Insomnia

Hi, my name's Caroline, and this is the 3rd in a series of video clips that's been looking at issues that affect people throughout their lives. Now, as promised, this one is looking at something that most people can relate to at some point in their lives, whether it's having babies in the house or perhaps a period of illness. Going without sleep for a long period of time is something that most people As I say, have experienced or can relate to. Now, figures suggest that 45% of us at any point are suffering from sleep deprivation. And so if that's affecting you at the moment, I'm sure you can really relate to how sleep deprivation affects so many areas of your life. A lot of people can relate to hypnotherapy for things like weight loss, which we've spoken about in one of the other video clips. and smoking is also quite commonly known. But it's also incredibly effective with solving problems with insomnia. So I'm going to start by talking to you about a couple of cases of people that I've worked with. The first one that really sticks in my memory, someone that I worked with quite early on after I qualified. She came to me after having not slept for more than 4 hours in a night for over 10 years. Now amazingly, she said that she was feeling okay, and I think she'd become so used to only having 4 hours sleep. Her body was doing amazingly well. But the issue for her is she'd got 2 grown-up daughters and she feels she couldn't go and stay with them overnight because it was okay for her to be walking around her own house at 3 AM in the morning doing the ironing, but she couldn't do that in other people's homes. And so she wanted to help to give her a new freedom of life, to go and be and stay with other people. We did one session. And I got a text the next morning to say that she'd slept 7 hours that day. Now, I always do follow-up calls with all my clients 4 to 6 weeks down the line, and so on her follow-up call, she confirmed that since that one session, she had had 7 to 8 hours sleep every night from that point forward. Another lady, she came to me after having had problems with sleeping ever since childhood. Now, she was a slightly older lady, and her issue stemmed all the way back to childhood. She was a child at the end of the Second World War, and when air raids went off— she lived in a big city— they would all go down to the air raid shelter. And she then became very afraid that if she went to sleep in the air raid shelter, again often at night, that she might be left behind. And even 70 years on, there was still a part of her that was incredibly afraid that if she fell asleep, she might be left behind, and that program was still running. I also do quite a lot of work with children and adolescents. With the younger kids, it's quite typically problems with fear— fear of the dark, fear of the monsters under the bed. With the adolescents, it's more typically worry— worry about something that's going on with school, worry about perhaps exams that are coming on. And so the techniques used with them will vary because we're all individuals. There isn't one particular technique or approach I take with everybody. It's all completely tailored, but with all of these people, they've had an improvement in their sleeping patterns. So, in some of these past clips, we've spoken about the role of the subconscious mind and how things at the subconscious level, a bit like that operating system on the computer, Affects behavior. Now, with sleeping, one of the main things that have gone wrong with the subconscious programming relates to fear. Now, one of the primary causes or issues around fear is actually, in its very raw form, a fear of sleep in itself. Same with that lady with the air raid shelter. She was afraid of going to sleep because she might be left behind. And so, the subconscious does a fantastic job in saying, okay, so if we don't go to sleep, we don't need to be scared. I'll stay on alert the whole night. We'll be okay. An increasingly common, and surprisingly common, issue with fear is actually the fear of death. Now, if we think about some of the things that children hear when they're young, for example, you know, Grandma's gone into a very deep sleep and she's not going to wake up again. Or, we had to put Rover to sleep because he was very ill. These very innocent statements made to actually protect children, when they're heard by the very innocent subconscious mind, can make wrong connections. So that little child connects sleeping and I don't see that loved person, my gran, my dog, anymore. So therefore, if I don't go to sleep, I won't lose anyone I love. It may sound strange, but these kind of things with that very innocent subconscious mind really happen. Now, a lesser form of fear we call worry, and we've touched on this already with the teenagers, and that goes right the way through adult as well. And so for people that go to bed worrying, there tend to be 2 types of insomnia that That manifest themselves. There's the people that lay awake for hours, doing their worrying, doing it very well, until