Long-term insomnia negatively impacts your physical, emotional and psychological well-being. In fact, I am often working to eliminate insomnia, using the specific application of NLP techniques delivered in practical steps.
Lack of sleep can create unhappiness, worry and depletes energy and concentration. Similar to depression, insomnia is a behavioural pattern and it can be changed using specific interventions.
Firstly, let’s look at some of the causes of insomnia before we identify some key steps to overcoming this pattern.
How much sleep do you expect to have?
Everyone has a different idea about the amount of sleep we “should” get. In fact, as we get older we can function easily on less sleep. More relaxation, and less sleep. The amount of sleep a person actually requires depends on a number of different factors, including physical fitness, sleep expectations and the amount of regular exercise.
Our mental activity also impacts the amount of sleep we require. And yet, once we pass the age of 30 years old, it’s rare to require the eight or nine hours of sleep that we benefitted from during our youth. Regular relaxation sessions can also reduce our deep sleep requirement. 1-hour of hypnosis and other relaxation ‘purposeful’ sessions are through to equate to 4-hours of sleep.
Procrastination
When we consistently put things off it can play on the mind. If we have an ongoing list of things that we think we should do or things we wish to complete this can run through our mind as we try to get to sleep. We may even have procrastinated to such a degree that we have so much to do that we don’t know where to start or how to deal with them. This creates a list of “should do, haven’t done” in the unconscious mind.
For a short while, we’re able to block these issues consciously. We keep ourselves busy with everyday life and yet these issues fester in the back of the mind. They continue to affect us emotionally and our unconscious stress levels continue to increase. Often, when we’re just drifting off to sleep these issues come into our mind and we find ourselves feeling wide awake and unable to sleep. This is often a cause of waking early in the morning too.
Stress Management – Or Lack of It!
The more stressed you are, mentally and emotionally, the more your alert your mind is. The more alert your mind is the more difficult it is to get to sleep, and stay asleep. Even if you can get to sleep, stress can create a broken sleep pattern, which can leave us feeling tired and un-rested when we wake up in the morning.
The Insomnia Habit
Even if we’re not under stress we can develop an insomnia habit if we experience a couple of challenging nights. Often these initial sleep challenges are caused by drinking caffeine late in the day, excitement about an upcoming event, an active mind or lively conversation during the evening, or perhaps even the requirement to get out of bed early for an important meeting or event.
Accordingly, if we experience just two or three events where we’re unable to sleep due to some such normal activity it’s possible to develop an expectation about being unable to sleep. It’s like an anchor. Effectively, as soon as we notice that we’ve had trouble sleeping, we begin to expect to have trouble sleeping. Then this expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Working at Sleeping
Most adults do actually have interrupted sleep and waking, on occasion, during the night is quite normal. If we have the misfortune to develop an insomnia habit and we allow this to continue, we may worry that we have insomnia and we’ll never be able to sleep properly again. Ironically, many cases of insomnia are actually caused by worrying about not being able to sleep.
If you’re working at sleeping, sleep becomes increasingly elusive. You are mentally putting activity into sleeping rather than allowing sleep to come naturally and with ease. So, as we increase our mental activity, our mind becomes more alert. If we stress ourselves even further because we find ourselves unable to sleep, our alertness increases. This cycle only creates a lack of sleep.
Working With NLP Techniques Eliminate Insomnia
1. If you’re an NLP practitioner looking for ways to work with insomnia, the first technique you want to use is Time Line Therapy® negative emotion release. This addresses the biggest underlying challenge that exists.
2. Next, you’ll want to explore limiting decisions around sleeping. Does the person believe that they’re a ‘bad sleeper’? Ask the client what they believe about their problem and note down everything they say. Then chunk up to the highest-level belief and also notice what type of conflict it is. Towards-Towards, Towards-Away or Away-Away and use the appropriate technique(s).
3. Next technique you can use is a Swish pattern. Swish the undesired of not being able to get to sleep to a time when they fell asleep easily and without thought.
4 Finally, you can work with strategies to assess the full spectrum of strategy programming the client runs around sleeping. From knowing they’re tired and that it’s time to go to bed to actually fall asleep. Elicit the strategies, notice if there are any unhelpful steps, away from steps, or synaesthesia and then work to design new strategies with the client. Then install the new patterns with eye-pattern anchoring and chained anchors. Ensure repetition to fully install.
Eight Practical Ways You Can Eliminate Insomnia
- Use breathing techniques to relax in bed. Count the breath in and out.
- Engage in regular exercise.
- Avoid caffeine late in the afternoon or evening.
- Keep a pad close to your bed and write down anything that comes into your mind.
- Buy “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron – she has great tips on writing to reduce stress and increase creativity.
- Keep your clocks out of sight.
- Get up and do something if you can’t sleep – don’t lie there awake, it’s a waste of time!
- Listen to my deep sleep hypnosis track and feel more relaxed in bed. You can download it here.
Find Out More About Working With Me
If you’d like to find out more about coaching with me, or if you’d like to arrange a call to see if we’re a good fit for one another, please send me an email to sarah@sarahmerron.com.
You can book coaching online here.
Find out about NLP Training here.
If you’re interested in group training and coaching, you can check out my Farcical Life Programmes here.
