Sleep Therapy

In 1938, sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman and his student Bruce Richardson lived in Mammoth Cave in Kentucky for about a month. With no daylight, they tried living on a 28-hour day. Richardson adjusted. Kleitman never did. He concluded that people’s internal clocks differ, and some people can change their sleep habits with ease, while others find it very difficult. The next year, he published Sleep and Wakefulness, the first major book on the science of sleep.

In December 1951, Kleitman’s student Eugene Aserinsky hooked his eight-year-old son, Armond, up to an old brain-wave machine. During the night, the pens jumped and his eyes moved rapidly behind closed eyelids, as if the boy were awake, but he was fast asleep. In 1953, Aserinsky and Kleitman named this rapid eye movement sleep, or REM sleep. The discovery showed the brain stays active all night, and REM is when most dreams and nightmares happen.

By the 1950s, sleeping pills had become a common answer for sleepless nights. Barbiturates worked, but they were addictive and easy to overdose on. In 1970, flurazepam became one of the first benzodiazepines sold just for sleep. It was seen as safer, and within a few years it was among the most prescribed sleeping pills.

In 1972, psychologist Richard Bootzin noticed that for people with insomnia, the bed itself had become a place for lying awake and worrying. He suggested going to bed only when sleepy, and getting up when sleep wouldn’t come.

In 1987, psychologist Arthur Spielman noticed that people who slept poorly often spent longer in bed trying to catch up, which made their sleep lighter and more broken. He suggested limiting time in bed so sleep could become deeper and more steady. He also described how insomnia can start with a hard event, then continue long after it passes.

In 1999, Canadian psychologist Charles Morin tested cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I, which combined these two ideas. He led a trial with 78 older adults with long-term insomnia, comparing CBT-I with a sleeping pill. Both helped at first. Two years later, the pill’s benefits had faded, while CBT-I’s had lasted.

In 2001, sleep researcher Barry Krakow showed that nightmares after trauma needed their own treatment. He worked with 168 women with PTSD, nearly all of them sexual assault survivors. They rewrote their nightmares while awake and rehearsed the new version each day. Their nightmares dropped, and their sleep improved.

But sleep is mostly still treated as a habit to fix.

Common sleep advice can feel unsafe after trauma. Being more tired can make fear, memories and big feelings harder to manage. Getting up in the night and spending less time in bed can feel unbearable for a body that is hurting.

Shift work, caregiving, noise, housing and money worries also shape sleep.

In 2023, a study of over 4,000 Canadians found about one in six had insomnia, and nearly half had used something to help them sleep that year.

Trauma-sensitive sleep therapy works inside those gaps. It asks what night is like for you before offering tools. It makes room for the impact of life stressors and trauma. It treats your responses as protection, not bad habits. And it helps you build enough safety for sleep to come more easily.

Trauma-sensitive therapy starts by helping you feel safer.