The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Sleep

Posted on August 31, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Sleep is one of the main ways the brain and body restore balance after the demands of the day. During sleep, the brain sorts and stores memories, processes emotional experiences, and clears away metabolic waste that builds up while we’re awake. It helps different parts of the brain communicate more effectively, which supports attention, learning, decision-making, and creativity.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology perspective, sleep supports integration. It helps our nervous system coordinate information across the body, brain, and relationships. When sleep is disrupted, we become more vulnerable to threat responses, emotional reactivity, pain, inflammation, and difficulty connecting with others. When sleep is sufficient, we are more able to regulate our emotions, think clearly, recover from stress, and engage with the people around us in ways that promote health and well-being.

Sleep is not a luxury or a reward for getting everything done. It is a biological need that shapes how we feel, think, heal, and relate to one another every day.

The quality of our sleep emerges from the interaction of the body, brain, relationships, environment, stress load, physical health, and daily rhythms. Sleep disruption is often a sign that multiple systems are under strain rather than evidence of a personal failure or disorder.

Through an IPNB lens the question is, “What conditions is this person’s body living in that make sleep difficult?” before asking, “What technique can we use to force sleep?” That often leads to more useful solutions.

Key IPNB-informed points:

  • Sleep supports integration across the brain and body. It helps organize memory, learning, emotional processing, immune function, pain regulation, and recovery.

  • Chronic stress shifts the body toward vigilance. When vigilance remains elevated, falling asleep, staying asleep, and returning to sleep after waking can become more difficult.

  • Human beings evolved as social creatures. A sense of safety, belonging, and predictability often supports sleep, while isolation, conflict, uncertainty, and social threat can interfere with it.

  • Sleep problems are often effects rather than primary problems. Pain, grief, trauma, financial stress, caregiving burdens, medical conditions, medications, environmental disruption, and lack of social support can all contribute.

  • The body tends to sleep best when daily rhythms are predictable. Regular exposure to daylight, movement, meals, and social contact helps anchor circadian timing.

  • Sleep is strongly connected to homeostasis. When multiple physiological needs are unmet, sleep quality often suffers.

Things that often help:

  • Get outdoor morning light within the first hour after waking, even if only for 10 to 20 minutes.

  • Wake up at roughly the same time each day, including weekends when possible.

  • Increase daytime movement, particularly walking outdoors.

  • Avoid spending long periods indoors under artificial lighting without natural light exposure.

  • Eat meals on a reasonably consistent schedule.

  • Reduce stimulating activities during the hour before bed.

  • Keep the sleep environment cool, dark, and quiet.

  • Address pain, breathing issues, reflux, medication side effects, and other physical contributors.

  • Build more moments of genuine social connection during the day. Positive social contact can influence physiological regulation in ways that support sleep later.

  • If your mind becomes busy at night, externalize unfinished tasks by writing them down rather than trying to hold them mentally.

  • If you cannot sleep after a prolonged period, get up and do something quiet and low-stimulation until sleepiness returns rather than spending hours frustrated in bed.

Things that are often overlooked:

  • Loneliness can affect sleep.

  • Ongoing conflict in important relationships can affect sleep.

  • Financial insecurity can affect sleep.

  • Chronic pain can affect sleep.

  • Excessive caffeine, alcohol, and cannabis use can all affect sleep architecture, even when they seem to help initially.

  • Sleep problems are frequently reduced when the broader conditions supporting regulation improve, even if no sleep-specific intervention is used.

When Nighttime is Associated With Danger

When sleep has been linked with traumatic experiences, the goal is not to trick or force the body into sleeping. The goal is to create conditions that help the body gradually learn that the present is different from the past.

  • Many people with nighttime trauma histories find that early morning feels safer because daylight is approaching, other people are waking up, and the environment feels more predictable.

  • Lack of daylight exposure, especially during winter, can make it harder for the circadian system to anchor itself. Morning light is one of the strongest signals that helps regulate sleep timing, mood, energy, and hormone rhythms.

  • Trying to force an earlier bedtime often backfires because it increases performance pressure around sleep and reinforces the association between bed and frustration.

Instead of focusing on “going to bed earlier,” it can be more useful to focus on gradually increasing cues of safety and predictability throughout the day and evening.

