Reduce insomnia with hypnosis

Insomnia is incredibly annoying and creates problems you would rather avoid. Not being able to fall asleep nights in a row or waking up from the slightest thing and then not falling back to sleep can affect your life considerably. To know what to do about insomnia, it is important to find out what form of insomnia you have. In fact, there are several.

Read more about insomnia and how hypnosis can help you regain sleep in this blog.

Types of insomnia

When you go to your doctor to report that you can no longer sleep you are often asked the question, "Are you having trouble falling asleep, sleeping through or what else?"

This question is important because it gives an indication of the type of insomnia you have.

There are several types of insomnia, namely:

• DIMS insomnia
• Idiopathic insomnia
• Initial insomnia
• NOS insomnia
• Late insomnia
• Resource Insomnia
• Paradoxical insomnia
• Physiological insomnia
• Physiosociological insomnia
• Sleep continuity

This is a whole slew of forms of insomnia. Most forms of insomnia boil down to having difficulty falling asleep and/or maintaining that sleep.

Some forms of insomnia have no obvious cause, such as idiopathic insomnia. This form of insomnia begins when you are a child and is often chronic. This is treatable only with sleep medications (not antidepressants).

Then you also have Physiological Insomnia. This is insomnia that can occur because something has gone wrong in the body, such as when you have suffered a brain contusion. This can also be combined with insomnia symptoms due to more psychological factors.

Lastly, your sleep hygiene is also important to prevent insomnia. For many people, just improving sleep hygiene is sometimes enough to regain sleep. Unfortunately, this is not true for everyone who has insomnia.

The term sleep continuity is used to indicate the quality of sleep. How rested are you after a night of tossing and turning or, conversely, when you did sleep.

Effects of insomnia

Insomnia has both mental and physical consequences if left unchecked. For example, a person's chances of developing diabetes become higher with chronic insomnia. This is an incredibly annoying side effect.

In addition, people may experience more concentration problems from insomnia. The tired feeling is incredibly distracting from work you need to do, for example. In addition, fatigue can also make you make mistakes faster.

People with office jobs often recognize fatigue by making typos.

As a result, you have to correct those mistakes. This can lead to time pressure, which in turn leads to stress.

Stress in turn leads to additional insomnia and so you end up in a vicious cycle.

Fortunately, there are several hypnosis exercises that can help break this cycle.

Hypnosis exercises that can help with insomnia

Do you suffer from insomnia yourself, or do you want to help people who do? If so, you can try several hypnosis exercises to reduce sleep problems.

Retrieving memory of moment when sleep succeeded

Haven't you suffered from insomnia since childhood? Then you probably (day)dream of the times when you just laid back in bed and were barely even aware of your head hitting the pillow. After all, you were already in dreamland.

This moment can help your brain re-learn how to actually fall asleep again.

Recalling this memory is not the same as regression. You simply bring it to life a little more vividly in your mind’s eye.

In the process, this memory retrieval can be linked to a particular action that helps you fall asleep. This has to be an action that you don't often do during the day. After all, you don't want to fall asleep at work.

Post-hypnotic suggestions

These types of links are made with post-hypnotic suggestions. A post-hypnotic suggestion pairs a particular activity with an action. For example, if you clap your hands you fall asleep or something similar.

A good trigger (such as clapping your hands) for insomnia is the bed. For example, you can give the following hypnotic suggestion:

"When you feel the blanket over you you rub it a little more and then you fall asleep."

So out of the blue, this post-hypnotic suggestion may do nothing. Therefore, it is important to also link the suggestion to the problem preventing a person from falling asleep. Worries about work are often a reason why people cannot fall asleep. You can then package the post-hypnotic suggestion as follows:

"You've had a busy day at work and come home with all that busy energy. First you relax by breathing through your belly. Then you lie down in bed. When you feel the blanket over you you rub it some more and then you fall asleep."

If you can't catch sleep precisely for other reasons, you should place the suggestion precisely with those other reasons.

Inspiring confidence in the subconscious

What is so incredibly annoying about insomnia is that you can't force yourself to sleep. You may even think very angrily, "Go to sleep now!" but the effect is usually that you then actually lie awake longer while the minutes seem to creep by. Terrible!

Unfortunately, sleep is a completely unconscious process. You can’t force the subconscious mind. Fortunately, you can influence it with hypnosis.

To regain better sleep, it is important to reawaken confidence in the subconscious mind. You can do this, for example, with arm levitation. The trust this awakens in the subconscious can then be translated back to the bed.

"When you lie in bed you feel the temperature of your right hand. Then you can let your subconscious take over. Before you know it, it's morning."

Shifting focus to the moment between breathing

Falling asleep is something that most people who sleep do not consciously experience. Therefore, it is very difficult for a healthy person without insomnia to explain how to fall asleep now to someone who has insomnia.

Beyond, "You just lie down in a nice position and close your eyes," you won't get farther.

A fun fact about falling asleep is that the exhalation is then often just a little longer than the inhalation. However telling the client to exhale longer makes him/her active again. It is better to shift the focus to the end of the exhalation. Then they will automatically breathe out longer. Your client is then much more likely to fall asleep.

Shifting focus to comfort

So people who sleep say "You just lie down in a nice position. After all, under the blanket it is nice and warm, and the weight of the blanket also makes you feel wonderfully secure.

By allowing your client to focus on the nice soft blanket, the body being nicely warmed, there is less frustration. Thereby, the shifted focus can cause the comfortable feeling to be enhanced.

This, in turn, can contribute to falling asleep.

Daydreaming to really dream

Thoughts you have before bed can suddenly come into focus very clearly. As a result, a thought can turn into a real dream just like that. Through visualizations it is possible for your client to get to sleep faster.

Then make sure these are visualizations of a nice relaxing place. Of course, the idea is not to give your client a nightmare, or, on the contrary, to stay awake because of an unpleasant thought that is suddenly depicted.

All of these techniques can be used separately to help your client, but when combined can also be very powerful.

Would you like to know exactly how to apply these techniques during a hypnosis session? Then check out the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands or come to a workshop.

Sources:

http://www.med.upenn.edu/cbti/assets/user-content/documents/TypesofInsomniaPGandMP.pdf