they're utterly exhausted and fall asleep. There's the other people, the other type, who fall asleep very quickly, but then wake up to 3 o'clock in the morning and get back to doing their worrying. Now, we've spoken in the past about the role of the subconscious. With these people, it's not so much a subconscious problem, it's a problem with the conscious mind, the other part. Now, I see there's a lot of similarities between the conscious mind and muscles. Now, if you were to imagine using a muscle, be it in a gym, anything that you're doing in the form of exercise, if you keep doing it, it gets tired, eventually to the point where it doesn't work anymore, and you need to rest it. If you don't rest it, it gets sore, it will eventually break. The conscious mind is like a muscle. Is very similar. Whilst our subconscious mind is there in the background running all of these programs that keeps our body running, makes our heart beat, digests our food, what the conscious part of us is there is to learn. It's to make new connections, to rationalize things, and it's very, very good at doing it. And so when we go to bed and all those other distractions have quietened down and you've got nothing else to do apart from make all those new connections. In some people, their conscious mind goes, yay, let me loose! And off it goes. It starts doing its worrying, churning all those things over, until it either gets so fundamentally tired you fall asleep anyway, or in those other cases, you fall asleep very quickly. But then after a little bit of a rest, the conscious mind goes, okay, I've had enough, let's off we go again, and starts once more to run amok. Now, I'm going to be a little bit controversial here. Everyone can sleep. We are born being able to sleep. It's not something like most of the other things in life that we have to learn. We even have to learn to eat. If you see most babies when they first start, they make one hell of a mess before they get it right. That's not the case with sleep. But that sleeping program can go wrong. So some of the reasons why that can go wrong, we've already seen with our lady in the, in the air raid shelter, it could be trauma. Something happens that causes that program to dysfunction. Now the work that we do with people who have experienced that sort of trauma is all about helping that very innocent connection that was made at a young level, To realize that the trauma's over, you're safe, you did survive. That sounds, again, I know, might sound a bit strange, but imagine all of those adults running around being scared of spiders. Consciously, they know the spider isn't going to hurt them, but at a subconscious level, that fear is so intense, it overrides it. And that's very much the same with these people who have had a trauma that's affected their sleep. That's usually quite difficult. Quite an early age. And that can be reversed and changed very easily. Quite often only 1 or 2 sessions, there's a fundamental change and the sleeping patterns return to an adult normal behaviour very, very quickly. Another way that programmes can get changed is when we constantly hear or say something to ourselves to form new beliefs. Now, He may not like this, but my husband is a great one for going to bed, and as he climbs into bed, saying, oh, I bet I'm going to wake up at 4:30 again. I just wish I wouldn't wake up so early every morning. Now, let me tell you how the subconscious mind translates that. Subconscious mind hears, I bet we can wake up at 4:30. Yay! It says, I can do that. I'm really good at doing that. Have you ever perhaps had to go get up really early for a flight, catch a train, perhaps do something you don't do as normal? You set 2 or 3 alarms to make sure that you wake up on time, but then you wake up before the alarms go off anyway. The subconscious mind is incredible. When you send it a message, give it a suggestion, it buys into it, and it's very cooperative in actually meeting that suggestion. So, if every night it's hearing, oh, I bet I'm going to wake up at 4:30, it goes, Yeah, we can do that. We can do that really easily. Second part of it. I wish I wouldn't wake up every— early every day. Now, do something for me. Let's have a little bit of a game. Close your eyes for me. And now, with your eyes closed, I'd like you to think about anything, but whatever you do, do not think about a pink spotted elephant. I don't want you to think about an elephant, pink elephant. spotted elephant under any accounts. Open your eyes again. Now, tell me, you picked— you thought about a pink spotted elephant, didn't you? Because you can't help it. Your subconscious mind cannot process negatives. It just hears the positive element. So whenever we hear, don't do something, it's only the something that we hear. So whenever a child is told, Don't touch that hot oven, and you see its hand going out, it's because they're not being naughty. All they're hearing is touch that sub— touch that oven. So we're saying, don't wake up early, I don't want to wake up early in the morning. Okay, wake up early in the