Have a healthy, balanced supper 🥗 at 6.30pm and, having eaten, put away the dishes and tidy everything for the next day (actually, if we’re going with dream, the housekeeper – remember, this is a dream! – does the tidying before she leaves!).
Next, we sit down to watch TV 📺 for an hour or so, and afterwards change into pyjamas, put away the mobile phone and iPad, and turn off the TV.
We then go upstairs, write in a journal 📓, plan the day ahead, brush our teeth 🪥, wash our face 🧽and get into bed 🛌.
We pull out a book 📕 and read for half an hour or so, until we feel sleepy. We then fall asleep 💤 and sleep for about eight hours, awakening refreshed and ready for the day!
That’s what we should be doing – or variations of it, perhaps with a bath 🛀🏻 too! We all know it, but few of us actually do it, however good our intentions.
In reality, if we do eat at 6.30pm, we’re often then ravenous by 10pm, eat something unhealthy and unhelpful 🥨 far too late, and get indigestion. We plan to turn the TV off at 9.30pm but start watching something gripping and end up binge-watching 🎭 until nearly midnight 🕛.
We brush our teeth 🪥, wash our faces 🧼 and change, but by now it’s half past midnight and too late to read. Once the lights are off, we lie awake in the dark 👀 waiting for sleep. Sometimes we fall asleep easily, sometimes we’re wide awake, hearing noises, watching the hours roll past. Then we need the loo 🚽 at 3am, and wake up at 7am or 8am, tired, wanting more sleep, but having to be up.
So many of us lie awake at night, believing it’s just us. Every night we feel anxious that we won’t sleep – that we have a long drive or a busy day ahead – and we need to sleep, yet sleep remains elusive. No trick seems to work.
We’ve all tried counting things 🐑, planning holidays and what to pack 🧳, or choosing a word and going through the letters, thinking of as many things as possible that start with each letter.
So, why can’t we sleep? Of course, we can make our environment as good as possible ✅ – have the room at a cool 16–18 degrees, turn the lights down 🕯️ as bedtime approaches, not drink caffeine ☕️ or eat chocolate 🍫 late, eat our supper early, avoid alcohol 🍷and follow a routine so our mind recognises it’s sleep time again 🌙.
Even doing all the right things, some of us still can’t get a good night’s rest. What’s going on?
Usually, we’ve been under too much pressure – pressure from work, from relationships, worries about money 💰, health ❤️🩹, loved ones 💕. Anxiety about our diet ⚖️, our fitness 🏃♀️, our future 🔮.
There are so many things worrying people, and the only way to relieve the stress is with consistent, good sleep – not too much, not too little. Sometimes, the very thing filling our stress bucket 🪣 is that we can’t sleep 💤.
Assuming we’ve got our environment right, got our routine on point – what else can we do?
The most obvious answer is Solution Focused Hypnotherapy!
Every week, we focus on something small and positive that we want to achieve. We think of all the things that have been good in our week – tiny things like the sun shone ☀️, we got a great parking space 🚗, and enjoyed lunch 🥪, all the way up to bigger things – a great relationship 💏, an unexpected bonus 💰, and so forth. Then we have a trance session – and that’s where the magic 🪄 happens. Trance has a similar effect to REM (rapid eye movement) 👁️ sleep – it’s where we file 🗂️ all of our experiences and empty our stress bucket.
Bit by bit, it empties our stress bucket until we feel well and balanced again.
There are other things we can do to help ourselves, too.
Here, I’m going to mention the three Ps:
1️⃣ Positive action – repetitive movement, exercise. Not only does it help release all the good stuff (dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, etc.), but it also puts our minds into trance and helps reduce our stress levels.
2️⃣ Positive interaction – socialising! Seeing the people you like and love, enjoying a meal out, having them round to chat and support each other.
3️⃣ Positive thoughts – if you look for the positive, you teach your brain to filter and notice the positive things going on around you. We have around 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day! Our mind then filters these thoughts based on focus, to approximately 300 to 3,000 conscious thoughts a day. Many of these pass through our minds automatically, but if you focus on the positive aspects of your life, that’s the filter you use – and that, in turn, will affect how anxious or relaxed you feel.
There’s one other thing we can do to improve our sleep – and that is meditation 🧘♀️. By listening to a guided meditation or meditating yourself (you can download my sleep guided meditation for free on my website), you relax your central nervous system – and this really helps you not only fall asleep 💤, but also improves the quality of your sleep too.