Sleep, Solstice, and Suicidality
How Sleep & A Sense of Belonging Keep Us Alive
If you or someone you know is in crisis and you don’t already have an active plan to navigate acutely difficult feelings, please call 988 or visit the suicide and crisis website here.
Sleep, Solstice, and Suicidality
I know it’s the peak of the sunshine months, and it might feel a bit disparate to be writing about something as dark and spooky as suicide. If I think about a list of words in our dominant culture that people go wide lengths to avoid looking at, talking about, or sitting with—suicide has got to be towards the top of that list. While I’m not afraid to touch in on these types of topics, I certainly acknowledge that other people are and I often try to be respectful about the comfort levels of others in the scope of my work.
However, I have always found sunlight to be the best disinfectant, and if we cant talk about tough topics like suicide in the brightest parts of the year, when can we realistically talk about them?
Should we be talking about suicide:
In the middle of winter when things are the hardest?
In the collision of a massive crisis when everything has already fallen apart?
In the wee hours of the morning when our prefrontal cortices are thrashing around explosively with our untethered emotions and we don’t have the fullest capacities to access our sense of safety, agency, and hope?
In the moments when our loved ones are in a hospital setting?
Well if that’s the only time our dominant culture talks about suicide—I’m not here for it. I’d love to create a new paradigm.
Let’s talk about suicide in the light of day.
Let’s take a morning to learn how closely sleep and suicide touch each other, a bit about why, and then I’ll end with a podcast recommendation that I recently stumbled upon that inspired me to write this article.
Let’s Start By Understanding Some Basics About Suicide, First
Chronically disrupted sleep and suicide go hand in hand. Similarly, suicidal thoughts, ideations, and attempts chronically disturb our sleep. In the scientific literature we call this a “bi-directional relationship” which means that these two things impact each other.
Before we start exploring (and potentially getting lost in) the luscious scientific weeds around this topic, I want to take a moment to just give a very practical explanation of what suicide is and is not.
When someone is suicidal, it is often not because they actively want to die, at least initially. Suicidality is more often because someone is living a life that feels absolutely unbearable to them. The unbearable parts of life might come from an external shift or set of circumstances that leave people with extreme feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, or chronic and consistent experiences of pain. Suicidal behaviors might also come from internal experiences where someone’s life has become devoid of access to joy and connection to others no matter what one does, where panic attacks, anxiety, and PTSD might be the most dominant feature of someone’s inner world, or someone is living in a constant fear of terror and confusion.
Whether the experience is internal, external or both1, there is often an overwhelming, and pervasive feeling that no matter what they do, things are not shifting, nor do they have hopes of shifting.
In other words, suicidality in many cases is about an extreme and persistent loss of agency.2
So again, I reiterate, being suicidal for most people is not that they want to die as much as it is the bottom of the barrel feeling that no matter what someone does, day-to-day life feels absolutely, completely unbearable.
It feels very important to shine light on this misconception while de-stigmatizing suicidality so that if we ever have someone in our life who is actively suicidal, or if we ourselves, ever go through a spell of suicidal ideation or behaviors, we can understand how to appropriately support ourselves and others3.
Which brings me to suicide’s connection to sleep.
Suicide and Sleep Symptoms
Now that we’ve covered the waking experiences of suicide, it’s important to understand how this impacts our experiences sleep. To understand the connection I’ve briefly listed below how someone’s sleep might change during an acute period of distress (regardless of if someone is actively suicidal or not).
When we are distressed we are more likely to:
Have a dramatic change in sleep patterns, consistency, and abilities
Sleep significantly more, sleep significantly less, and/or sleep in chaotic and disorganized fashion
Have heightened cortisol release around bedtime and in the middle of the night
Experience heightened anxiety at night, particularly around sleep
Ruminate, especially close to bed time
Have vivid and disturbing nightmares
Isolate ourselves from social connection
Eat at more irregular time intervals, eat less nourishing foods, and drastically change eating patterns (eating substantially more or substantially less)
Avoid regular movement and exercise
Looks like a bummer up there, huh? No kidding. It is.
Before we get too scientific with it, I’ll put this as plainly as I can.
If someone is going through an acutely difficult time where their entire day-to-day life feels unbearable (or maybe even actively excrutiating) and all of a sudden their nighttime is also filled with terror and pain and distress—this person is now experiencing pain and discomfort 24 hours a day, with no relief.
Who would want to remain alive in that circumstance?
Not many people.
While I listed some ways that sleep might shift when we are just acutely distressed, I want to also add that often times, when people are actively experiencing suicidal ideation and behaviors, they are also very likely to be experiencing vivid nightmares.
So even if folks are able to find some kind of solace in sleep, even the sleep they are getting is painted in painful or terrifying images.
It’s a doozy.
I also want to name that even those of us who might normally navigate the world around us with a generally sunny disposition and optimistic outlook on life would have a hard time maintaining hope if, over time, both their days and nights were stuck in a painful loop. In fact, some of the most optimistic, high-functioning people I know can spiral very quickly into a place of extreme distress if their sleep gets dysregulated for a long-period of time, even if nothing else in their life is visibly wrong.
What Else Is Going On Here?
Suicidal ideation and behavior is complex. If we could explain it simply, we could probably fix it simply. But we cant, so…. we cant. I don’t want to get too deep in the scientific literature and many, many theories around suicide, but it does feel important to add one more, nerdy layer of how we currently know sleep and suicidality are related. Particularly around how important sleep is as a protective factor for suicide.
In January of this year, I wrote a blog that gave some broad information on how sleep impacts our social and emotional functioning. In essence, when we are not sleeping well, we objectively have a harder time with social connections. We also objectively experience a higher number of negative emotions and a lower number of positive emotions.
