From the Chair of the Hypnotherapist: Wish You Could Sleep Better? Here’s a Way You Can

                                                                                       Image: thebeautybean.com

The Edinburgh Reporter’s Mike Smith is a qualified hypnotherapist. In the latest of a series of articles, Mike looks at how hypnotherapy can help those with insomnia.

A question I’m often asked is ‘can hypnotherapy help me to sleep better?’ Now I’m aware of the irony here. There remains a misconception about hypnotherapy that some people think I’m an old man (well, that bit may be right) with a grey beard dangling a gold watch in front of someone’s eyes telling them they are going to become sleepy….

Well let me tell you, I don’t have a grey beard and I certainly don’t own a gold watch….

Hypnosis is associated with sleep but is often tagged with the stage show acts and television programmes such as ITV’s ‘Back in the Room’. But for hypnotherapists like me, our profession is about helping people to break their habits or unwanted disorders – and not being able to sleep can be a deeply ingrained habit.

Hypnotherapy – by a fully trained hypnotherapist – can be used to help treat sleeplessness with positive results. Sleeplessness can become a vicious circle. You may have something on your mind and you are unable to relax – perhaps it’s a worry about your job, financial worries or the health of a close family member. You feel tired but when you climb into bed and turn off the bedside lamp, you lay your head on the pillow and wait to drift off to sleep. But you can’t. You close your eyes but your mind just won’t switch off. You toss and turn in bed. You see every hour on the clock. And the more each hour passes, the more frustrated you become.

‘I must get to sleep, I’ll be getting up in a couple of hours’ you tell your mind but your active mind ignores you.

Does this sound familiar?

Hypnotherapy can help by suggesting changes to your thought process to help you relax and addressing the thought patterns that influence a restless mind. I can help retrain your subconscious mind to enable you to relax more, thereby helping you to sleep more easily.

People who have insomnia usually find their nervous system prevents them from winding down. Hypnotherapy can teach the client’s subconscious mind how to go down the pathway to sleep.

Through carefully worded, bespoke scripts, I can ease you into a wholly relaxed state and feed suggestions to your subconscious mind to put it into s state where it is no longer vulnerable to those issues which keep you awake at night. I can try to ascertain the causes of your insomnia by reaching your inner mind and I will then use powerful suggestions which will have an immediate effect.

I use the lighting in a room as a metaphor for this exercise.

Imagine you are entering a room. When you first go in the light is bright and, therefore, full of energy. This is how it is when you try to go to sleep – your mind is full of energy. Imagine then, in this room, you turn the dimmer switch to lower the light. Apply this action to your mind – think of your mind as being a bright room but you are dimming the brightness by lowering the light. You are in control of this dimmer, no one else. By lowering the light in your mind, your body feels limp and weak; our brain is sending fewer and fewer signals to the rest of your body and your muscles get fewer impulses to be active.

Slowly, your brain is falling into a state of rest and peace and, as a result, the functions of your conscious mind subside as you slowly drift into sleep. By dimming the switch in your mind to the point that it is very dark indeed, your worries and concerns, thoughts about the future and other distractions – the ones which are preventing you from sleeping – gently subside. Escaping into a fantasy world where your mind is a dimly lit room can help you drop into sleep.

Part of the process is helping you into a ‘trance’. You are very much awake and in control – part of the hypnotherapy process is guiding you to ‘daydream’. How many times has someone said to you ‘Hey, you’re away in a dream’ – but you’re not actually asleep, you’re thinking about something else or somewhere else. Hypnotherapy enables you to do this; helps your mind to drift off to wherever you want it to, somewhere where it is free and able to think whatever it wants. In this state of ‘trance’ your subconscious mind is more open to manipulation either by suggestions or visual imagery from the hypnotherapist.

One idea is to think of insomnia on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is fully awake and 1 is in a deep sleep. With guidance from the hypnotherapist, the plan would be to initially get to 5 – halfway – by which stage you would be in a very relaxed state. From 5, you will then begin to forget about your regular thoughts and feelings – and eventually reach step 1.

With the help of a psychological analysis and breathing techniques, hypnotherapy has been shown to help people with insomnia and, in some cases, even help with night terrors and bad dreams.

If you have difficulty sleeping and find that counting sheep doesn’t work – contact me today. Together, we can help address your insomnia.

After an initial FREE consultation, we can decide together the best way to enable you to achieve your goals.

If you would prefer a home visit, I would be happy to arrange this.

Take the first step to changing your life!

Mike Smith Cert Hyp CS

Mind Generating Success    (click on this link to take you to the website)

14-18 Hill Street, Edinburgh

EH2 3JZ (just off North Castle Street, in the heart of Edinburgh)

Tel: 0752 135 3787 (24 hours)

email: mike.smith@mgs-hypnotherapy-services.co.uk

FREE consultation and special offer for readers of The Edinburgh Reporter – quote ER01.

My grateful thanks to the source of parts of this article – Andrew Gentile of www.toronotohypnotherapy.ca

Mike Smith

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Author of The Team for Me - 50 Years of Following Hearts. Runs Mind Generating Success, a successful therapy practice in Edinburgh. Contact me if you want rid of any unwanted habits. Twitter @Mike1874

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