Some possibilities include:

  • Start with the wake time rather than the bedtime. Even shifting wake time earlier by 15 to 30 minutes every week can help move the sleep schedule gradually.

  • Prioritize morning daylight exposure as soon as possible after waking, even if it’s later in the day than most people. If natural light is limited in winter, a clinically appropriate light box may help.

  • Create experiences of connection and regulation before bed. A phone call with a trusted person, listening to a familiar voice, spending time with a pet, or engaging in calming social rituals can help counter isolation.

  • Reduce the contrast between daytime and nighttime. Soft lighting, familiar sounds, weighted blankets if tolerated, or white noise can help create continuity rather than an abrupt transition into silence and darkness.

  • Consider whether complete darkness feels supportive or activating. Some people with trauma histories sleep better with a small amount of light.

  • Address environmental cues that increase vigilance. Locks checked once, pathways cleared, comfortable room temperature, reducing unexpected noises, and having needed items nearby can help.

  • Finding ways to increase light exposure and movement during waking hours may help strengthen the body’s daily rhythms.

  • If you cannot sleep, leaving the bed for a quiet, low-demand activity can prevent the bed itself from becoming associated with struggle.

Focusing on “What conditions help this person’s body feel safe enough to allow sleep to emerge?” can reduce shame and open the door to solutions that match the person’s lived experience rather than asking them to push harder against their own biology.

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Embodied, Safe, and Present: Qigong as Nervous System Support

Posted on August 31, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

I have been building a Qigong practice for about 18 months, and am impressed by the multiple benefits. Within weeks, I felt more freedom and less pain and tension across my upper body. Now, I find I am more present and embodied, too.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) Perspective, this 4,000 year-old movement exercise is understood as a practice that cultivates awareness, attunement, and regulation through movement, breath, and attention. It provides predictable, safe input to the nervous system, supporting coherence across body, mind, and relational capacities.

Enhances Self-Regulation: Qigong trains interoception (the ability to sense internal bodily states), which helps individuals recognize stress or tension and engage in self-regulation before becoming overwhelmed or shutting down. The intentional movements act as internal relational signals of safety.

Core Benefit: It supports resilience, reduces allostatic load, and improves one’s capacity for attunement by teaching the nervous system patterns of safety, predictability, and connection.

Group Practice and Co-regulation: In a small group, Qigong creates a shared field of attention and rhythm. People naturally attune to the collective steadiness, which is a powerful form of co-regulation that helps the system loosen its guard. It offers a rare experience of collective, non-judgmental movement, which can quiet internal alarms related to a culture of comparison and competition.

A trusted instructor deepens the experience by offering a steadying presence. Their pacing and tone act as cues for the system to settle, allowing for greater presence, deeper breath, and more easeful movement. This steadiness serves as a reference point for genuine co-regulation that spreads throughout the group.

A Good Place to  Start: Mimi Kuo-Deemer’s “8 Brocades” video. Her description: “This is the qigong practice of the 8 Brocades, or Baduanjin. Regular practice is believed to improve organ function and overall wellbeing. It was filmed in Beijing in September, 2014. Watch out for some cameo appearances from interested onlookers and passers-by! [That one guy cracks me up every time!] Hope you enjoy it.”

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Safety, Connection, Belonging, and Well-Being

Posted on August 26, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology perspective, safety, connection, belonging, and well-being are not separate experiences, but interdependent processes that continuously shape one another.

Safety is the foundation. When our nervous system detects enough predictability, responsiveness, and choice, it becomes possible to move out of survival states and toward openness. Safety is not simply the absence of threat. It is the presence of conditions that signal, “I do not have to face this alone.”

Connection creates those conditions. Attuned relationships–where we feel seen, understood, and responded to–help our nervous system settle. Through repeated experiences of reliable connection, the body begins to expect support rather than danger.

Belonging emerges from sustained connection. Belonging is not just being included in a group. It is the felt sense that who we are can exist within relationships without needing to hide, perform, or disconnect from ourselves. A person can be surrounded by others and still not experience belonging if attunement and acceptance are absent.

Well-being grows from these experiences over time. When safety, connection, and belonging are present, the nervous system can devote more energy to exploration, creativity, learning, play, purpose, and contribution. Physical health, emotional balance, cognitive flexibility, and resilience all become more accessible.

