Insomnia - how to put the problem to bed

Hello there, and welcome to our webinar, Insomnia: How to Put the Problem to Bed. Now we're just going to wait a minute or so to see if any people, people want to join us. We've got a few people online already, so welcome to those of you who have joined us. So if you bear with us for just a minute, And then we are going to, to get on with the show. So if you just— it looks as if I'm coming into computer, but I'm really not. Okay, so welcome to our seminar. I am here with Shelley Baker from Sherry Baker Aromatic Therapy, and Cai He of Cai He Chinese Acupuncture. 3 specialists who all work in the area of insomnia. Now, just to get some of the admin things out of the way, I just need to let you know that we are all experts in our respective fields, but we're not medically qualified doctors. So the information we're going to share with you during this webinar should not be used for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease. We're all individuals deciding on their own and his or her own lifestyle preferences, and that retains with you full legal responsibility for your own health. So if you have or suspect you may have a health problem, you should consult your GP. And this is what we actually look like. So hello everybody, I'm Caroline.

Hi.

This is Shelly, and this is Kay. So let me explain what our plans are to talk with you our solutions for insomnia this evening. We're each going to introduce our own particular therapies using some avatars, so we have a virtual family. Now obviously each of you may not relate to those individuals specifically, but hopefully some of the situations that these individuals find themselves in will trigger some aha moments within you. We're then going to introduce to you some of the questions that we regularly get asked. There may well be questions that you have in your own minds as well. Now, if you do have any questions while we're talking, there is at the bottom of your screen a little bar, and along it, it says chat. So if you click on that chat, it will pop up a little screen, and you can type in a question. We will get to see those questions, and what we will do at the end is to answer as many of those questions as we can within the time that we have. We're planning to keep this webinar to about 40 minutes, so we will address all the questions we can within that timeframe. If we overrun, we will refer to all of the questions and get back to you individually via email, so please be reassured any questions that you have, we will find a way to answer them in the best way we can.

we can today.

We also do have an offer for you, but none of us are high-pressure sales ladies, so we will let you know when that offer's coming up, and if it's something that during the webinar you've heard something of interest to you, hang on for that bit because you may find that the offer is very much of value too. So that's the admin bits over already, thank goodness, and let me turn to Shelley who's going to talk to us about how she deals with Insomnia in mums. Thank you for attending.

So my part of the family is mum, and we're going to call her Lucy. So mum is really busy. She's working, she's got her own business, she's very, very busy sorting everybody else out, running around, husband kissing, everybody else out the door.

She's very off-rails.

Yeah, the last person in the pile, so By the time she's sorted everybody else out, she doesn't really sit down by the time it comes to the evening, so she falls into bed at whatever time, no sleep plan like we should all do, and can't sleep. Everything's racing around in her head. Has everybody sorted out for tomorrow? The lunch is made and all the rest of it. So looking at Lucy is how would aromatherapy help her to sleep? Aromatherapy is, it's a branch of herbalism really. It uses essential oils which are all extracted from plants. And my background in science, my personal belief is that aromatherapy and essential oils are chemicals and they do a job. So they go into the body, they go into the blood system, and they do a job. And so looking at it that way, you can use some blends of essential oils to help Lucy to sleep. She's busy, she's really busy. She hasn't got time to be going off and having a massage overnight and doing all these things. She needs quick things to incorporate into her daily routine, so using oils as inhalations, using things in the bath, using things that she can use quickly daily to get into a good routine and to help her to sleep. So that's my, my approach would be looking at her sleep pattern, looking at her daily routine, and trying to find little things, little ways that essential oils can slot into that to keep her calm and to keep her relaxed and to help her sleep. Various ways of doing that, either through inhalations, that it might be that you're actually using essential oil that's actually quite uplifting earlier on in the day and then more sleep-relaxing oils later on in the day.

