Mixed
Strategic timing of sleep to follow exposure therapy can strengthen extinction memories and improve treatment outcomes for PTSD.
If you are doing exposure therapy for PTSD, try to ensure you get good sleep immediately following your sessions. This helps your brain consolidate the 'safety' learning you practiced, making the therapy more effective. Treat sleep as an active part of your treatment plan, not just downtime.
We suggest that optimizing sleep quality following trauma, and even strategically timing sleep to strengthen extinction memories therapeutically instantiated during exposure therapy, may allow sleep itself to be recruited in the treatment of PTSD and other trauma and stress-related disorders.
Why this rating
The paper suggests this as a potential technique based on general sleep-memory principles and animal studies, noting it is a 'potential new technique' rather than a fully established clinical standard.
Source
Sleep and REM sleep disturbance in the pathophysiology of PTSD: the role of extinction memory
Edward F. Pace‐Schott et al. · Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders · 2015
DOI 10.1186/s13587-015-0018-9
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