Increased safety supports connection. Connection deepens belonging. Belonging strengthens well-being. Improved well-being makes it easier to seek and sustain connection. Disruptions at any point can affect the whole system.

Trauma often interrupts this cycle. Experiences of neglect, betrayal, exclusion, discrimination, poverty, or violence can link connection with danger rather than safety. When that happens, isolation is often a survival adaptation to overwhelming or unreliable environments.

Healing involves creating experiences that gradually restore the connection between these elements. Sometimes that begins with one attuned relationship, a community that welcomes difference, or environments that increase predictability and choice. Small, repeated experiences of safety within connection can expand a person’s capacity for belonging, and belonging becomes fertile ground for well-being.

We can think of it like this:

Safety answers: “Can I let down my guard?”

Connection answers: “Will someone meet me here?”

Belonging answers: “Can I be myself here?”

Well-being reflects: “Do I have what I need to thrive?

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The Neurobiology of the “Busybody”

Posted on August 24, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

You have probably known a “busybody,” a person who constantly tells other people how to live. They can be annoying, intrusive, and hard to comprehend. But from a Relational Neuroscience perspective, they may have difficulty tolerating the reality that another person has a separate mind, history, needs, and the right to make choices they would not make themselves.

That pattern can develop for many reasons. Some people learned early that being useful, solving problems, anticipating what others needed, or preventing bad outcomes was how they maintained connection. They may have become highly attentive to other people’s circumstances while having less practice recognizing where their responsibility ends and another person’s begins.

There is a difference between caring and managing. Caring allows the other person to remain an autonomous participant. Managing requires the other person to make the choice the concerned person considers correct. The difference becomes particularly clear when advice has already been declined and continues anyway.

What happens relationally when the other person says, “I hear you, but I’m choosing something different”? A person who can remain connected while accepting the other person’s autonomy is relating to another mind. A person who becomes increasingly insistent, argumentative, dismissive, or intrusive may be having difficulty tolerating separateness.

Integration includes both connection and differentiation. We need to be able to remain connected to other people while differentiating between their experience and ours. I can care about your life without assuming responsibility for it. I can disagree with your decision without needing to change it. I can offer information when it is wanted and stop when it isn’t.

When someone repeatedly projects solutions onto another person’s life, the question is whether the relationship can accommodate two different minds.

Someone can genuinely care about you and still fail to respect your autonomy. When they do, setting a boundary maintains healthy connection, which requires differentiation first.

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Facebook: When exploitation of Human Connection is the Business Model

Posted on August 21, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Human beings evolved for connection. Throughout history and across cultures, our survival and well-being have depended on fundamental social needs: belonging, recognition, communication, and active participation in a community. Relational Neuroscience shows that our neural pathways, stress-response systems, and emotional landscapes are deeply shaped by the social environments we inhabit.

In the modern world we now have Facebook, and the broader architecture of commercial social media, the neurophysiological and social impacts of which we need to better understand.

It is easy to reduce the critique of social media to familiar refrains: “social media is bad,” or “people lack self-control.” But that misses the real issues at play. Facebook didn’t invent basic human social biology, create our longing to be seen, our sensitivity to social rejection, our appetite for novel information, or our evolutionary attunement to threat and outrage. But Facebook did construct an unprecedentedly massive, highly profitable business model around those human tendencies.

When a commercial entity takes control of the primary environment where millions of people form relationships, seek validation, and make sense of the world, a subtle yet fundamental shift occurs. Ordinary human needs are converted into quantified metrics–likes, shares, comments, and screen time–that can be continuously measured, optimized, and monetized.

This dynamic changes the nature of interpersonal interaction. In an environment structured around maximizing engagement for advertising revenue, the platform’s financial incentives directly dictate what is amplified and what remains hidden. Content that triggers immediate emotional responses–such as outrage, fear, or tribal identity–naturally generates higher engagement metrics. This commercialized infrastructure directs the social ecosystem, rewarding behaviors that drive clicks while penalizing the slow, nuanced interactions essential for genuine relational health.

I don’t blame individual users. Responding to social signals, seeking approval, and feeling drawn to compelling stories are ordinary human behaviors. The challenge lies in the systemic reality of operating within spaces designed for profit rather than relationship quality.