Yeah, because I've heard that lemon sometimes—

you always think of lemon being a stimulant, refreshing. What happens with lemony-scented essential oils is lemon irritates the trigeminal nerve here. So when you smell a lemon or you smell lemony-scented essential oils, you get that initial, oh, that's really refreshing, that's keeping me awake, which is brilliant. It's 2, 3 in the afternoon instead of that reaching for a cup of coffee to keep going. But then when lemon's actually in the bloodstream, when that chemical in the essential oil is in the bloodstream later on in the day, it can act as a sedative. So it's having a double effect. It's having the effect of smelling it, and then later on the effect of actually having it in the bloodstream to work as a sedative. And then you've got all the traditional— everybody's heard about lavender.

Lavender.

It's very well documented, there have been studies done on it. It's very useful. I use it a lot for sleep, but there are lots of other essential oils that can be used for sleep as well. It might be things to— sometimes tonics help for sleep. It might be that, you know, somebody's so uptight, you need to sort of dissipate that with more citrus oils rather than going for the heavy So would everyone have a complete different mixture of smells? Yes, so there isn't really— well, the way I work, I don't have a standard stock blend that's my sleep remedy. I look at everything that's going on in that person's life, look at everything that's going on with the sleep pattern, how they feel when they awake. Depending on how they feel, it might depend on which bit of the sleep cycle is being disrupted, and then you can look at essential oils to help bring that Back into balance.

I found my little aroma stick brilliant. As you wake up, you could just have a— and you've got an immediate— something you can do immediately as soon as you wake up. Yeah, a really good way of getting essential oils into you.

Yeah, so that's Lucy, Lucy's mum.

Okay, and I'm going to introduce you to Lucy's son Robert. Robert is 16 years old and he's just starting to prepare for his GCSEs. Robert used to sleep really well, but as the exam pressures are mounting, his sleeping has gone completely out the window. He lays awake at night with his mind whirring with all of the revision that he's been doing that evening. He might get a few hours sleep, but then he'll wake up, ding again, with the next maths problem that he needs to be solving, and he'll stay awake for a few hours. And so the quality of his sleep is, is very, very poor, and it gets into a downward spiral. That the more tired he becomes, the more worried he becomes about his ability to actually study, his ability to do well in the exams, and everything then starts to go down. So my profession is I'm a clinical hypnotherapist, and people often run a mile as soon as they hear the word hypnotherapy. But really what I work with and what I teach people like Robert is how the mind works, because it's a fascinating, absolutely fascinating organ. So to give you a little analogy, if you were to imagine your mind being like a computer, the brain is very much like a computer. It has the operating system, which is the subconscious mind, and when we're born, we have a program that runs sleep. And that's an interesting factor with Robert, is that he used to be able to sleep well. It's not something that's been a problem right the way through his life. So he has a program that that was running really, really well until something happened. And so if we think of a program as code, something has happened to disrupt that code. So what my job is, is to help Robert recode the coding in his computer so it goes back to this perfectly running program. And the way we do that is, is a number of different angles. So some of the things that Robert might be doing is worrying about the impact of his exams, so he might be having a fear of failure. The what if I fail type of thing, and that fear is actually creating a new piece of software over the top of that old program that's causing this dysfunction. So he can fall asleep, but then this new program goes, oh, but what if I fail? You need to wake up and start studying again. So it's starting to help him look at the fear of failure from a completely different angle, because you may be aware yourself that when you worry about it, it's a bit like that proverbial dog with a bone.

You just keep on going at it.

And when you can get someone to actually sit back and look at the picture, they have that what we call the aha moment, go, oh yeah, I've never thought of it in that way. And when you have those aha moments, we often say it's the penny drops. That is a reference to the code changing. Something very small inside changes and you get a, oh, I now feel different about it. So that's one of the ways we work with Robert, is to help him see things from a different angle. me as a mature woman having done lots of exams can give him advice as a 16-year-old that he can't do. And often I can give him advice in a way that even if his parents said exactly the same thing, they're just the mum. So my teenage daughter to me is like, what do I know, you're my mum. Whereas as a therapist, I somehow get a lot more skills involved that people will then listen into. One of the other techniques that I use that's incredibly powerful is visualization. And visualisation is something that a lot of top athletes—

it's a common factor in the Olympic team now to use this skill.

