The exhaustion experienced by many CPTSD survivors isn’t about not sleeping. Though not sleeping certainly doesn’t help.
CPTSD exhaustion, like CPTSD itself, represents something more long term.
It’s more related to chronic burnout than lack of rest.
CPTSD exhaustion is about a nervous system that has NEVER really had a realistic chance to rest and recharge.
Hypervigilance specifically completely wrecks our rest/activation cycle.
Many CPTSD survivors try to rest and recharge, try to design their day around opportunities to press the “reset” button— but that doesn’t matter to a nervous system stuck in sympathetic activation.
The sympathetic nervous system is the branch of our nervous system that gets activated into trauma response by triggers. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop— those all originate in the sympathetic nervous system, and launch in states of sympathetic activation.
The parasympathetic nervous system is colloquially known as the “rest and digest” branch of the nervous system— and parasympathetic activation is what soothes and recharges us, allows us to meaningfully reset.
“Normal” human beings usually exist in a state of parasympathetic dominance. Their sympathetic nervous system gets activated comparatively rarely— almost always by an event that is way outside their norm.
CPTSD survivors, however, experienced events that triggered our sympathetic nervous system into action on the regular— so much so that we developed an inverse baseline: sympathetic nervous system dominance was our “normal.”
One of the reasons why states of calm and focus can paradoxically freak CPTSD survivors out is because they are so far outside of our norm, we wonder if something is wrong, or if the other shoe is about to drop.
So here we CPTSD survivors are, day after day, basically living with our “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system turned on as our default— and it’s exhausting, almost by definition.
Cars are not meant to redline as their default.
Runners are not meant to spring as their default.
And humans were not meant to live in a state of sympathetic nervous system activation as our default.
Of course it’s exhausting— and that exhaustion doesn’t go away with one good night’s sleep.
That exhaustion only starts to change when we develop some skill at downshifting from sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous system dominance on the regular.
Put another way: just like CPTSD isn’t about one trauma that happened in an instant, CPTSD exhaustion isn’t about one exhausting thing that happened— it’s about the over functioning of our body and mind, day after day, over time.
We do need the opportunity to rest and digest and recover, yes— but more than that, we need to chip away at the pattern of fight/flight/freeze/flop/fawn being our baseline. Because that’s what’s supporting that state of exhaustion.
As usual in CPTSD recovery, the problem is the pattern, not the past.
Breathe. Blink. Focus.
And know that the issue of CPTSD exhaustion is solvable— but probably not in one night, or with one tool.