When our social infrastructure prioritizes corporate growth over mutual support and well-being, the environment is distorted. Understanding Facebook through the lens of human social biology allows us to look past individual behavior and critically examine the commercial incentives shaping the spaces where we connect. 

How does it change your experience of online spaces when you recognize that your engagement is being measured for profit?

In what ways might your social relationships look different if they weren’t mediated by algorithms designed for maximum engagement?

What specific qualities of a community do you find are often missing or distorted when an interaction takes place on a platform optimized for commercial growth?

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Games Therapists Play 

Posted on August 19, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

The pop psychology book, “Games People Play” was published in 1964. I remember reading it as a teenager in the 70’s. It described common relational patterns among people, like the “Yes, But” game, in which a person complains, another offers a solution, and the first person shoots down the idea. I decided a “Games Therapists Play” list could be wickedly funny while still making a serious point. Here you go:

“Pathologize the Patient”
Whatever happens gets translated into evidence that something is wrong with you.

“The Treatment Is Working Because You’re Still in Treatment”
When symptoms persist, the persistence itself becomes evidence that you need more treatment.

“The Treatment Didn’t Work Because You Didn’t Do It Right”
If the intervention fails, responsibility quietly moves from the intervention to the patient.

“You Need to Be More Motivated”
Your lack of improvement is interpreted as insufficient motivation rather than information about the treatment.

“You Are Resistant”
You disagree with the clinician, and your disagreement becomes evidence of resistance.

“Lack of Insight”
You understand what is happening differently from the clinician, therefore you lack insight.

“Poor Boundaries”
You object to something inappropriate in the therapeutic relationship, and your objection becomes the clinical problem.

“That’s Transference”
Something about the therapist’s behavior bothers you, but instead of examining the behavior, it is interpreted as something you are transferring onto them.

“Treatment Plan Roulette”
A document is created describing measurable goals that bear little resemblance to your life.

“One-Hour-a-Week”
You are expected to make meaningful changes while receiving approximately one hour of professional attention per week, and the rest of your life is somehow expected to accommodate the treatment model.

“It’s Your Coping Skills”
A structural or environmental problem is handed back to you as a coping-skills deficit.

“Safety Plan”
A complicated human situation gets reduced to a standardized form that protects the institution more effectively than it supports the person.

“The Diagnosis Explains Everything”
Once you have a diagnosis, every subsequent experience is interpreted through it.

“The Differential Diagnosis Disappears Game”
Once a psychiatric explanation is established, competing explanations receive progressively less attention.

“The Compliance Trap”
Agreement with the clinician is interpreted as progress. Disagreement is interpreted as pathology.

“You Are Noncompliant”
You decline an intervention that doesn’t work for you, and the refusal becomes part of your diagnosis.

“You Can’t Join the Therapeutic Alliance”
The therapist’s failure to establish a workable relationship is reframed as your inability to form one.

“I’m More Specialized and Qualified Than You”
Your lived knowledge of your own condition is treated as inferior to someone else’s professional knowledge because they have credentials.

“It’s Evidence-Based”
“Evidence-based” means whatever the institution has decided counts as evidence, while your response to the intervention is treated as no problem.

“That’s Your Illness Talking”
You criticize the system, and the criticism itself becomes evidence of illness.

“You’re Getting Better Because You Say You’re Getting Better”
Your agreement with the treatment narrative becomes a measure of improvement.

“You’re Getting Worse Because You Say You’re Getting Worse”
Your disagreement with the treatment narrative becomes evidence of deterioration.

“The Reframe”
You report something harmful, and the therapist finds a more comfortable interpretation of it.

“You’re So Resilient!”
The system gives you fewer resources and then celebrates your ability to survive the resulting conditions.

And my favorite:

“Heads I Win, Tails You Have a Disorder”
If you improve, the treatment worked. If you don’t improve, your disorder is severe. If you object, you lack insight. If you leave, you have poor treatment adherence. If you seek another opinion, you’re shopping for validation. If you stop treatment and improve, it is apparently because you finally learned the skills they taught you.

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Grief Moves When the Body Is Allowed: Trauma Integration and the Power of Witnessing 

Posted on August 17, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

I went into my craniosacral appointment without an agenda, not trying to make anything happen. I laid on the treatment table and my doctor cradled my head with his hands. Before long, I felt a huge wave of deep grief rise up and expand inside my core.

