If you have sleep problems, this post is going to help you solve them. Keep reading, and start getting the sleep you deserve.
We’ve all been there. You are lying in bed waiting to fall asleep, and you continue lying there, and still continue lying there. The growing anticipation of falling asleep can feel absolutely dreadful when it seems like you’ve been attempting to fall asleep for what seems like eternity.
For some people, the mind seems to race the most when laying in bed and for others the mind is blank, yet the body is restless.
In this blog post you are going to discover some sciency goodness behind what sleep is, why it’s so important, and how you can naturally and automatically find restful sleep each night without the use of medication.
The Truth Behind Sleep
According to the CDC, almost 47.5% of adults over the age of 18 are getting less than 7 hours of sleep. You can check out the stats here: https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/data_statistics.html
To make matters worse, the CDC also found that there is a clearly defined increase in health related risks, like heart attack, coronary heart disease, obesity, and stroke in adults who on average get less than the recommended 8 hours of sleep each night.
So what’s the deal with sleep and why is it so important?
Sleeping really is incredible, isn’t it? You lay in a comfortable bed, snuggled up under your favorite blankets, resting your head on a cloud like pillow. It can feel like a dream come true when you do fall asleep.
The problem, though, is that whole “falling asleep” part. So many people seem to struggle with this.
You’ve probably had an experience of waking up without the proper quality of sleep and notice the next day that you seem “off,” don’t you? You may feel drowsy, groggy, have bouts of brain fog, struggle making good choices, or are unable to emotionally manage yourself. It’s like a completely different person shows up and is running things.
These are just a few of the unfortunate struggles that a lack of proper sleep can cause. There is a reason for this too.
When you dream, you enter into what’s called an Alpha brain wave state. It’s here, in Alpha, that you begin to do something called Rapid Eye-Movement, or R.E.M. for short.
During this phase of your sleep cycle, you are processing the emotions of the day and any unresolved feelings. This process happens symbolically in your mind, which is how your unconscious mind processes information anyways.
This is why you can have dreams that don’t make any sense if you remember them later. You know … dreams where you are rowing a canoe through a grocery store using an ice-cream cone oar? Yeah, that kind of weird dream. It’s OK to admit it. We all have them.
Your unconscious mind attaches meaning to symbols and understands what they mean on a deep level. This process of dreaming is absolutely essential for your mental health and why it can feel like a struggle the next day unless this happens.
Enough Sleep Isn’t Really Enough
Notice how in the section above we said “quality” and “proper” sleep, rather than total duration of sleep? The truth of the matter is that more hours of total sleep doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll wake up feeling well rested.
There is a huge difference between the quality of sleep and the quantity of sleep and science has found that quality over quantity, in this case, is really important.
It’s one thing to get 8 hours of sleep and it’s another to feel as though you got 8 hours of sleep. Why exactly is that?
When you are wide awake and living your everyday life, you are walking around in what is called a Beta state. Beta brain waves are active waves and help keep you alert. When you are in beta, small drips of cortisol are released in your bloodstream.
Cortisol is the stress hormone and one of its primary functions is to increase the sugars in your blood and enhance your brain’s use of it. It also curbs functions of your body and organs that would be nonessential in a fight-or-flight situation. This helps keep you sharp and ready just in case something might jump out and attack you.
In primitive days, this is an incredible biomechanical advantage. The last thing you would want is to be relaxed and tired when a tiger was right around the corner.
When you are relaxing in a hot-tub, meditating, or lying peacefully in a field of flowers (don’t judge us!), your brain starts to slow down and you enter into an Alpha brain wave cycle. This cycle is the primary cycle of entering dream land. This also happens when you are daydreaming!
Remember that during the Alpha state, R.E.M. sleep occurs and your brain begins to integrate and resolve the pent up emotions from the day.
Below Alpha is Theta, and is considered a creative frequency and one that is most associated with sleep. As you continue descending through Theta, you reach the very bottom end of brainwaves and enter into the Delta state. Delta is the healing state of the body and is one of the rejuvenative processes for your physical health.
That means, if everything goes according to plan, each night your brain will shift through multiple cycles of this process, moving between Alpha and Delta, and back up again.
In order for you to feel fully awake and as though you got a completely restful night’s sleep, you’ll need to make it through these sleep cycles uninterrupted. If, for whatever reason, you are unable to get completely through the sleep cycle, you will definitely know it the next day.
Why Hypnosis Is The Answer To Sleep Issues
So by now you are probably wondering just what in the heck sleep and all of the science hub-a-lub regarding brainwaves has to do with hypnosis. Or, likewise, what does hypnosis have to do with falling asleep?
If you are the type of person who struggles falling asleep or you wake up in the middle of the night, then hypnosis may very well be the answer you’ve been looking for.