And it uses one of these, one of the few very minor faults in this wonderful computer that we have. And that's the fact that the brain can't tell the difference between reality and imagination. So it's now been proven that whether you think something or whether you actually physically do something, The same motor neurons start to fire. So we can use this, and the process of visualisation is creating a new program for Robert that will help him to relax, to feel calm. So I may, for example, help him to visualise going into the exam, imagining that everything's calm, he's feeling confident, he sits down, turns over the paper, the first question is one that he knows off the back of his hand, he gets to the end of the 3 hours, he closes the paper and feels brilliant. And just the simple process of running that program, that visualization, like a little mini clip over and over again, literally sets up a program that subconsciously, when he does it for real, it goes, oh, I know what we do in this situation. We go into the exam hall, we're nice and quiet, we turn over the paper, we can answer all the questions. Fantastic. And that's how we can use the power of the subconscious mind to actually help you create the programs or reprogram the little bits of Okay, tell us a little bit about what you do with acupuncture.

Thank you, Caroline. So as an acupuncturist, I'll try and give you a flavour of how I would work with somebody that's suffering with insomnia. So my member of the family is Tom. Tom's had bouts of insomnia in the past, haven't we all? We all know that, you know, you can have a bad night's sleep, and very often you can actually think, oh, I shouldn't have eaten that heavy meal so late, a bit of indigestion, or working hard in the garden, aching, aching muscles, and you've got an awareness of why you've had a bad night. Worry over an exam or an interview is another common one. But when the problem becomes chronic and it's night after night, as you probably know if you're an insomnia sufferer, it really does start to affect your life. So what's happening with Tom is exactly that. He's having a bad sleep every night. He's got a reasonable bedtime routine, he doesn't go to bed too late, he doesn't drink, you know, coffee at 9 o'clock and then expect to sleep well, and generally he gets off to sleep okay. But in the early hours of the morning, he finds he wakes up, he's wide awake, he's thinking about what he's got to do the next day, what's on the agenda at work, and his mind is whirring and he can't get back off to sleep. So a good 2-3 hours, and then finally maybe grab an hour of sleep and the alarm goes off and it's time to get up. So that's the kind of pattern that Tom's experiencing. Now, as an acupuncturist, what I'm always trying to do is Re-establish balance, and that's balance physical, emotional, and mental. All those things have to be in balance for good health, and somebody that is in a good healthy balance should be able to sleep well. So any imbalance in the body could cause insomnia, might not, might cause something completely different. But it could cause you to have a bad night's sleep. So how do I get to the bottom of Tom's problem? Well, the first thing I do is a full health history. I'm looking for patterns, so I need to know about everything. I'll be asking Tom in great detail about exactly how this insomnia manifests itself. I'll be asking him about his work, his lifestyle, talking about his digestion, His energy levels, health history, any past illnesses, and it really is about getting as full a picture as possible about what is going on in his body, mind, and spirit. So doing this with Tom, I find out that he's going through a really stressful time at work at the moment. The pressure's on, he's working very hard, quite long hours. He's finding that he's quite irritable in the day, and it's very hard to keep a lid on his temper sometimes. He's tired, obviously, because he's not sleeping, which exacerbates the problem. He's drinking coffee through the day to try and keep his energy levels up, and he can't relax in the evening, so he's probably having more alcohol than he would normally have as well. So already with this sort of information, never mind all the other stuff, I'm starting to see a pattern emerging which tells me there could be a liver disharmony going on. Now, when I talk about liver disharmony in Chinese medicine, I've got to be really careful Because I'm not talking about liver disease. If I thought that there was anything, an illness or a disease going on, then obviously the first thing I would do would be refer Tom to his GP. But with Chinese medicine, we're looking for subtle imbalances in energy. So I like to think of it more as the liver's the organ that's taking the hit, that's needing the extra support to cope with what's going on in Tom's life at the moment. So it's more that kind of level of imbalance.