One of the ways we can predict that someone is going to go from a general hard time of “distress” to tipping over into the land of full-blown suicidality, is because their sense of being a burden in their community drastically goes up and their sense of belonging to a community dramatically goes down.
When we are not getting adequate sleep—even if we are not actively suicidal—we increase our sense of burdensomeness and decrease our sense of belonging. The good news is, that the flip side of this is also true. When we are getting healthy, adequate, and consistent sleep, we are more likely to feel a sense of belonging and not catastrophize our normal, human needs as a burden on those we love.
Sleep is an essential part of feeling social belonging and connectedness and also winds up being an essential resiliency factor against feeling suicidal.
Why Do Belongingness and Burdensomeness Play Such A Massive Role In Suicidality?
There are many reasons belongingness and burdensomeness interplay with something as serious as suicide. However, again, to keep it pragmatic and over-simplified—our fears of being ostracized is something we biologically evolved to pay attention to and actively avoid at all costs4.
Although it doesn’t make logical sense when we shine bright light on it, when we are experiencing extreme distress, we believe that if we share that distress—people will not want to be around us anymore. In many cases, the fear of living a fully-isolated life feels more dangerous to our body and our nervous system than the idea of hurting ourselves, disappearing, or actively removing ourselves from our communities altogether. Many of us can endure pain, but the thought that our lives might be actively causing pain to other people becomes more than we can bear. Hence, the next step folks will take in this train of thought, is to remove themselves from the equation entirely.
For most people who find themselves in a state of suicidality—there is truth to how they are feeling. People probably have abandoned them in times of need. Some experience in their life is probably unbearable and difficult to change. There probably is something, internal or external, that is completely outside of their control.
Yes, there are tools they may not have found yet.
Yes, circumstances do all, eventually change.
Yes, Yes, Yes.
However, it is extremely important not to minimize the experience someone is having or insert your own opinion on top of whatever they’re navigating unless you are a professional who is helping this person in a professional capacity.
What Can A Layperson Do To Help?
As a layperson, some great things you can do to support anyone in a time of acute crisis (whether they are suicidal or not) is:
make sure they have qualified, professional support for what they are experiencing
don’t stigmatize their experience—get curious with them and ask them to share whatever they safely feel like sharing. Be honest about your capacity and set clear boundaries on how and when you can support them. Be straightforward about what you can safely support hearing versus when you need your friend to seek out additional support because you are out of your depth. Do not shame, punish, or guilt someone if they don’t want to share anything with you when you ask.
encourage and support as much healthy sleep and safe resting environments as you can (to help give their nervous system a respite and a break)
PS- The more you model this behavior and participate in this safely with them the better.
bolster their sense of belonging as much as you can without putting yourself at risk. This can range from inviting them to gatherings or simply texting them in the night and in the mornings to let them know you’re thinking about them during the two most difficult times of day for people in the middle of a crisis
learn how to get comfortable experiencing and talking about your own struggles and grief. Spend time reflecting on what helped in those moments. The more you are able to sit in your own experience of despair and grief without spiraling into catastrophe, the more capacity you will have to sit with your loved ones without judgement when they find themselves there, too.
Finally, keep educating yourself on the experiences of what conditions create distress in others. Keep educating yourself on why people might feel suicidal and what they found helpful to move themselves out of it.
On The Topic of Learning…
I wanted to share a link to the podcast that inspired this month’s article. Having studied suicide, had my own experiences with suicide in my personal life, and from a deep and pervasive interest in holistic ways to pursue the art of rest—I thought this podcast episode was a poignant and thoughtful way to explore one of the many contributing factors to keeping ourselves vital.
Maybe one day I’ll write an article about how speaking our truth fosters connection and safety in the nervous system. But in the meantime, maybe take a listen to a thoughtful conversation and see if you feel the exhale in your own body.5
On the note of truth, thanks for being here with me today shining a bit of light on suicide while we’ve got the most daylight in the year.
As per usual,
I am so grateful you’re here.
<3 To the sunshine as much as the darkness—
Dagny Rose
This sub-section of The Art of Rest, is all about—you guessed it—The Rest.
As a trained sleep scientist and mindfulness teacher & researcher, here we explore the everything related to rest. Whether we are unpacking the newest evidence-based sleep health tips, exploring day-to-day tools for bolstering and protecting rest, or diving into a world of dreams, “The Rest” is going to regularly touch into what a restful life is, and how to move towards one5
Looking For A Way To Dig Deeper Into Your Wildest Dreams?
Well, while I cannot find those dreams for you, The Art of Rest is having their first Missoula-based community event where you can explore them for yourself! Together we’ll use myth, story, and folklore as a way to:
Rest our nervous systems into community with a sense of belonging
Explore motifs, archetype, & symbology from the tale of The Lindworm
Expand our sense of curiosity and creativity with creative practices, discussion, and reflective questions
This event will be hosted at Sacred Ally on July 27th from 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM. Spots are limited so make sure to register so you don’t miss out.
Usually there are elements of both.
This is not exhaustive. Make sure you do your own research and talk to mental health providers for more extensive information.
I could rant heavily about this if given enough time and space. I wont. But if you ever run into me in person and want a good old fashioned rant about something—here’s your in.
This is hilariously the second time I’ve featured this specific podcast on my own media. I want to disclaimer that while I absolutely LOVE the thought provoking topics the podcast “WTF is on my Mind?!” bubbles up for me, I want to also say that I do not agree with everything that is on every episode of this podcast nor do I agree with everything that is said in this particular episode. Use your discernment<3
One of my favorites from you, thank you for bringing light to this important topic