Insomnia:
Poor sleep leads to worrying. Worrying leads to poor sleep. Worrying about sleep is like your mind trying to fight itself. That’s a horrible place to be.”
Mind
Insomnia is a big concern in our current society, it is said that 1 in 3 people suffer from it. The demands of our modern day lives often clash with our natural process of going to sleep. Whether it is night shift working or being overwhelmed with demands on us, from work, family, cost of living etc. Hypnotherapy can help with insomnia.
If you have suffered from insomnia you are familiar with its effects. It robs us of our quality of life. When we are fatigued we can’t think clearly, don’t have the energy to get involved in life. When we don’t get involved with life, we loose the support and stimulus that every day life brings us. This lack of stimulus makes us feel more miserable and anxious, so we don’t sleep well. We end up in a vicious cycle as described in the above quote. Our mental health suffers.
So lets get back to all those positive benefits of sleep. The benefits of deep rest and restoration which sleep gives us, as well as the mental release. All this is essential for wellbeing and proper functioning.
How can hypnotherapy help with insomnia?
Here are some considerations around the causes of insomnia:
Anxiety and Stress
One of the primary causes of insomnia is anxiety, stress, worry, overconcern. When we feel anxious about the events and situations in our life, we become alert. This is especially true when we are overwhelmed and our anxiety levels are at their highest. In reaction we can experience insomnia, insomnia is our body mind system supporting us in times of danger. It is keeping us awake and alert so that we are ready to defend ourselves against anxiety provoking dangers.
The insomnia strategy is often accompanied with the thoughts such as, “I’ll feel safe if I put in more time in to deal with my issues”. This thinking results in us getting up early in the morning to get ahead of things. Other times we wake up at 2 am, running through the events of our day trying to find a solution. That is fine in the short term, but if we don’t deal with the underpinning cause it can become a habit and a problem.
Hypnotherapy can help with insomnia by helping with anxiety & stress
Hypnotherapy reduces insomnia, by helping empty our stress bucket and dealing with our anxiety. The stress bucket is an analogy for our capacity to deal with the demands of life. The more we have in our stress bucket, the more we are likely to feel stressed and anxious and develop the symptoms of insomnia. So hypnotherapy helps us keep that stress bucket at an appropriately empty level.
It helps in the following way:
- It gives us an understanding of where insomnia comes from, its cause. Understanding the cause collapses the mystery of insomnia and allows us to plot a path to better sleep. After all, we all know how to sleep we just need to remove the obstacles to sleep.
- It helps raise our wellbeing levels (through positive action, interaction and thoughts). When we have a sense of wellbeing we feel more relaxed, safer in life and so have no need for insomnia. Like the adage goes “Feel better sleep better” or ” Think better, sleep better”. So rather than trying to get rid of insomnia, hypnotherapy addresses the underpinning need for it.
- It helps us empty that stress bucket by helping us relax and process the events of our day positively. This gives us more mind capacity to think in a more clear and a resourceful way. It also gives us a healthy sense of self.
- It puts us back in control by encouraging us to take positive action, have positive interactions and have positive thoughts so that we are in control within our lives.
- The hypnotherapy process provides a mp3 relaxation track which helps us relax, it can help us go sleepy. When we go sleepy we signal to our bodies to let go and go into sleep. Relaxation is key to sleep as it converts fatigue, tiredness into sleepiness by reducing the alert / anxiety levels within fatigue. The relaxation track also has the benefit of moving our attention away from the daily troubles to a more relaxed but engaging story, i.e. a little bit like when we read bedtime stories to children.
Habit
If insomnia remains when the danger has passed or has been dealt with, it can become a habit. A habit that is self perpetuating. We end up anticipating not sleeping well, as well as projecting the subsequent negative consequences on the following day. This causes anxiety which causes poor sleep etc. Insomnia becomes its own cause. The good news is that hypnotherapy can help insomnia.
In this habit situation, we need to replace the insomnia habit by creating a new habit of healthy sleep. Setting healthy sleeping as a goal has two benefits. The first benefit is that it it gives us something positive to work towards. The second benefit is it stops us focusing on the problem (insomnia), lessening its impact on us.
