UARS and Your Nervous System

When you've been sleep-deprived for years (or decades), your body enters a state of chronic survival mode.

Your nervous system doesn't know you have a narrow airway. It just knows that every time you fall asleep, you are suffocating. So it dumps adrenaline and cortisol into your system to keep you alive.

This creates a vicious loop:

Sleep is dangerous: Your body learns to associate sleep with threat.
Hyperarousal: You become "tired but wired," unable to settle down even when you're exhausted.
Dysregulation: Your baseline stress level rises. Small stressors feel catastrophic.

The Window of Tolerance

I used to think I just needed to "relax" more. I'd try to force myself to be calm. But you can't force safety.

Healing the nervous system isn't about forcing relaxation; it's about widening your window of tolerance.

Hyperarousal: Fight/Flight (Anxiety, racing thoughts, irritability)
Window of Tolerance: Calm, alert, connected, capable
Hypoarousal: Freeze/Shutdown (Numbness, dissociation, depression)

For years, I bounced between hyperarousal (anxiety about my health) and hypoarousal (collapse from exhaustion). I rarely spent time in the window of tolerance.

Safety Signals

The key to shifting this state is sending safety signals to your body. This is different for everyone, but for me, it looked like:

Somatic tracking: Learning to feel sensations in my body without judging them as "bad".
Gentle movement: Walking, slow stretching (intense exercise often triggered a crash).
Co-regulation: Spending time with safe people or even pets.
Environment: Soft lighting, warm textures, quiet spaces (hence the design of this website).

It's a slow process. You are retraining a system that has been trying to protect you for a long time. Be patient with it.