Getting Better Sleep

If you aren’t sleeping well it takes a toll on your overall health and wellness. Not getting enough sleep, or not getting good enough sleep can drain your energy, distort concentration and reasoning, and make you feel irritable and cranky. On top of that, it increases stress, lowers natural immunity, and increases craving for carbs and sugars.

There are many ways that people don’t sleep well, whether from a racing mind, or waking in the night, or just not getting enough good quality sleep. The underlying causes vary as well and include stress, chronic pain, and habits that hinder sleep. Other causes of poor sleep include anxiety, depression, being over-tired, high blood pressure, diabetes, nightmares, and certain foods.

Resolving the underlying issues will mean better quality sleep more often.

Sleep Hygiene

Paying attention to sleep hygiene is one of the most straightforward ways that you can set yourself up for better sleep. Keeping a stable sleep schedule, making your bedroom comfortable and free of disruptions, following a relaxing pre-bed routine, and building healthy habits during the day can all contribute to good sleep hygiene.

Here are some examples that you can use to set yourself up for better sleep.

• Sticking to a schedule of the same bedtime and wake up time, even on the weekends, helps to regulate your body’s clock and may help you sleep through the night.

• A relaxing routine activity right before bedtime, away from bright lights, helps separate your sleep time from activities that can cause excitement, stress, or anxiety.

• Daily exercise can help your mind and body release stress and differentiate between sleep and waking times.

• Design your sleep environment to be a comfortable place to sleep. Consider the temperature of the room, light sources, and noises. Make sure your mattress and pillows are comfortable and supportive.

• Avoid alcohol, nicotine, and heavy meals in the evening.

• Use relaxation, meditation, breathing exercises, or hypnosis to ease into sleep.

Hypnotic Suggestions for Sleep

Hypnosis is one of the most effective tools for getting better sleep. These hypnotic techniques can help you build the habit of better sleep.

Revivification is the practice of remembering an experience or event. This activates the subconscious mind, and allows you to apply past experiences to the present moment. Revivifying a previous experience of falling asleep allows you to use that memory to fall asleep easier.

Using revivification is simple. As you are lying down to sleep, allow yourself to remember a time when you fell asleep easily and deeply, or perhaps that moment just between awake and asleep. Not the memory of waking up - the memory of the heaviness in your body, your eyelids not wanting to open, your mind drifting into a dream. Let the memory be as vivid and detailed as possible. The feel of the pillows, the temperature of the room, the sounds or silence around you, and how wonderful it felt to drift off to sleep.

You don’t have to “try” to make anything happen here. Just let the feelings of that memory do their work. If you find your mind wandering to some unrelated thought, just bring yourself back to more details of the memory of falling asleep.

Hypnotic Stories

Telling yourself a story will let you experience the things you’re imagining. Use this story model tonight.

“My friend John went to bed and at first he noticed that his feet felt tired and his hands felt tired and his breathing got tired and his eyes got tired and before he knew it, he was asleep.”

As you repeat this story to yourself you are setting a pattern to follow. Tell the story about someone else. You can include other body parts if you’d like, always ending with “before they knew it, they were asleep.”

Non-Awareness

Sleep isn’t something you can do consciously. The non-awareness set is all about getting the subconscious mind to do things. Read the paragraph below to yourself, or even record it and play it back as you lay down to go to sleep.

“I wonder what that arm has got to teach you about falling asleep at night? Maybe when you go to sleep at night as you sense your arm comfortably relaxing in the bed you’ll drift to sleep quickly and the hand can only relax down even deeper as quickly as your subconscious mind makes that happen, so that as soon as you feel yourself in bed and you feel the heaviness of your hand spreading into your arm then the subconscious mind can take over and the next thing you know it’s morning, you’ve slept all night and you’re feeling refreshed and alert.”

There is no wrong way to fall asleep, and you can feel free to use the tools that feel best to you and sleep better.🍥