I have enormous grief from everything that has been stolen from me by abusers and other people in positions of power. Especially the men I turned to for help in medicine and psychiatry, who smashed me again and again, until I lost virtually everything. This includes family, community, safety, connection, financial stability, health, quality of life, and potential future.

That kind of betrayal takes away any sense that help is safe, particularly because the institutions that are supposed to protect us from men like them actually stand by them and protect them from their victims. In my case, that includes the hospital, my health insurance company, estate licensing board, and a Delaware deputy attorney general. Layers of complicity.

There’s also grief that goes back my whole life. Men in positions of power subjected me to numerous experiences of rape, beatings, whippings, trafficking, and torture, before age 16. And there has been no accountability or justice anywhere, ever. I could have had such a better life if even one person had been held accountable somewhere. Just once.

On the treatment table the grief came in waves. The first one was massive. Several minutes later, another one, smaller. Then toward the end of the treatment, just a small flow. And then I was okay. That doesn’t mean anything was fixed or completed, just that I was okay after experiencing massive grief long held. I still have a lot of grief. It feels endless sometimes, and that makes sense. This wasn’t one event. It was a lifetime of exceptional harm, followed by systems that protected the people who caused it.

It’s remarkable how safe I feel with this doctor. My body knows it can let this happen there. Nothing is being forced or interpreted. I don’t have to explain anything or make it into something meaningful. I can just let it move.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, this is how traumatic material integrates. Not by digging or retelling. By having enough safety and enough relational steadiness that the body doesn’t have to keep everything locked down. Our nervous systems are built for this. They hold what they have to hold until it’s safe enough not to. When the conditions change, the body changes. This is not pretending the past didn’t happen, changing my perspective or thoughts, but being able to live in my body without everything piling up and crushing me.

The capacity to integrate and heal through safe connection isn’t special, rare, or earned. It’s our birthright. And being in a space where my body is finally allowed to do what it knows how to do is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever experienced.

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Self-Harm: A Survival Adaptation, Not a Character Flaw

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

A few years ago, when I was struggling the hardest, I occasionally engaged in self-harm. My body knew the practice offered relief, but I still felt some shame, because I’d been indoctrinated to believe self-harm is a kind of pathological weakness. But from a Relational Neuroscience lens, self-harm is not a mystery or a failure of willpower. It is a sign that a person’s system has been pushed past what it can hold and is trying to regulate in the only way it has access to at that moment. It is a survival adaptation, not a character flaw.

A human system under chronic overload loses access to connection, curiosity, and other stabilizing states. When someone is drowning in activation, pain, or aloneness, the body searches for even a brief sense of clarity, control, grounding, or release. Many people describe self-harm as the only thing that makes the unbearable feel containable. That tells us the real problem is the degree of threat and isolation the system is carrying, not the behavior itself.

IPNB reveals to a few key dynamics:

Loss of relational holding
When someone cannot feel seen or supported, the body often slides toward collapse, self attack, or frantic attempts to override the internal storm. Self-harm becomes a substitute for co-regulation when co-regulation is missing.

Overwhelming activation without relief
When the system cannot discharge distress or settle, pain turns inward. The behavior is an attempt to shift state fast.

A body trying to interrupt dissociation
For some people, self-harm pulls them out of numbness so they can feel present again. That shows how much they need grounding and connection.

A way to communicate what words cannot carry
The body speaks when language fails, especially when the world has shown it will not listen.

IPNB never reduces this to “bad coping.” It asks what conditions made this the only available option. The focus is on what the person needed and did not get: safety, resonance, steadiness, and the felt sense of being accompanied.

Responding to self-harm from this perspective means widening support rather than shaming or pushing. The questions become:

What load is this system carrying?

What threat cues keep firing?

Where has connection been disrupted?

What would help this body feel even a little more supported and less alone with its pain?

And the steps toward change are about restoring capacity, not forcing behavior:

  • small moments of co-regulation with people who can stay steady
  •  predictable routines that give the system anchors
  •  practices that build interoceptive clarity without overwhelm
  •  environments that reduce threat and remove the pressure to perform
  •  ways of expressing distress that do not require hurting the body to be heard

IPNB treats self-harm as a signal that the system needs more connection and protection, and less load. The remedy is never about telling someone to “just stop,” but in creating enough safety in the mind, body, and relationships that the survival adaptation is no longer necessary.

