When you say "in practice", you're thinking of artificially operationalizing it and how one would force that through medication or whatever. Of course that woul

When you say "in practice", you're thinking of artificially operationalizing it and how one would force that through medication or whatever. Of course that would be hard to sensibly apply in practice! How would you distinguish a traumatizing experience from a manageably negative one in time to formulate a prescription, how would you prescribe wakefulness to someone who didn't seek it themselves, how do you know how much wakefulness is appropriate or what other trouble you might be causing by artificially amplifying it? But if you step back, the real "in practice" is the thing that bodies already do. Sleep is often a mess after truly shocking experiences, and this mechanism suggests some reason why. For the folk that need scientific studies to justify things that their bodies naturally want to do, this is the study that says it's okay to toss and turn and have weird sleep hours when something bad happens.