So what do I do?

Well, I choose points that are going to support the liver, give it, you know, help it to re-establish the balance in the body. If this is working for Tom with treatment, you should start to see changes. Now, it doesn't just magically disappear and he starts sleeping. What will probably happen is— He might find that although he's still waking at 1 or 2 in the morning, when he is asleep, he's more rested, he's not hot and dreaming so much, and he's getting better quality of sleep. Then maybe when he does wake up, he gets off back to sleep more quickly. He might find that he's less irritable in the day, his tempers, he's got a better handle on his temper, and that will help, you know, sort of, he won't need as much coffee, as much alcohol. It's a whole cycle often of imbalance that's going on. And actually, you know, it's chicken and egg, isn't it? Is it the insomnia that's causing the stress and the, you know, the anxiety at work, or is it the pressure at work that's causing the insomnia? And actually, it works both ways. And a lot of what I'm trying to do is break that cycle. So as his insomnia improves, he'll be less grumpy and stressed in the day.

His day will go smoother.

He'll be more relaxed. His insomnia will improve, and you get the cycle working in a more positive direction. And that's what I'm always trying to achieve when I, you know, when I analyse a person in terms of Chinese medicine. So I hope that gives you a flavour of how I work and what you're hoping to achieve with acupuncture treatment.

I think that's— Yeah, that's really interesting. One of the things that, as you were talking there, and just what we were saying, Michele, it's quite common that Is an understanding of lavender and sleep. Is it always the liver that you hone in on as that first port of call?

Right, no, it's not actually. It could be any, any of the organs. I mean, often the heart's involved, especially if there's anxiety and, you know, sort of worry, which would be a different organ. So liver is just one of the possibilities, and actually it'd be quite unusual To put something like insomnia down to one thing. People aren't that simple.

People are always more complicated, and there's always a bit of that, a bit of the other.

And, you know, you have to kind of work with the whole picture. And now with treatment, the picture changes as well. So the liver might be the primary thing, one thing, and then as that starts to get better, you might see something else that, you know, shows that it's out of balance. So yeah, good question. Yeah, when we were sort of talking together about the way we all practice, one of the things that struck me about what Shelley does was this idea of, I always thought aromatherapy was, you know, a lovely sort of relaxing and a nice treatment to do, but I hadn't realized that the oils actually have this physiological effect on the body, which, yeah, that quite— it was quite a shock to me actually.

really common that people think you sort of waft a bit of lavender about and there you go, job done. It's all a bit floaty. And some aromatherapists do work in that sort of way. Which is lovely. Which is lovely, and it's very relaxing, and that's absolutely fine. Personally, for me, because I had an interest, because my background, as I said before, was in science, and I had that interest, it wasn't enough for me to say lavender's going to 5,000 years, therefore it's okay. I needed to know, for me, what's in it that makes it work, the chemical composition of things. So we know that if you— you know, we know that things go through the skin, otherwise there wouldn't be any point in having HRT patches and that sort of thing. So we know that the skin is permeable, and we know that essential oils go into the bloodstream. If you put garlic oil— not that I do this— but if you put garlic oil on the sole of somebody's foot, you'll smell it in their breath within half an hour.

Wow.

That's had to have gone through the skin. So yeah, the essential oils will go in and actually do the job. And, um, you're not, not talking about sleep, but if we're looking at other things, essential oils will actually— we've known for years that clove bud works for pain, but actually it works because it's actually locking on molecularly at a particular nerve.

Chemistry.

So it's the chemistry of what it's doing. So they're not working like drugs, And we would never say that, but they do actually have an effect. It's a lot more than just smelling something and feeling lovely. There's a lot more to it than that, I believe.

Absolutely, yeah.

And Caroline, one of the things that I've noticed with some of my people is that they're extremely busy and they're not going to be able to You know, can you really alter somebody in a very short space of time? Can Lucy really manage to fit everything in?

