Why sleep matters more than we think
Sleep is often treated as a side issue — something that would sort itself out if the "real" problems were addressed. For children living with stress or trauma, this gets it backwards. Sleep is not separate from behaviour, learning and wellbeing. It is central to all three.
Poor sleep makes emotional regulation harder, concentration weaker, and threat responses more sensitive. A tired brain has less capacity to pause, reflect, and choose. For young people already struggling with self-regulation, disrupted sleep can make every challenging moment harder to navigate.
What poor sleep can look like in school
School staff often see the effects of poor sleep without recognising it. A child who is visibly tired may present as low-mood, irritable, impulsive, or resistant to learning. They may struggle to retain information, overreact to minor frustrations, or find it harder to read social situations accurately.
These presentations can easily be misread as defiance, poor attitude, or learning difficulty. When the underlying cause is chronic sleep disruption — often rooted in anxiety, hypervigilance, or an unsafe home environment — the response needs to be different.
Trauma and the nervous system at night
Children who have experienced chronic stress or trauma may find it genuinely harder to sleep — not because they are choosing to stay awake, but because their nervous systems have learned to remain vigilant.
For a child who has experienced unpredictability at home — sudden changes, raised voices, instability — the body may maintain a state of alert even when the environment is physically safe. Bedtime removes the distractions of the day, which can actually increase awareness of threat cues, real or perceived. Falling asleep requires a level of felt safety that some young people have not yet been able to establish.
This is not a behaviour problem. It is a physiological response to experience. And it means that interventions based purely on sleep hygiene — consistent bedtimes, no screens — may not address the underlying cause.
What actually helps
Adults can support better regulation by creating predictability, reducing shame, and responding to sleep difficulties with curiosity rather than frustration. In school, this might mean acknowledging that a child's low tolerance or high arousal in the morning has a context — and adjusting expectations accordingly at the start of the day.
For families, support that focuses on felt safety — rather than rule-setting — tends to be more effective. A child needs to feel safe before they can sleep, not the other way around.
Where The Baxter Project fits
Our sessions offer calm, relational spaces during the school day. For some young people, a Baxter Project session may be one of the few times their nervous system genuinely settles. The companion dog helps create that calm. The practitioner helps the young person understand their own responses — building the self-awareness that, over time, supports better regulation both during the day and at night.
We also track wellbeing over time through ODISSYS, including measures of emotional regulation and stress response. For schools, this means changes — including improvements that may be linked to better rest — are visible in data, not just anecdote.
Since working with The Baxter Project, she has seemed calmer and less reactive in the mornings. We don't know exactly what's changed — but something has.
— Pastoral Lead, partner secondary school