A Country Without a Rear and Sleepless Nights

  

In a "normal" country, danger is an event. It has a beginning and an end, a place where it happened, and people whom it directly affected. Grief is permitted to follow a shape: shock, then acknowledgment, then — however slowly — something resembling return. In a country without a rear, danger turns into background. It is always present, even when, at this very moment, no one is firing. It cannot be "switched off" — it only changes form.

Physical danger arrives through sirens, explosions, power cuts, the movement of military vehicles, news of new strikes. Informational danger flows through news feeds, air-raid alert channels, chats where messages about shelling and losses appear earlier than any official report. Even when the body is in a relatively safe place, the psyche lives in a mode of "anything can happen at any moment." For sleep, this means that the boundary between "day" and "night" blurs, and the night loses its ancient status as a safe phase — the one in which a person is allowed, for a few hours, to let go of control.

The classical language of trauma speaks of something that has happened: a crash, an attack, a battle, a catastrophe. There is a "before," a "during," and an "after." The nervous system is built to move through that arc. In our reality, many people never reach the "after." They live in what can be described as Complex Continuous Traumatic Stress Disorder — CCTSD. Here, the wound is not a single blow but an unbroken sequence: shelling, economic instability, corruption, legal uncertainty, constant changes of rules, unrelenting media exposure to horror, the experience of displacement or of permanent temporariness. All of this stitches itself into a single background conviction: the world is unpredictable, dangerous, and often unjust, and I must find a way to survive in it — always, without pause.

In such conditions, the psyche rarely finds the passage from shock toward stabilization. As soon as one wave of threat recedes, another appears on the horizon. The system gradually loses the ability to fully "lay down its arms," even at night. Anxiety does not disappear — it only changes shape: from sharp fear to a dull inner tension, from panic to the quiet certainty that one cannot afford to truly fall asleep.

Within this picture, sleep turns out to be one of the most fragile links in the chain. Sleep rests on trust. The brain and body need at least a minimal sense that the night can be used not for defense, but for repair — for consolidating memory, clearing metabolic waste, restoring the hormonal balance that daytime burns through. When trust in the world is undermined, the processes that require us to temporarily relinquish control are among the first to suffer.

There are several interlocking reasons why sleep breaks earlier than other functions. Sleep is directly bound to the perception of safety: in nature, a sleeping creature is vulnerable, and if the brain does not believe it can "hand over the watch" even for a few hours, it keeps the system near the surface — light sleep, frequent awakenings, a body that never fully unclenches. Sleep is also the meeting place of day and memory: at night the brain replays scenes, rewires connections, attempts to integrate what has happened, and when the day is saturated with threat and helplessness, the night inevitably fills with heavy images and a creeping fear of sleep itself. Finally, sleep is the first thing we willingly sacrifice. In chronic crisis, people consciously trade sleep for work, for volunteering, for one more scroll through the news feed — and a temporary regime quietly hardens into a permanent one.

When all of this layers together, sleep ceases to be a resource and becomes a battlefield. Some people fight with sleep — "I have no right to sleep while others are fighting." Others fight with themselves, trying to control minor details while remaining helpless against the actual sources of danger. Still others simply collapse from exhaustion, the night delivering almost no restoration at all.

This chapter exists for one purpose: to honestly register that the problem is not simply "poor sleep hygiene" or "bad habits." It is about how war and prolonged stress alter the very conditions under which sleep is supposed to occur. Only when this picture is seen whole does it make sense to move forward — toward how, despite all of this, it remains possible to return at least a measure of safety and meaning to the night.

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Mykola Iabluchanskyi Yabluchansky