Insomnia

Do you feel drowsy all day because you had difficulty falling asleep last night?

Do you spin around on your bed until 4 am and then can’t wake up on time?

Do you feel you have a low energy level because you wake up 100 times during the night?

These are all symptoms of Insomnia. Insomnia can affect your health and the quality of your life. If not treated on time it can cause serious health problems which include heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, and anxiety.

Don’t let insomnia rule over your life, take your life back and sleep with the dream of the righteous.

What is Insomnia?

A short-term bout of insomnia is best handled by doing nothing. It’s important not to compensate by staying in bed longer or napping during the day.

Insomnia is a sleep condition that involves difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. Almost everyone goes through bouts of sleeplessness from time to time. But if someone struggles to fall asleep or wakes up at night or early in the morning and finds it difficult to fall back asleep, and this happens at least three times a week for a few months, that person is likely suffering from chronic insomnia.

Short-acting sleeping pills may improve sleep and next-day alertness, but the best way to handle a bout of insomnia is to do nothing; the body’s sleep mechanism tends to right itself if given the chance. The most effective treatments for chronic insomnia are behavioral techniques that eliminate sleep anxiety and allow the body’s own sleep cycle to kick in.

Insomnia may cause daytime fatigue and reduced energy levels. People with insomnia may also experience weakened coping skills, difficulty paying attention and concentrating memory problems, and trouble performing even routine tasks. But most of all, insomnia affects mood. The chronic sleep disruption of insomnia appears to be a major trigger for depression and irritability.

Insomnia is not defined by the hours of sleep a person gets or how long it takes to fall asleep. Individuals vary in their need for and satisfaction with sleep. A feature of insomnia is that individuals experience distress or impairment in functioning as a result of their poor sleep.

Insomnia can be classified as episodic, persistent, or recurrent. Insomnia lasting from one month to three months is episodic. If the symptoms last three months or longer, the insomnia is said to be persistent. Insomnia is considered to be recurrent if two or more episodes occur within the space of one year.

The development and course of insomnia as cataloged by the DSM-5 include:
The onset of insomnia symptoms can occur at any time during life, but the first episode is more common during young adulthood. Less frequently, insomnia begins in childhood or adolescence. In women, new-onset insomnia may occur during menopause and persist even after other symptoms, such as hot flashes, have resolved. Insomnia may have a late-life onset, which is often associated with the onset of other health-related conditions.

Insomnia can be situational, persistent, or recurrent. Situational or acute insomnia usually lasts a few days or a few weeks and is often associated with life events or rapid changes in sleep schedules or the environment. It usually resolves once the initial event subsides. For some individuals, perhaps those more vulnerable to sleep disturbances, insomnia may persist long after the initial event, possibly because of conditioning factors and heightened arousal. The factors that precipitate insomnia may differ from those that perpetuate it.

How does insomnia get stronger?

For example, an individual who is bedridden with a painful injury and has difficulty sleeping may then develop negative associations with sleep. Conditioned arousal may then persist and lead to persistent insomnia. A similar course may develop in the context of acute psychological stress or a mental disorder. For instance, insomnia that occurs during an episode of major depressive disorder can become a focus of attention, with consequent negative conditioning, and persist even after the resolution of the depressive episode. In some cases, insomnia may also have an insidious onset without any identifiable triggering factor.

Of course, insomnia may also be episodic, with recurrent episodes of sleep difficulties associated with the occurrence of stressful events. Chronicity rates range from 45 percent to 75 percent for follow-ups of one to seven years. Even when the course of insomnia has become chronic, there is night-to-night variability in sleep patterns, with an occasional restful night’s sleep interspersed with several nights of poor sleep. The characteristics of insomnia may also change over time. Many people with insomnia have a history of “light” or easily disturbed sleep prior to the onset of more persistent sleep problems.

Insomnia complaints are more prevalent among older adults. The type of symptom changes because of age, with difficulties initiating sleep being more common among young adults and problems maintaining sleep occurring more frequently among middle-aged and older individuals.

Symptoms of Insomnia

The diagnostic criteria of insomnia include difficulty falling asleep, difficulty maintaining sleep, and early-morning awakening with an inability to fall back to sleep. Sleep disturbances such as these cause significant distress and impairment in a multitude of areas in functioning, including social, academic, behavioral, and work.

Signs and symptoms of Insomnia

A predominant complaint of dissatisfaction with sleep quantity or quality, associated with one (or more) of the following symptoms:

Difficulty initiating sleep. (In children, this may manifest as difficulty initiating sleep without caregiver intervention.)
Difficulty maintaining sleep, characterized by frequent awakenings or problems returning to sleep after awakenings. (In children, this may manifest as difficulty returning to sleep without caregiver intervention.)
Early-morning awakening with the inability to return to sleep.

The sleep disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, educational, academic, behavioral, or other important areas of functioning if:

The sleep difficulty occurs at least 3 nights per week.
Sleep difficulty is present for at least 3 months.
The sleep difficulty occurs despite adequate opportunity for sleep.

Causes of Insomnia

Certain conditions seem to make individuals more likely to experience insomnia.

