Chapter 7 Sleep, Stress, and Traumatic Memory L. D. Sanford, L. L. Wellman, G. Lonart, and R. J. Ross Abstract Intense stress has the potential to produce traumatic memories that are core features of chronic mental disorders. However, encountering even intense stress most often does not have a persisting negative impact on health. Stress outcomes appear to involve complex interactions of sleep, learning, stressor qualities, and individual differences in resilience and vulnerability. This chapter will discuss how these interactions can impact the formation of traumatic memories, with a focus on factors that can differentially lead to normal and pathological stress outcomes. It will discuss the potential roles of different types of learning, stress resilience and vulnerability, and the neurobiological substrates that regulate interactions of stress, sleep, and the formation of traumatic memories. A case will be made that, given its role in learning and the processing of emotion, sleep may be key to fully under- standing normal and pathological outcomes of intense stress. Keywords Amygdala · Learning · Memory · Sleep · Stress · Synaptic plasticity The views expressed in this article do not represent those of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the US Government. L. D. Sanford (*) · L. L. Wellman Sleep Research Laboratory, Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk, VA, USA Department of Pathology and Anatomy, Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk, VA, USA e-mail: sanforld@evms.edu; wellmall@evms.edu G. Lonart Department of Pathology and Anatomy, Eastern Virginia Medical School, Norfolk, VA, USA e-mail: lonartg@evms.edu R. J. Ross Research and Development Service, Corporal Michael J. Crescenz Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA Department of Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: Richard.Ross2@va.gov © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 S. K. Jha, V. M. Jha (eds.), Sleep, Memory and Synaptic Plasticity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2814-5_7 171