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If you are suffering with poor sleep, hypnotherapy can often help.  Sleeping problems occur for several reasons:

• Fear of not being able to fall asleep – if you experience sleeping problems over a period of time, the fear of it continuing can cause you to lose even more sleep – thereby causing severe insomnia.  Your insomnia may have started by another factor such as certain medications, pain or poor sleeping environment, but is being perpetuated by fear of the insomnia.

• Something is on your mind/bothering you – which can cause issues switching off from daily life.

• Stress and anxiety – tends to affect many areas of your life, a good night’s sleep being one of them. Sometimes even unresolved issues from long ago can come to the surface at bedtime – and cause insomnia, poor levels of deep sleep, nightmares, restless sleep.

Hypnotherapy often works well for sleep issues which tend to stem from your inner thoughts and feelings playing out in your mind.

Hypnotherapy for insomnia can be used to help you to relax more at bedtime, to set your mind at ease and to create new, more positive thoughts and habits around sleep.  Hypnotherapy may also be beneficial to resolve any emotional issues which may be causing sleeping difficulties at an unconscious level.  Lack of sleep can have extremely debilitating effects on all areas of your life and cause anxiety, depression, extreme tiredness, irritability and mood swings.  However, once your sleeping patterns are returned to normal you can begin to look forward to going to bed and waking up feeling refreshed and revitalised.

Suggestions to Help with Sleep

Approximately one third of our life is spent sleeping.  To enable us to get the greatest health benefits from sleeping it is important that we sleep in a good posture and are relaxed.  A good position is to lie on our right side with the top leg bent and the other leg straight.  The right hand can be placed under the head for a pillow and the left hand rests on the thigh.  In his position the heart is high up and does not get constricted and the liver, which the Chinese say ‘stores the blood’, is lower down and hence receives more blood.  This posture also allows our Qi (otherwise known as energy) to circulate freely.

The Chinese say that before sleeping we should ‘first relax the heart’.  This means that we should try not to go to bed excited, nervous or over stimulated.  In order to help us sleep better, here are some suggestions.

Cultivate going to bed at a regular time each night – even if you don’t immediately fall asleep.

1. Cut out caffeine based stimulants such as coffee and tea. Buy decaffeinated drinks or drink herbal teas and water.
2. Don’t engage in stimulating activities before bed. Watching television, reading exciting books or vigorous activity are all stimulating and keep us awake.
3. Don’t eat late at night – you will go to bed still digesting your food.
4. Listen to a relaxation CD.