Examples of these conditions include:

Advanced age (insomnia occurs more frequently in older adults)
Occurs more frequently among females
Having a history of depression

There are a number of possible causes of insomnia:

Shift work
Jet lag or other sleep-wake disturbances
Depression
Anxiety
Excessive worry
Stress
Grief
Intense excitement
Poor sleep conditions, such as a bed or bedroom not conducive to sleep
Use of nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, or stimulants
Eating before bedtime
Medications or illicit drugs
Medication withdrawal
A new medication
A change in medication
Bright-light exposure
Excessive daytime sleep
Excessive stimulation at bedtime, physical or intellectual
Overactive thyroid
Conditions that impair breathing
Arthritis or other chronic illness
Heartburn or other gastrointestinal condition
Co-occurring disorders or medical illness
Stroke
Restless leg syndrome
Aging
Menopause

Episodic or situational insomnia generally occurs in people who are temporarily experiencing one or more of the following. These can often be resolved on their own.

Stress
Environmental disturbances, such as noise
Change in environment
Extreme temperatures
Jet lag or other sleep-wake disturbances
Medication side effects

The more complex chronic insomnia often results from factors, including underlying physical or mental disorders. Depression, for one, is a common cause of chronic insomnia. Other underlying causes include asthma, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, restless legs syndrome, arthritis, kidney disease, heart failure, Parkinson’s disease, and hyperthyroidism. Chronic insomnia may also be due to behavior problems, including the abuse of caffeine, alcohol, other substances, stress, shift work, or other lifestyle behaviors.

Some behaviors can exacerbate insomnia, or they may cause sleep difficulty in the first place:

Worrying about difficult sleep
Excessive caffeine
Alcohol intake before bedtime
Smoking cigarettes before bedtime
Excessive afternoon or evening naps
Sleep-wake disruptions

Nothing cures insomnia better than the realization that it is time to get up!

How does hypnotherapy help you fall asleep?

Numerous causes could be fueling your struggle to sleep.

For example, anxiety and stress – two of the greatest contributors — impair your ability to “shut off” the mind before bed. Medical conditions like allergies or asthma might also be keeping you awake. Or the cause might be something as seemingly minor as a change in routine.

In many cases, though, we’re kept awake by our internal dialogues. And this is how hypnosis for insomnia can help.

Your mind might race, thinking about an upcoming stressful event. (Like the first day of a job.) Or you might replay unresolved problems from the day in your mind over and over. (Like a fight with a spouse, or a contentious meeting at work.)

Sleep hypnosis for insomnia provides a framework to help our minds turn off, allow our bodies to reach a relaxed state, and ultimately, to push us from hypnotic trance to sleep. In particular, a sleep-promoting hypnotherapy program helps you:

Relax Physically: Hypnosis, in general, provides steps for relieving tension in the body, relaxing muscles and achieving that feeling of heaviness in the body. Under hypnosis, the body is wholly relaxed, which can be achieved through breathing and focus techniques.
Relax Mentally: The hypnotic state, much like meditation, is a state of heightened awareness and focus. By following hypnosis techniques, you can begin to unburden the mind of its worry. You are seeking to move away from your conscious thoughts, and find a disconnection from your surroundings. Sleep hypnosis, as such, is effective because it helps you slow your internal thoughts, tune them out or place your focus elsewhere.
Induce Sleep: A hypnotic trance is not sleeping, contrary to popular thought. You remain aware and conscious. But the transition from a state of hypnosis to sleep is natural. They share similarities, and therefore, once you’ve relaxed mentally and physically, simple suggestions may help you drift into sleep.
Fall into Deep Sleep: Research has shown that listening to a sleep hypnosis recording prior to bed can help us get to deep sleep faster. In fact, a 2014 study found that women who listened to a sleep hypnosis recording before bed spent 80 percent longer in deep sleep. In other words, hypnosis helps us fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, ensure we spend enough time in the desired N3 and REM sleep stages.

The best solution for Hypnotherapy

One-on-One Hypnotherapy: Sessions with a professional hypnotherapist provide you with personalized guidance during your experience. A hypnotist will lead you through relaxation techniques to reach the hypnotic state, and then would help you examine your unconscious mind and reframe negative associations. A one-to-one session would be particularly powerful for deep-rooted sleep disorders, like night terrors or sleepwalking.

Whatever path you choose to take, remember that hypnotherapy requires commitment. You must first want and commit to seeing the results, just like any self-improvement program.

And don’t be discouraged if you don’t experience instant results. It takes, on average, six sessions to achieve results. With hypnosis, sticking with a program long-term can help you achieve your goals.

Conclusion: Hypnosis Can Help You Unlock Restful Sleep

What’s preventing you from a good night’s sleep? There’s a good chance it’s buried in your subconscious. It might be anxiety about the future, stress, or regrets about the past.

And if you’ve experienced sleep struggles for long periods of time, your inability to sleep is now a habit. Your unconscious believes it to be normal, and it tells your mind that it makes sure it stays that way. Hypnotherapy helps because it provides you an opportunity to drill down to this level, to gain control of your unconscious thoughts, and to shut down your mind when you’re ready to sleep.

Are you ready to sleep like a baby?

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