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The Falsehood of “Post-Traumatic Growth”

Posted on August 12, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

People sometimes tell me I am experiencing “post-traumatic growth.” They say it like it’s a compliment, and I should feel encouraged. As if this is the gold at the end of  years of fighting for my life. That’s a falsehood.

The reality is that I can finally function a little better after years of severe trauma followed by even more severe trauma at the hands of people and systems that claimed to help. And now that I’m not actively drowning every second, people want to rebrand that as growth.

I am trying to recover what I once was. I am working doggedly to reclaim capacities I had before I asked for help and paid for it with my body, relationships, sense of safety, and my future. I am still a fraction of who I was. I have recovered only a fraction of the range, stamina, and level of well-being I once lived.

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, trauma does not create growth, but narrows life. It forces survival and strips choice. It demands constant threat detection at the expense of connection, creativity, learning, and rest. Nothing about that produces expansion.

What people call post-traumatic growth usually shows up only after the threat finally decreases and some safety is restored. After connection becomes possible again. When the relentless demands on the system ease just enough that life can start to re-enter the picture. That’s not trauma making someone better. That’s recovery: capacity slowly coming back online once it is no longer being crushed.

When I hear “look how much you’ve grown,” I’m reminded that my massive losses are still invisible: years I didn’t get to live, work I couldn’t do, relationships I couldn’t sustain, and capacities that vanished when survival took over. The person I was before asking for help, before being harmed again and again for being honest about the egregious harms done to me throughout my life by people in positions of power.

Calling this growth skips over the brutal truth. It smooths the story into something palatable. It lets people avoid grappling with how much damage was done, how preventable it was, and how long recovery takes when harm is chronic and institutional.

It also quietly puts the burden back on the person who was harmed. If trauma leads to growth, then suffering is reframed as meaningful. Necessary, even. The abusive systems don’t have to change if the injury becomes the teacher. It’s like being met with what pain specialists call “the C7 salute.” Middle finger up.

But what I’ve learned did not come from trauma. It came from surviving it without adequate support. It was hard won from having to see clearly because denial was no longer an option. It came from experiencing what happens to human beings when hierarchy, cruelty, and neglect are built into the structures that claim authority over our lives.

From an IPNB lens, humans grow in environments that support safety, dignity, and mutual care. Trauma disrupts that process. Prolonged threat reshapes what is possible in the moment because survival demands it. When the pressure finally eases, the nervous system does what it has always tried to do: return toward life. Toward homeostasis. 

That return can look dramatic from the outside:  insight, boundaries, refusal to tolerate harm, and clearer values. But none of that requires trauma as a prerequisite. Those capacities flourish in supportive environments, too. The difference is that trauma makes naming the cost visible.

I don’t celebrate “post-traumatic growth.” I present recovery as what it is: slow, uneven, incomplete, and hard-won. I share the truth that I am still rebuilding after years of being pushed past human limits. I present the loss alongside the persistence. I am not harvesting wisdom from trauma, but doing the exhausting, unfair work of rebuilding after being repeatedly harmed for seeking care. 

The only thing that deserves recognition is the relentless drive toward life that keeps showing up even after everything that tries to shut it down. That, and the rage and determination that kept me fighting a “healthcare” system and domination culture that drove me excruciatingly close to death. 

Calling this “post-traumatic growth” is an egregious falsehood, and I won’t stand for it. It erases loss, launders harm, and turns recovery into a feel-good story so no one has to look too closely at what was done or why it keeps happening. Trauma did not give me anything. It stole from me, repeatedly, and what you see now is me fighting to reclaim ground I already had, under conditions that should never have existed. I will not let language be used to soften cruelty, excuse systems that overload human beings, or rewrite survival as transformation. Recovery deserves honesty. Anything less is just another way of treating harm as acceptable.

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The Hidden Load of Heat When You Live With CPTSD and CRPS

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Shay Seaborne, CPTSD

Lately, everything feels more challenging. I have been sleeping more. Some days I take two or three naps. I feel lethargic and become cognitively stressed more easily. My productivity, which is already limited by chronic illness, is even more impeded2. Simple tasks require more effort, decision-making takes longer, and concentration is harder to sustain. I wondered what was wrong. Then I started looking more closely at the role heat may be playing.

