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I can’t get no sleep…
Clients who come to my Leatherhead hypnotherapy clinic come for a wide variety of reasons. They may be suffering from stress, anxiety or they may want to lose weight, stop smoking or it may be a phobia that is affecting their lives. Many of these clients also complain of insomnia.
Lack of sleep can affect every area of our lives according popular newspapers and magazines it seems that there is an epidemic of insomnia in recent years. Many articles are written about the need to keep electronic gadgets out of the bedroom, how important it is to go to bed at the same time, keeping the bedroom to the right temperature, excluding light from the outside. The advice is endless and then there are the remedies, lavender spray, sleep tea, herbal tablets. The list goes on and on. Doctors are reluctant to prescribe sleeping tablets because they become addictive over a time. Sometimes clients feel nothing will help them.
Sleep deprivation is used as a torture because of the effect on both the mind and the body. Severe insomnia over a period of time can affect a person’s mental and physical health.
Insomnia has two distinct patterns. There are those people who cannot fall asleep and lie awake staring at the ceiling. The second group are those who fall easily asleep and wake at two or three in the morning and then lie awake unable to go back to sleep.
Hypnotherapy can help with sleep as it can retrain the subconscious to enable us to fall asleep and to stay asleep. Visualising ourselves asleep when in hypnosis watching ourselves asleep as if on a television screen ourselves asleep gives the subconscious a strong message that we can sleep throughout the night.
Everyone is born with the ability to sleep. If we can reprogram the subconscious in hypnosis to regain that facility, then in very short time insomnia becomes a thing of the past.
One method of stopping the brain churning over the day’s events or worrying about the future is to turn your eyes up to the ceiling and begin counting backwards from five hundred. Between each number blink and mentally say the word “calm”. Very quickly the eyes become tired and the mind slows down allowing you to fall asleep.
Years ago the suggestion was to count sheep. Maybe this wasn’t a silly idea. Anything that stops the mind’s chatter will help you to fall asleep. Perhaps granny had the right idea after all.