morning is what's heard. And as we've seen in some of these other clips, anything that you practice on a regular basis becomes transferred from the conscious To the subconscious. It runs on that autopilot mode. And so, whilst we're talking about practicing, a third thing that tends to happen with insomniacs is what we call conditioning. It's that transfer process from a conscious habit to a subconscious habit. So, going back to things that a lot of us experience at some point in our lives, young children in the house, Perhaps an illness, there is a prolonged period of time where your sleeping patterns are interrupted. You have to keep waking up every 3, 4 hours for a feed, or because you need to clear your throat, whatever it may be. And so that then becomes the default setting. It becomes the autopilot mode. And again, at a subconscious level, that is relatively easy to change. Now, for a lot of people that struggle with insomnia, sleeping pills is their default solution. Now, I'm not going to badmouth sleeping pills. I've got a lot of friends that are doctors and they do a wonderful job. However, if you are taking sleeping pills or you're thinking about taking them, I'd encourage you to do a bit of research. 2 things that bother me about sleeping pills. And one of them is that you are given a label. You are given a label of someone who cannot sleep without taking these pills. And that then becomes a belief, just like the beliefs we spoke about a bit earlier. A belief that you cannot sleep without these pills. And when a label is applied to someone, it affects their behaviour. People, when they're given a label, tend to live up to it. Again, relate to perhaps a child in school that's labelled as the naughty boy. They then live up to that label. They live up to the expectation that's been set to them, because the subconscious likes to do what it's told. It wants to be that expectation that's being set on them. So if you have the expectation of not being able to sleep without taking a pill, it does it really, really well. So that label really becomes very entrenched and can be in itself a perpetuator of not being able to sleep without taking chemicals. The second area is a little bit more medical, so stick with me. We have this thing called REM sleep. REM is the deep part of sleep that we go into several periods at night. We tend to slip into it firstly after 60 to 90 minutes of first falling asleep, and then it happens again 3 to 4 times at intervals during the night. And during this special period of REM sleep, that's when we have the mental discharge. Our body relaxes and is recuperating all the time we're asleep, but it's only really during these REM times, these REM periods of sleep, that our mental functions, the mental tensions of the day, are released. It's like a valve opening and all the pressures being released so that you wake up Not only feeling physically relaxed, but also mentally relaxed. Now what barbiturates do, which are a common pill that are given to help people with sleeping problems, barbiturates suppress REM sleep. So people on sleeping pills will often feel physically very restored, but they don't have that same sense of mental restoration because the REM sleep is is suppressed through the chemicals of the barbiturates. They don't get the release of that mental tension. So, I guess the main thing that I want to communicate to you, for you to hear, is that there are other options than taking sleeping pills. And hypnotherapy is something that allows you to harness that wonderful power of the subconscious mind. Think of all the things that it can do when it's going wrong. If you can turn that round and use that, harness that same power to make things go right, insomnia is a thing of the past. Sleep patterns become very, very strong, very functional, and it's relatively easy. Most of the people that I've worked with, and I've worked with hundreds of people, I have a really high success rate. in helping people overcome insomnia, and it's a long-term change. Once that program is running functionally again, it continues to run functionally because the programming has changed. So if you're having problems with sleeping at the moment, just give me a call. I can be reached on email, caroline@addingzest.com. Phone, 01980 862 000. 01272 2725, or just message me through Facebook. All calls, all contacts are completely confidential, and I would love to help you. I've had periods of poor sleep in the past, and I know how debilitating it is. I would love to help you to have a good level of sleep, because I know when you sleep well how all of those other areas of life are changed too. So give me a call and let's have a chat. Now, next video that I'm going to be putting up in a week or so's time is going to be on phobias. So whether they're spiders that are causing you problems in your life, birds, whatever it may be, again, phobias are something that can be changed and relieved very easily, very quickly. And I'd love to be able to talk to you and look forward to talking to you about that very soon. Take care.