Yeah, and that's a really interesting question because, like anything, there's more than one way to look at it. And the argument I'd put forward to someone is, if you want to achieve something, it invariably requires a bit of effort. And so one of the first things I'd say to Lucy is, what is it costing you to be tired all Does that mean actually you have, you know, you're less productive, you're getting less things done, you're dropping balls left, right, and centre because you're exhausted? And so perhaps that hour to come and see me and have a session may save you 3 hours in your day. And that's the kind of like, oh, I hadn't thought of it in that way, type of moment. So quite often, if the motivation to do something forward isn't good enough, look behind you, and if you've got one of these big monsters going, oh, I'm gonna get you, you go, okay, I'm ready to run.

Done now.

So it is a question of motivation, and I liken hypnotherapy a lot to physio. I can teach someone the exercise just like a physio can teach someone the exercise, but the real value is the practice you do at home. And all of the techniques, they're not, you know, they're not things where— a bit like going to the gym, you don't have to go to the gym for an hour every day. It's just a subtle re-awareness. It may be when you're driving, just repeat a little saying to yourself to create that reprogram. Or when you're sitting having a cup of tea, just close your eyes and run through that little visualization. So they're the sort of things, it's like a couple of minutes here, a couple of minutes there. And I would then argue again with Lucy that if you really want to sleep well, can you find that 2-3 minutes 3 times a day? And if she says no, then my argument would be, well, actually, I think you're quite happy and well with where you are. And then that might be another angle we take, is what benefit are you getting From having insomnia? Because I know a lot of people who actually like pain because the pain gives them an excuse not to do something, which is a really interesting angle to come to talk to, and perhaps the subject of another webinar. We'll do that another time. But yeah, so that's all part of the how is Lucy thinking, why is she thinking that way, and I help her to think in a different way to see if that gives her a motivation to change. Once that motivation is there, then the change can happen really, really quickly. Coming back to you now, I had Robert as a teenager. I've also got a teenager myself, and when we've been talking about aromatherapy, she turned around and said, oh goodness, I'd never have that because, you know, that means a massage. I'd have to take my clothes off in front of a stranger to have a massage. Not doing it! How do you deal How do you feel if a teenager actually thinks, I quite like this idea, or there's a parent watching that thinks, my teenager might really like this, but I know there's no way they'd get undressed in front of a stranger? What's the solution?

It's extremely common. I completely understand that. You don't have to have massage to have aromatherapy. So you could use essential oils in a bath, you could use essential oils as an inhalation, like the reiki sticks that you were talking about. You could teach her, as her mum, you could teach her a hand massage with the hand cream that she's got her own blend of essential oils in. So there are lots of ways of introducing essential oils to the body to help without actually going and having a massage.

Yeah.

Of course, in terms of stress and relaxation, having a massage is an amazing thing to do to try and calm that down, and looking at the history behind why somebody is so stressed and not able to relax and not able to sleep. I would never say to somebody, no, you've got to come in, I'm going to ask you questions and then ask you to take your clothes off and give you a massage, because that's just not relaxing, not going to do the job.

I guess also, you know, if you, if you have a little aroma stick, because they look a bit like inhalation sticks, don't they, or even a hand cream, it means that kids can have them in school and actually be helping themselves with aromatherapy without anyone else even knowing.

It was certainly with the aroma sticks we Use them for all sorts of things, from nausea, travel sickness, through to sleep and stress and uplifting, all sorts of things. It's just a way of getting the oils into the body, and it's actually— inhalation is the fastest way to get an essential oil into the body. So, um, yeah, very, very effective. Patches as well, did you say? You can have patches for sleep. Yeah, the aroma stick is great, but once you're awake, you're awake and you have to sniff the stick. But you can have the essential oils put onto a patch It just sticks onto the chest and then you've got a 4 or 5 hour release of essential oils, so hopefully that should keep you calm and asleep. Yes, and make you feel refreshed. Okay, one of the things that people often say to me is that they really, really don't like needles.