We work best when we are working towards something ( i.e. the goal of a health sleep pattern) rather than away from something (i.e. away from insomnia). A great way to illustrate this is to say to you “don’t think of a purple giraffe!”. I’m willing to bet that you would have had a purple giraffe in you mind. The reason for this is that the mind doesn’t process the negation, i.e. the “don’t”. In order for the mind to understand the statement, it has to visualise the very thing it is being asked to not visualise. We do the same when we say, often unconsciously, things like “I don’t want to have insomnia” or “I don’t want to sleep poorly”. What do you think that the mind hears ?? And what do you think it dutifully creates for us!
So it is much better to hold in mind what we do want, i.e. a healthy sleep pattern, and then take steps towards it. After all we know how to sleep we just need to get back to the conditions that allow us to re-access that natural ability. We need to get back to that sleepy feeling where our unconscious takes over and carries us into sleep.
Working towards a Healthy sleep pattern.
Here are a few suggestions. (For more details see the suggested reading resources in the links.)
Prioritising sleep
Make a healthy sleep pattern a HIGH priority, something that you focus your attention on to achieve. As you focus on it and take steps towards it, make sure you recognising every time you get a little closer to it. This creates hope and a desire to do more. You can prioritize sleep by realising that when you sleep better you perform better and so have greater certainty and security. In essence it addresses the very thing that insomnia is trying to address (security) but in a way that is sustainable, creating a virtuous cycle rather than a negative insomnia cycle.
Understanding the sleep cycles
In order to resolve insomnia, it is useful to gain an understanding of the elements of sleep, i.e. the circadian process and the homeostatic process. These two process tell our bodies when to go to sleep. They are our internal body clock and our drive to sleep, when these two elements are aligned we naturally fall asleep. However when these two process are disrupted, through for example anxiety, then we loose that natural ability to fall asleep. To re-establish our natural sleep cycle balance we need to return to a more structured sleep regime.
Examples of this are;
- Having regular bedtimes
- Having a regular rise times
- Only going to sleep when you are sleepy and not necessarily when you are tired
- Giving yourself time to unwind (relax) before going to bed
- Avoid lying in etc.
All these things create a routine which the body can get into a habit of following. We work best when we have structure because structure creates certainty and certainty helps us relax and therefore sleep better. If you have young children you can appreciate the importance of a routine when getting them to sleep.
For more detailed strategies of how to re-establish more natural circadian / homeostatic cycles go to NHS resources or check out resources in Amazon (Beat Insomnia with NLP by Adrian Tannock) or on the internet.
Sleep Hygiene
Maintain sleep hygiene. Sleep hygiene is about creating an environment which our bodies and minds associate with sleep rather than wake-fullness. The bedroom should be a place for sleep and not activities such as watching the television or using the phone. TV and the phone raise our alertness levels which isn’t conducive to sleep. It should be a place where we are telling ourselves “sleep is important and I am going set aside a special place to do it”. A multi-use environment can dilute the association of the bedroom with sleep. Examples of a sleep promoting environment are: an uncluttered bedroom, a comfortable bed, a warm environment, fresh air circulating, black out blinds, relative quiet, no television etc. (See NHS resource for more information)
In addition to the environment, part of sleep hygiene is also about avoiding sleep detrimental habits such as drinking coffee just before you go to bed (caffeine blocks the action of adenosine – a molecule that tells our brain to feel tired), eating before we go to sleep, avoid watching the television, avoid alcohol (whilst it may help us go to sleep it generally gives us a restless sleep). etc.
A lot of the above suggestions are common sense and already known. By making sleep a priority, as mentioned previously, we can find ourselves implementing them. By taking positive action, having positive interaction and positive thoughts about sleep, we can make sleep happen more consistently.
Hypnotherapy and insomnia: Other causes
Here we need to mention that insomnia can have medical causes. Examples of medical causes are: sleep disorders (e.g. sleep apnoea), menopause, CRPS, medicine side effects, acute pain from injuries etc. The first port of call should always be the GP.
Hypnotherapy can support as a secondary service. It can help reduce anxiety which is associated with these medical causes. It can also help with pain.
Conclusion
I hope the above brief discussion has given you food for thought and other places to go for information. Understanding the process of sleep and how we can take positive action can bring hope of a good nights sleep. Actions we can take are: addressing underpinning anxiety, or re-establishing a healthy sleep pattern.
For support in addressing the insomnia causing anxiety or help in establishing that more healthy sleep pattern, contact ACT Hypnotherapy.
Remember the FREE 1 hour consultation. At the consultation, you will learn how the brain works, how we create anxiety, anger and depression, but more importantly what we can do about it!
