skills to approach emotions as they arise rather than avoid them.

• Practice self-soothing. Use your senses to bring comfort and signal safety to your body. Soft textures, calming sounds, pleasant scents, or warmth. Small moments of comfort help the nervous system shift from alert to rest.

For some, safety may also mean reaching out for external supports, finding stable housing, a quieter or safer space, or simply a place or person that feels grounding. The emotional brain cannot integrate what the body still perceives as unsafe.

For those living with depression, safety can also mean gently reawakening energy. The nervous system isn’t just overactive, it can also slow down, dampening curiosity and motivation. Creating safety here might look like inviting small moments of movement, light, or connection, a walk, morning sun, or reaching out to someone who feels steady. These small sparks remind the brain that life is still moving, and you can move with it.

Safety, even in small doses, is the soil that rest grows in.

Medication and Emotional Integration

Medication can sometimes play an important role in restoring rest, especially when exhaustion, anxiety, or distress have become overwhelming. For some, it offers a short-term bridge to safety while other supports take hold. Certain medications, particularly those that alter neurotransmitters like serotonin or norepinephrine, can influence how deeply we sleep or how vividly we dream, sometimes quieting the emotional brain’s natural way of integrating experience during REM and non-REM sleep (Walker, 2017; Palagini et al., 2013).

While medication decisions should always be made in consultation with a physician or psychiatrist, the broader aim is to help the body and mind regain their own rhythm so that rest and emotional healing can work together. When the nervous system is calmer and the sleep cycle more stable, the brain can resume its natural processes of memory consolidation and emotional regulation.

Therapy, reflection, and emotional-regulation skills complement medical care by supporting the brain’s innate capacity to integrate experience, both by day and by night. When the dreaming brain struggles to weave emotional experience into memory and meaning, therapy becomes the waking equivalent of that process. Through dialogue, reflection, and self-awareness, people learn to make sense of what once felt fragmented. Over time, this internalizes: clients begin to reflect, regulate, and integrate on their own. In that way, therapy ultimately aims to work itself out of a job, helping people trust their own capacity to heal, rest, and live with steadier emotion.

How to Support the Mind’s Natural Healing Rhythms

Here are gentle, non-pharmacological strategies that support better sleep and emotional balance across trauma, anxiety, depression, and personality patterns.

1. Establish Predictability (teaches the brain that rest is safe).

• The nervous system finds safety in rhythm.

• Go to bed and wake up at consistent times.

• Dim the lights an hour before bed.

• Avoid screens, caffeine, and heavy conversation late at night.

2. Reflect Before You Sleep (allows for conscious emotional processing).

Take 10–15 quiet minutes to settle the day:

• Write a few lines about what you felt, learned, or noticed.

• Identify what remains unfinished and remind yourself it can wait.

• Acknowledge one thing that felt good or safe today.

This short reflective practice helps the brain “consciously integrate” emotions so the unconscious doesn’t have to process everything in dreams and can be approached in many ways such as prayer, meditation, journaling to name a few.

3. Ground the Body (lets the nervous system know it is safely in the present).

• Use slow breathing, gentle stretches, or a warm shower to cue your body into rest.

• Weighted blankets, soft sounds, or calming scents can support the parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) system, the one that allows dreaming to unfold safely.

4. Light and Movement (discharge stress and reset emotional and sleep rhythm).

• Morning light exposure and regular daytime movement regulate serotonin and melatonin, the same chemicals that support sleep and emotional stability.

• Even 15 minutes outdoors can improve both mood and rest.

5. Process Today, Not Just the Past

Many people working through trauma or emotional pain focus on integrating the past, yet daily stress can also build and overload the system. Taking time each day to notice and process how you feel in the present helps prevent emotional backlog and lightens what you carry into sleep.

Bedtime, however, isn’t the time for deep trauma work. That kind of reflection is best done when you feel grounded and supported during the day, in therapy, or with someone who can listen without judgment. Evening reflection is more about gentle release than deep excavation.

Many Indigenous communities have long practiced this through healing circles. A talking stick, eagle feather, or other sacred object is passed from person to person, allowing each to speak openly about their experience without blame or interruption. Simply being witnessed helps the nervous system settle and integrate what’s been felt.

In our own lives, we can create small versions of this. Historically, the family dinner table offered that space, a daily ritual for sharing the day and reconnecting. Today, with busy schedules and screens pulling us in different directions, those moments are easily lost. Reclaiming even simple acts of connection, checking in after dinner, talking during a walk, or sitting quietly together helps families and partners process the day’s emotions as they happen, rather than carrying them into the night.

Putting This To Rest

Rest begins long before we close our eyes. It starts in the small moments when we feel seen, safe, and connected. Whether it’s sharing a quiet meal, speaking honestly about our day, or simply sitting beside someone who listens, these acts tell the nervous system it can settle. Over time, those ordinary moments of presence become the foundation for deeper rest, the kind that restores not just the body, but the heart and mind too.

Take care of yourself tonight. Rest isn’t a reward you have to earn, it’s something you deserve, a birthright of being human.

Author Bio

Sherry Slejska, MSW, RSW, is a trauma-focused psychotherapist and founder of Pathfinders Wellness in the Waterloo Region. She takes an integrative, developmental approach to psychotherapy, drawing on neuroscience, attachment, and trauma theory to support emotional and relational healing. Learn more at pathfinderswellness.ca or contact the author

References

Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why zebras don’t get ulcers: The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping (3rd ed.). Henry Holt and Company.

Solms, M. (2021). The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. W. W. Norton.

Solms, M. (2023). The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Free Energy Principle. University of Cape Town.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience. Oxford University Press.

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.

Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.

Yehuda, R. (2002). Post-traumatic stress disorder. New England Journal of Medicine, 346(2), 108–114. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMra012941