Many of us have been taught to think about hot weather as a minor inconvenience. We complain about it, drink a little more water, and carry on. But for people living with conditions like Complex PTSD, CRPS, dysautonomia, chronic pain, chronic illness, and other conditions that affect the body’s regulatory systems, prolonged heat can become a significant physiological stressor. Understanding that has helped me give my body more grace this summer.

Relational Neuroscience teaches us that our experience emerges from the ongoing flow of information in the body, within the brain, and between us and our environment. We do not exist separately from our surroundings. The body constantly takes in information about temperature, hydration, circulation, energy availability, social connection, physical safety, and hundreds of other variables..Heat changes the equation.

When temperatures rise, the body has to work harder to maintain a stable internal environment. Blood vessels dilate, sweating increases, heart rate often rises, more fluids are needed, sleep can be disrupted, and energy is diverted toward cooling and maintaining basic physiological balance.

For someone with a healthy, flexible nervous system and no chronic health conditions, these adjustments may not be particularly noticeable. For someone like me, they can become impossible to ignore.

I live with severe Complex PTSD and quadrilateral CRPS. One of the features of my CRPS is hyperhidrosis. When the weather gets hot, I am not simply sweating a little more than usual. I can have sweat literally dripping down my legs from old scarred areas. At the same time, I am trying to stay hydrated, which is difficult enough under normal circumstances.

The result is that I often feel depleted before I have even started my day.  But I know fatigue is not laziness, naps are not a character flaw, and te cognitive difficulties are not a lack of motivation. My body is dealing with an increased physiological workload.

I expect many people with chronic conditions are experiencing something similar without realizing it. It can be particularly challenging because the effects of heat do not always show up in obvious ways. Sometimes they appear as increased pain, irritability, brain fog, poorer concentration, greater sensory overwhelm, reduced stamina, disrupted sleep, or an increased need for rest. People often blame themselves for these changes.They assume they are failing, that they should be able to push through, or that they are imagining it. Yet from a neurobiological perspective, there may be very real reasons their capacity is reduced.

Complex PTSD already involves a nervous system that has spent years adapting to chronic threat, unpredictability, or relational disruption. CRPS involves altered pain processing, sensory processing, circulation, temperature regulation, and autonomic function. Add prolonged heat to that mix and it is not surprising that many people find themselves struggling.

The body is being asked to do more. At the same time, many of us are trying to maintain the same expectations we had when the weather was cooler. That can create a great deal of unnecessary self-criticism.

One of the most useful shifts for me has been moving away from asking, “Why can’t I keep up?” and toward asking, “What is my body dealing with right now?” That changes everything. Instead of treating my fatigue as a problem to overcome, I can treat it as information. Instead of seeing naps as evidence that I am failing, I can recognize them as part of how my body adapts to increased physiological demand. Rather than trying to force myself through the hottest parts of the day, I can build my schedule around what my body needs.

For me, that means spending more time in air-conditioned environments. I have an air conditioner in my bedroom, which helps me sleep reasonably well. But I cannot spend my entire day in my bedroom. That would quickly become isolating and miserable. But outside my bedroom the house is often 88-95°F.

So I have been thinking differently. Rather than staying home and struggling through the hottest hours, I am strategizing to spend more of that time in air-conditioned public spaces: libraries, coffee shops, community spaces, and other places where I can cool down, conserve energy, and perhaps most importantly, have some contact with other human beings.

That social connection matters too. From an IPNB perspective, relationships are not separate from health. Human beings regulate one another in countless ways. Supportive social environments can reduce physiological strain. Isolation often increases it. My strategy for staying cool also supports.overall well-being.

I am also paying attention to when movement feels most accessible. For me, that often means walking first thing in the morning or about an hour before bed. I especially like walking before bed. It seems to help me settle into sleep more easily.

If you find yourself more fatigued, less productive, more cognitively stressed, more symptomatic, or simply less able to do what you normally do during periods of prolonged heat, consider the possibility that your body is responding to real physiological demands.

You are not imagining it or failing. You may simply be living in a body that is working very hard to maintain balance under challenging conditions. When the heat turns up, it is vital to listen more carefully to what our bodies are telling us.

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