I know, this is one of my biggest problems, people. I think acupuncture is probably the last therapy everybody chooses because of the needles. But actually what most people find is that they enjoy the sensation of the needles and they find treatment relaxing. And I know that sounds a bit mad when you've— if you've never had acupuncture.

They're so fine.

They're very, very fine. People associate needles with hypodermics, that's the problem I think, which do hurt. You're not putting a liquid into you, it's literally just the needle and More often than not, it just taps in very gently, a millimetre, not much more, and you will feel something. You're supposed to feel something, that's it working. It'll be a tingle or a warmness or a little ache, or, you know, and generally people know when it doesn't feel right and they say, oh no, that's not there, I can't feel that one, and actually they want to feel that because that's how they know it's, you know, so it's a kind of a mindset thing again with— You know, accepting that the needle going into your body is a good thing.

Mm-hmm.

So, and like I say, most people do actually find it relaxing. And I, you know, I can be, you know, use a strong needle technique, or I can be very gentle. You vary it, you know, to how the person is and what their needs are. So most people manage fine. And I think one of the things that I had to overcome, Caroline, when I first thought about hypnotherapy was this idea of somebody controlling your mind. That was the perception I had of hypnotherapy, was that someone went in there in some way and changed things around. Do you think that's a common perception?

It's a nightmare. It's an absolute nightmare. And the really frustrating thing for me is It couldn't be further from the truth.

Yeah.

So most people, their impression of hypnosis— hypnosis, hypnotherapy, we'll come back to that one— hypnosis is these stage shows. Now if you think the stage shows, people are volunteering to go up on stage, so they are already extroverts. So even though I can hypnotize myself in seconds, I'd never get up on that stage. So you've got a caliber of people who want to be the center of attention. What the hypnotists then are excellent at doing is picking the extreme of that extreme group. So they are picking the ones that will literally do anything to be the center of attention. And what happens when they're hypnotized— they are completely hypnotized, so that's, that's legit— but they are then not controlled in any way, shape, or form. Everything that they are doing is of their own volition.

Yeah.

And a great acid test is that if you will do something when you're drunk, you'll do it under hypnosis. So if they're the sort of people that when they're drunk they'll get up on stage, take their clothes off, and cluck around like a chicken, then yes, they'll do it under hypnosis. Derren Brown, who's one of the sort of in-vogue people at the moment, and he kind of crosses between the two, he does the stage shows but he also does some interesting scientific work as well, and he did some shows to try and prove can someone be made to do something that they couldn't, and he tried to convince someone that they had committed a murder. And it was so phenomenally well staged that it really looked like he did. But this guy knew that he hadn't. He couldn't be convinced because his belief system rejected that. So, you know, it's, it's all about suggestibility. If by suggesting to you in any situation, yes, you can act like a fool, and you go, yeah, that's fine, I can do that, hey, yeah, then you'll do it under hypnosis. And I guess the other thing, coming back to this hypnosis, hypnotherapy, I'm not there to be entertained. I am there purely to help my client achieve their goals, and I quite often make a joke with people to say, if you want to cluck like a chicken, there's the floor, let's get it over with, then we can get on with some serious work.

I'm not interested in the entertainment, and so it's a completely different ballpark that I work within.

Okay, so I hope that has given you lots of thoughts. Lots of, lots of ideas. What I'm going to do now is just to give your eyes a little bit of a break. It looks like I might be coming into the screen with you, is to flip over to some slides where each of us have just picked a top tip. So my top tip is the brain hears all of your words and thoughts, but it's also really obedient. Your brain is not there to annoy you or to hurt you in any way. So if you're getting into bed and saying, I bet I'll still be awake at 1 o'clock, your brain quietly says, yeah, I can do that. And you know, I've actually seen this happen with my husband. He got into a really bad habit of getting into bed and saying, oh, I bet I'm going to wake up at 3 o'clock tomorrow morning, and funny old thing, 3 o'clock, ding! And I said to him one night, well, that's a really stupid thing to do. Why don't you say, I'm going to get it— fall asleep and wake up when my alarm goes off? And he so sort of looked across at me and went, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.

