As a clinical hypnotherapist and naturopath I’ve helped many people get better sleep and overcome insomnia using hypnosis and sleep training.
Many people don’t get enough sleep and that may include you. Often in your busy schedule you may think you’ll rob yourself of sleep part of the week and catch up at the weekends.
Or you may have trouble sleeping well at any time.
The problem is that your body can only do without sufficient sleep occasionally in an emergency and not on a regular basis.
If you regularly lose sleep here’s what happens:
- You metabolise energy less efficiently
- You constantly feel tired and lose focus
- You become anxious and depressed
- You have less control over your emotions
- You are prone to grumpiness and anger outbursts
- You make more mistakes at work and are less accurate
- Your immune system works less effectively and inflammation levels in your body rise
- You are more susceptible to aches, pains and discomfort
Sleep is an essential part of our natural daily biorhythms that enables our body to function, thereby promoting good mental health.
However, industrialisation has interrupted our biorhythms that have evolved over millions of years with the electric light, radio waves and electronic radiation. This, together with us staying up long after sunset, raises our stress levels.
As a species we are not naturally nocturnal as our hormones are greatly regulated by daylight and dark.
As daylight begins, we produce more DHEA-S (dehydroepiandosterone sulfate), an adrenal gland hormone that gives us energy, which is at its highest in the morning and afternoon.
As dark falls we begin to produce more melatonin, a pineal gland hormone that regulates the wake/sleep cycle.
A decrease in DHEA-S levels begin when the sun goes down and it goes dark which helps send you to sleep.
Sleep is not always automatic and you must create the circumstances that will promote your ability to sleep well for at least 8 to 9 hours.
If you ignore your body’s need to sleep and when you should sleep, your body moves into the alarm state and begins to produce more cortisol, an adrenal hormone that keeps you awake.
So, you get stuck in insomnia and can’t sleep and lie there worrying about all the woes in the world and are focused on everything but sleeping.
Not only do you have to train your body to sleep but also your mind so they can work together in a coordinated way to put you into the sleep state.
Only when they are working together in synchronicity can then you go down into the deep sleep state when you dream.
Dreams keep you sane.
Yes – that is absolutely true. We know this from experiments that monitored psychopathic patients in hospitals that showed the strong link between severe mental illness and low levels of REM, (rapid eye movement), the dream part of the sleep cycle.
When you dream, your brain is processing the information from the day before and calculates possibilities and probabilities for your future.
In other words, dreams are your mind having a meeting to determine coordinated ways to run your life.
Just imagine trying to run something as complex as the human body without coordination – how might that work out?
Hypnotherapy is a profoundly effective way to help you get better sleep.
In fact, ‘hypnos’ means ‘sleep’ in the ancient Greek language. It has been used since the ancient Egyptian times to help people get better sleep.
Of all the people I’ve studied over the years who have reached 100 years old and even over 110, they all say the same thing: They trained themselves or were trained by their parents to be good sleepers.
So, what to do:
- Be as regular as you can be in your habits so your body knows the time
- Arrange the times that you designate for sleep and protect those times from interference
- Clean up your diet so you do not eat over-stimulating foods too late in the day
- Make the place where you sleep dark or wear an eye mask
- Regulate the noise around you so it is peaceful
- Learn and practise hypnosis to put you in the right frame of mind to help you sleep
Book your hypnotherapy appointment to overcome insomnia and sleep disorders with Dr Tracie O’Keefe DCH by calling 0403 398 808.
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