Insomnia and Sleep Disorder
Most people will at some point in their lives suffer insomnia or some other form of sleep disorder, whether this takes the form of difficulty getting to sleep, or waking up too soon – during the night or early in the morning, typically between 3 and 5 – and being unable to get back to sleep. You may find that such problems arise, or worsen, when you are busy and at times of stress and anxiety, when it is difficult to “switch off” from your thoughts. Inability to sleep is worsened when you are experiencing stress and anxiety because you have the additional worry about the effects of having no sleep – this anxiety itself stops you from sleeping. The more you say to yourself “I have just GOT to sleep well tonight” the more tense you are about it, and the less likely you are to be able to get to sleep.
During deep sleep, the cortex – the part of the brain responsible for thought, memory, language and so on – disengages from the senses and goes into recovery mode. If you have insomnia, then the brain does not have sufficient opportunity to process and recover from the events of the day, and so your difficulty sleeping can make you feel increased irritation and anxiety about other stressful events in your life.
Hypnosis and hypnotherapy offer a safe and effective way of curing insomnia. Unlike with prescription or over-the-counter drugs to aid sleep, there are no short-term side affects – you will awake feeling refreshed after your night’s sleep, rather than feeling as if you are still in sleep mode, sluggish and finding it difficult to concentrate. Hypnotherapy and hypnosis to aid sleep is not associated with the long-term problems found with medicines, either – dependency, an inability to stop taking the remedy, and the fact that as soon as you stop taking the medicine, your problems sleeping will re-occur. Hypnosis and relaxation remain just as effective over time in aiding sleep as they are when they are first tried – unlike medicines, to which tolerance is built up, requiring you to gradually take increased amounts in order to get the same effect. In fact, the more that you are experienced in using hypnosis and relaxation to aid sleep, the better you become at it – exactly the opposite effect to that of sleep medicines and drugs, which work less and less well as time goes on.
Hypnotherapy will teach you various way to relax quickly and easily, and to switch off from intrusive and troubling thoughts, anxiety, and stress. You will be taught to practice self-hypnosis to aid sleep. The very fact that you will be able to relax more easily will help your sleep, without further intervention, but you will also be given hypnosis specifically to help you learn how to get to sleep quickly and easily, and to stop worrying that you cannot, which is itself a major factor in preventing people from sleeping.
The rules of “sleep hygiene” will also be explained to you. These are the basic rules you need to follow to ensure good sleep – these include not drinking caffeinated drinks, not using the bedroom for watching TV, reading, doing puzzles or in fact for anything other than sleeping, getting up after 20 minutes if you are unable to get to sleep, taking a warm bath before bed (the subsequent drop in temperature tricks the body into feeling sleepy), keeping a strict routine – getting up and going to bed at the same time each day, including weekends – and not napping during the day.
With the help of hypnosis, you will be able to quickly get into the habit of easily falling into a relaxing and refreshing sleep. After the treatment at my sleep clinic stops, you will have learnt the methods and techniques of falling asleep naturally, and can call on this knowledge if at any time in the future you are troubled by insomnia. You’ll never again have to face the day having had no sleep.
In addition, the ability to relax quickly and easily will help you in numerous other situations – with exam nerves, driving test nerves, public speaking anxiety and in social situations – and will also make it easier to cope with day to day irritations. A relaxed state of mind enables you to shrug things off and to avoid getting small every day problems out of proportion.