I'm gonna get into bed and slowly sleep till my alarm goes off at half past 6.

Half past 6 came around, his alarm went off, he opened his eyes, looked across at me and went, oh, I hate it when you do that! So listen to what you're saying. If you are constantly repeating things such as, I have insomnia, your brain is going to reinforce that behaviour and literally run that programme, create that bit of software that we were talking about earlier. You were born being able to sleep, that program is inherently created, and it's programmed at a subconscious level. But if it's gone wonky, if it's not working for you right now, you can reprogram it, and the language you use is a really big part of that. Now, a lot of people dismiss the value of mantras, it's all a bit woo-woo, but without ever having tried them or used them. So people who do use them really know the power of of positive repetition. So my real sort of takeaway thing I'd like to leave you with is stop talking about your problem and focus on what you want. Focus on sleeping through, focus on having a good night's sleep, because your brain will be just as eager to meet those commands too.

Okay, so My tip would be to first of all get into a really good sleep routine. Have a warm, not a hot bath, but a warm bath before bed, and add to it a couple of drops of lavender and ylang-ylang. You've got the Latin names on the screen there, so you buy the right oil. So add 2 drops of each of those to 10ml of unscented bubble bath base. If you've got nothing else, use full-fat or semi-skimmed milk. All you're trying to do is disperse it through the water so you don't get a nice itchy irritated skin where it's sat on the surface of water. And then relax for at least 20 minutes, take a book, and then as you get out of the bath, your body temperature will drop and that will help you to feel sleepy. And if you go to my website, there's a free ebook you can download for some more sleep tips and how to use essential oils.

And my top tip, so if like Tom you wake up in the early hours wanting to plan, to do your to-do list, thinking about what you're going to get done tomorrow, then one thing I've come across that can be helpful is to keep a pen and paper by your bedside and jot down your list. Basically get it out of your head because while it's going round and round in your head you won't be able to sleep, but once it's down on paper It might have the effect of just relaxing your mind, letting you, you know, sort of put it to one side and allow you to get back to sleep.

Fantastic. Now, this is the part that I said I would warn you about in terms of our offer. So hopefully you've had some real value, some things for you to think about. Thank you very much for listening. So we hope you've learned some ways to improve your sleep naturally and feel more able to now take some steps to help yourself. But we do, as I said, have a very special offer to work with each of us. So if you're not interested in that, we'll love you and leave you. Thank you for listening, although we do have a Q&A session, so bear with us. What we have is you— 10 vouchers to have a taster session with each one of us. So that's one session session with Shelley with aromatherapy, one with myself looking at the hypnosis and relaxation, and one with Kay. Now, the value of those 3 individual sessions would typically be just over £180, but we are offering 10 people to have those same level of treatments for an investment of £100. We only have 10 vouchers available, and the vouchers would need to be purchased by the end of this month, so 28th of February, and used by the 31st of May. So you will have a period of time to book your sessions in with each of us and decide on the order of them, so very flexible on that. So if you're interested in having one of those 10 vouchers that are available, then please email Lisa, who is contact@aromatictherapy.co.uk, and if you quote the sleep webinar, she will come back to you, arrange the first time, and Take that payment from you. So it is now time for our Q&A, so if anyone has got any questions, please click on that little round box at the bottom and type in your question now, and we will stay here for as long as there are questions coming. So there's a comment there from Pat, thank you, found it really interesting. That's fantastic, Pat, thank you. One of the questions we've got coming up now is, how many sessions would it take to see a notice? So I think it's probably best if each of us answer that in turn. So Shelley, how many sessions typically would someone have with you? I think it really varies.

Obviously there are things that you can do that will have an immediate improvement, so it might be just a little small adjustment to make a I generally work with people between 3 and 6 months to really get to grips with what's actually going on and taking a proper history and working that way. But there's no doubt that you can make big improvements with very little changes using essential oils to look into that.