How does it help and what makes it so effective?
Let’s talk about one of the primary reasons that people struggle to fall asleep when they get into bed, which is overstimulation. At first, it can appear to be a complex issue, yet is actually quite simple to manage.
According to sleep.org, when your brain is in the act of being overstimulated, it’s alert and active, which inhibits your ability to produce melatonin and your circadian rhythm is disrupted.
Often, when a person is overstimulated while lying in bed, their visual cortex is being bombarded with flashes of images or movie reels, with some type of quickened internal dialog going over all of the details and situations.
You’ve probably experienced this yourself, where your brain just didn’t seem to be able to turn off and you were thinking about all of the things that you did during the day that didn’t get done, or what needed to be accomplished tomorrow.
What does this have to do with hypnosis and how it can help you? The answer lies within your senses!
Sleep is mostly kinesthetic, meaning the brain quiets down and becomes less active, the body relaxes, and breathing shifts take place. This allows the brain to slow down and begin its descent into the other brain waves that we mentioned earlier.
In a similar fashion to sleep, hypnosis also follows a very similar pattern. While in a hypnotic state, a person shifts entirely into their kinesthetic system, the analytical mind, or the left side of the brain, also begins to quiet down, and the brain starts to follow the same patterns of sleep in regard to brain waves.
In 1990, the International Journal of Psychophysiology found that, just like during sleep, as you go deeper and deeper into a hypnotic trance, your brain shifts between Beta, Alpha, Theta, and even Delta brain wave patterns.
Another close relation of sleep and hypnosis is the activation of specific parts of the brain called a PGO (Pons, Geniculate, and Occipital) spike (an electrical spike). These parts of the brain become active when somebody is startled (your startle reflex), during sleep (the main activation of R.E.M. sleep), and during hypnosis (specifically with instant inductions).
How To Use Hypnosis To Start Getting Better Sleep
It’s one thing for us to give you all of the data and information available about how hypnosis is extremely beneficial for sleep. It’s another to actually help you with getting a good night’s sleep.
Self hypnosis is an excellent tool to help you get to sleep. This can either be when you are first going to sleep, or if you wake up in the middle of the night and struggle to fall back asleep.
We teach a simple three-setup setup for all self hypnosis sessions. In other words, you should define these three things, in advance, before doing self hypnosis.
- What is the purpose of the hypnosis session?
- How long will I go into trance?
- How will I feel when I return from trance?
Obviously, for sleep, some of the answers are self-evident. The purpose is to fall asleep, and you only want to stay in trance as long as it takes for the trance to become genuine sleep.
All you need now is a simple hypnotic induction such that your conscious attention is entirely absorbed with something that is quite relaxing and not stressful.
Once you’re in trance you can just enjoy it by asking your unconscious mind to take over as your own personal entertainer. Ask your unconscious to present you with a series of visual scenes, or sounds, or memories.
Trust us … your unconscious knows how to do this perfectly, and will do it flawlessly. Consciously, you can just lay there, in trance, and appreciate what your unconscious presents to you.
One easy way to get into trance, while lying in bed is like this:
- Establish your purpose such as “fall asleep easily”
- Find a spot on which to fixate your visual attention. Pick a spot that requires you to roll your eyes slightly up, towards your forehead, above your line of vision.
- Stare at that spot for a few seconds as you inhale fully.
- Now close your eyes, and exhale slowly, as you imagine yourself fully relaxing. It can sometimes help to imagine you have air valves in your wrists or heels, and you’re imagining that your lungs are deflating like an inner tube or air mattress.
- Open your eyes, look at that spot again, and inhale again. Repeat this inhale and exhale cycle (with eyes open, then closed) 3-5 times. Do it slowly enough such that it’s calming and easy.
You’ll know when you have finished step 5 because it will feel like too much trouble to continue, and you might also notice your eyelids start to feel heavy, so much so that they just want to stay closed.
Now that you’re in trance you can do any number of things including the suggestion above - invite your unconscious to entertain you with pictures, movies, sounds, or memories. And just enjoy them as you drift off to sleep.
Need more help?
We’ve put in the work in both researching and developing the perfect way for you to gently and comfortably fall asleep with ease each night, and it’s with our awesome product called A Good Night’s Sleep.
If you are wanting to be able to lay your head down and immediately find a comforting and relaxing rest, then A Good Night’s Sleep is for you.
While we did our due diligence in providing you tons of awesome knowledge in this blog post, you’ll find even more inside of the hypnosis audio training tracks that are included in A Good Night’s Sleep. It includes 2 audio training tracks, a 2 video training course, and 2 hypnosis audio tracks.
So what are you waiting for exactly? The magical sleep fairy to show up and help you eventually fall deep asleep? If that’s the case then you might be waiting forever.
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