Sleep Problems in Police Officers Take Heavy Toll

Add this to what was going on in Iraq and still going on in Afghanistan. If you think they are sleeping well every night, think again.

Sleep Problems in Police Officers Take Heavy Toll
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR
December 20, 2011, 4:00 PM
More than a third of police officers have a sleep disorder, and those who do are more likely to experience heart disease, problems with job performance and rage toward suspects and citizens, a new study suggests.

The research is one of the most extensive looks to date at the toll of sleep deprivation on police officers, a group for which overnight shifts, long hours and fractured sleep are all too common.

About 5,000 state and local police officers in the United States and Canada, most from Massachusetts and Philadelphia, elected to take part in the study; roughly 40 percent of them were found to have a sleep disorder. That figure is at least double the estimated 15 to 20 percent rate of sleep disorders seen in the general population.
read more here

The Stuff of Dreams: How Sleep Eases Emotional Trauma

The Stuff of Dreams: How Sleep Eases Emotional Trauma
COLUMN by LEE DYE
"Our dreams help us heal" unless they are bad dreams that make going to sleep something to fear. For combat veterans with PTSD, sleep is not something to look forward to. Many of them have terrible dreams and medications are often unable to stop the broken sleep pattern.

Nov, 30, 2011
Scientists have unlocked one of the great mysteries of the human experience, how we deal with traumatizing experiences that could leave us emotionally crippled. It happens during an "elegant ballet of biology" that softens painful memories, according to psychologist and neurologist Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the research team.

And here's the amazing part: It all happens while we sleep. Our dreams help us heal.

"When you snooze you win," Walker said during a telephone interview.

Walker's team produced strong evidence that supports an assumption among scientists that a specific phase of sleep, called rapid eye movement, or REM, plays a key role in helping us deal with troubling emotions. Until now, there has been "little to no" evidence that's true, and there was even less understanding of how it works.

But the Berkeley team found that during REM, which is also the time we dream, stress chemicals are suppressed in the "emotional hub" of the brain called the amygdala. The research shows that after a good night's sleep, even potentially traumatizing experiences are softened.

read more here

PTSD sleep research thinks new way

Wish Fulfillment? No. But Dreams (and Sleep) Have Meaning
By Tiffany Sharples Sunday, Jun. 14, 2009
Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud first posited in 1899, but growing evidence suggests that dreams —and, more so, sleep — are powerfully connected to the processing of human emotion.



According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life.

Past studies have also established a link between chronic sleep disruption and suicide. Sleep complaints, which include nightmares, insomnia and other sleep disturbances, are listed in the current Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's inventory of suicide prevention warning signs. Yet, what distinguishes Bernert's research is that when nightmares and insomnia were evaluated separately, nightmares were still independently predictive of suicidal behavior. "It may be that nightmares present a unique risk for suicidal symptoms, which may have to do with the way we process emotion within dreams," Bernert says.

If that's the case, it may help explain the recurring nightmares that characterize psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Walker says.

"The brain has not stripped away the emotional rind from that experience memory," he says, so "the next night the brain offers this up, and it fails again, and it starts to sound like a broken record...What you hear [PTSD] patients describing is, 'I can't get over the event.'"

At the biological level, Walker explains, the "emotional rind" translates to sympathetic nervous system activity during sleep — faster heart rate and the release of stress chemicals. Understanding why nightmares recur and how REM sleep facilitates emotional processing, or hinders it when nightmares take place and perpetuate the physical stress symptoms, may eventually provide clues for effective treatments of painful mental disorders. Perhaps, even, by simply addressing sleeping habits, doctors could potentially interrupt the emotional cycle that can lead to suicide. "There is an opportunity for prevention," Bernert says.

The new findings highlight what researchers are increasingly recognizing as a two-way relationship between psychiatric disorders and disrupted sleep. "Modern medicine and psychiatry have consistently thought that psychological disorders seem to have co-occuring sleep problems, and that it's the disorder perpetuating the sleep problems," says Walker. "Is it possible that, in fact, it's the sleep disruption contributing to the psychiatric disorder?"

go here for the rest

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1904561,00.html