Again, really, to establish that balance is a process. It's not something that always happens overnight, although you do get You know, the odd case where that might happen, but generally what I say to people is if you allow 4 to 6 sessions, you should have seen real improvement over that time, over maybe a 2, you know, 3-month possibly time period. And yeah, and at that point you've got a good idea of how far you've come and how much further you might be liable to get if you carry on with treatment. So I think 4 to 6 treatments, you have— you would make quite good progress in that.

Yeah, and I think I would probably fall in a similar sort of area. Most people would have between 4 and 6, but one of my earliest clients, she came to me after, as she said, she hadn't slept more than 4 hours a night for 10 years. And the reason she wanted to change is her daughters had got married, and And she felt she couldn't go and stay with them, because she couldn't be moving around at 2 o'clock in the morning like she could at home, and that was her motivation. And we hit on something that changed her belief straight away, and I got a text the next day to say she'd just slept 6 and a half hours. The next day was 7. It's been 7 ever since. So sometimes it can be one session. It all depends, again, on the background, what's been happening in the past. Has there been trauma involved? And sometimes, you know, the insomnia is actually a symptom of something else. and we have to then decide, do you deal with something else and then come back to the insomnia? So the way I work is very, very much individual. We go session by session, we deal with whatever comes up. But, you know, for a ballpark, I would be in the same boat here, 4 to 6 sessions. Now, we've got a question here from Chris. Whereabouts do you practice? Which part of the country? We're all based in Salisbury, Chris. So Shelley, just on the outskirts, Kaye, right in the centre, I'm about 7 or 8 miles I do have some online resources that I use for people as well, whereas Shelley and Kay, I think, more are face-to-face.

Yeah. But I could always recommend, you know, if you're interested in acupuncture, don't hesitate to contact me and I can always recommend somebody possibly in your area.

Yeah, it is one of the things I think as therapists we all face is this concept of Certainly the area of hypnotherapy, you can— it is really scary, it terrifies me that someone can do a weekend course in hypnotherapy and go out and start practicing with people. So damaging, potentially. So it's something to really question. What is, what is someone's qualifications? Look at their background. And again, if you are looking for therapists outside of the area that we can help you with, please come back to us. We'd be delighted to give you some criteria of these are the sort of qualifications qualifications you should be looking for, these are the sort of questions you should be asking someone before you make a decision to invest in them. But I think the other ladies will agree with me, one of the most important things about a successful therapeutic relationship is that you click.

Absolutely.

That you click with that person. If for any reason it's— and it's something that I deal with a lot— is listen to your instinct. If when you're talking to that person on the phone or you meet them, you just don't feel it's quite right, then it's not quite right, and that's okay. You're a square peg, they're a round hole. It's just not a fit. It doesn't mean that either of you are wrong. You need to find that person that fits with you. So do listen to your instinct, and that sort of instinct of, yeah, I like this person, is really, really important. So I think we've addressed all of our questions there. So thank you everyone for listening in. We've really enjoyed sharing this with you today. We are doing another talk Next week, for any of those of you who are around in Salisbury, we're doing something at the wellness practice which is on the marketplace, market square, what's it called? One of those.

Well Natural.

Well Natural, there we go. Glad someone knows what it's called. We are going to be there at 5:30 on Thursday the 16th. Yay, got that right, excellent. So please feel free if you'd like to come, that's an opportunity to actually meet us. We will be going through the same sort of thing again, but you're very welcome to come along, say hello, Or please recommend friends. It's another opportunity to catch up. As we said, we have been recording this. We will be sending you a link, so please feel free if there's things that you want to repeat, and if having watched it again another question comes up. On that first slide that we showed, there were all of our contact details, so just pop us an email. We will do everything that we can to make you sleep well. So on that note, night-night!

Good night!

Sleep well. Thank you for listening, and we hope to see you again very soon. Bye-bye. End meeting.