Insomnia & Hypnotherapy

Can't Sleep? Hypnosis Helps

People need sleep; in fact we all need 6-8 hours of sleep each night in order to function properly. If we lose merely one night of sleep, we can generally recover inside a few days, but long term lack of sleep is not so easy to overcome.

Insomnia causes a lot of people to miss out on essential sleep. The most unsettling part of the issue for most people tends to be that there is nothing in particular precluding them from going to sleep. You have the comfy bed, no distractions, you're the proper temperature, you don't feel especially stressed but something just won't let you rest. Hypnotherapy for sleep problems could be the help you need to finally get to sleep and get some essential shut eye.

So what does having a sleeping problem affect an individual?

When we're experiencing low quality sleep or no sleep at all, even if there is nothing stopping us doing so, we are experiencing sleep problems. It's where we have not had the chance to rest, leaving us feeling flat and lacklustre.

Problems like getting to sleep or sleeping at all, awakening early morning without prompt, waking up in the night, troubled or restless sleep, disturbed or low quality daily function because of reduced sleep can all be signs and symptoms of insomnia.

There are commonly very simple reasons for insomnia. Emotional tension and panic attacks are major causes of this sort of condition. The reason these factors affect us so much when it comes to sleep is mainly because they manifest themselves within both our conscious and subconscious mind, so that's two levels of our mind to battle with as we are trying to get to sleep.

Consciously, many of us will have experienced a restless mind when trying to sleep once in a while, where the problems through the day continue to buzz and spin around in your thoughts showing no signs of leaving. Lots of people end up drifting off to sleep through mental exhaustion.

Suffered on a long term basis, stress and panic attacks can show up in unforeseen ways within the mind. Some sufferers begin losing sleep when they endure panic attacks in the night without identifying what is happening to them. Every now and then anxious feelings can hit you without you realising the source; we just absorb the worries around us without understanding that this has been affecting us on a subconscious level.

After we become aware that we are having trouble sleeping, we can in some cases start a vicious cycle because we have worries about going to bed. When we don't know how to fix these issues we can feel helpless, isolated and worried.

Even when practising renowned methods, such as putting worries aside before bed by writing them on a notepad or telling your partner what you are worried about, we are only taking on the forefront of our mind - the conscious. This means that, regrettably, the symptoms may continue even with all your efforts as the largest part of the mind (the subconscious) was not tackled.

Hypnotherapy for insomnia helps you find the underlying issues triggering the condition and enables you to tackle them. I use a range of therapy methods that help deal with stressful thoughts and overcome the negative frustrating thinking patterns that usually underly insomnia.Hypnotherapy works by empowering you, giving you access to the most powerful part of your mind, handling the problems within and in the end reprogramming it to work with you, as opposed to against you.

In conjunction to my 'Freedom Formula for Change' programme that integrates the leading edge therapy methods to deal with Insomnia, I have also created a tailored hypnosis audio track as part of the 'Inner Space Series' called 'Sleepy Dreams' which is uniquely designed to help clients go to sleep and uniquely doesn't have a count up as in most hypnosis programmes, instead the track gradually fades with the suggestion that you will wake refreshed in the morning, so this track is ideal for actually using at night to get you off to sleep whilst re-training you how to do so.

John Plester is the Principal Tutor of the East Anglian Institute of Hypnotherapy and has worked with clients with insomnia for over 20 years in at his private practice in Norwich, Norfolk.