How well do you sleep?

One of the first questions I ask my clients is how good is their sleep. The reason for this is that sleep is paramount for your health, whether mental, emotional or physical.

Our sleep is divided in several phases which succeed in a repeating cycle throughout the night. Each phase is important and any unbalance in these cycles will affect us greatly.

Lack of REM

The most common problem that my clients suffer from is a lack of REM sleep. REM sleep is the part of your sleep where you dream and process the emotional content of the day. It is an essential part of your night because it helps you cope with life and put things in perspective albeit in a sometimes bizarre way. It does so by producing serotonin, which is a feel good hormone.

Emptying our buckets of worry

We all need a certain amount of REM sleep to empty what I call our "worry bucket". No one has a problem free life but some of us are able to cope with our problems better than others.

We all have worries that are stored in our worry buckets. That bucket needs to be emptied regularly so that we don't feel overwhelmed by our problems.

There are three ways we can do this:

• not worrying excessively about things (i.e. refrain from filling our bucket unnecessarily)
• simplifying our lives and lowering our level of stress
• emptying our worry bucket regularly and that is the job of the REM sleep.

If you lack the necessary REM sleep, you will wake up with a mind full of anxiety and worry and won't be looking forward to your day because it will be overcast by the worries you haven't managed to put to bed (pun not intended).

Getting a good night sleep is essential for this. But people whose sleep are too deep and who struggle to get out of bed also lack REM sleep because they almost pass out. If this is what happens to you, you could be sleeping ten hours a night and wake up feeling tired. This phenomena often happen to depressed people.

How do I get enough REM?

• You need to prepare for a good night sleep: avoid alcohol, tea, coffee, listen to soothing music, avoid the news on TV, avoid arguments, etc. Read a good novel. Listen to a relaxation CD. Have a hot bath. A massage.
• Have your room Feng Shui-ed to ensure that your bed is in the right position and conducive to good sleep. If it's the only thing you do: make sure that you can see the door of your bedroom from your bed, get any electronic equipment out of your bedroom (TV, playstation, etc) and declutter it (including under your bed)
• Trim down your consumption of substances that damage your REM to a bare minimum: tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, drugs - whether recreational or prescribed. These are all BIG enemies of your repairing sleep.
• If you have been deprived for a long time and feel overwhelm, come for a hypnotherapy session. And if you are not convinced yet, try my general relaxation CD on sale in the shop. All my clients usually go to sleep when listening to it, so I can guarantee a good night sleep!
• Use a hypnotherapy or relaxation CD during the day (at appropriate times and in a safe and undisturbed environment) to put you into a dream like mode. Trance is the closest state to REM and helps empty your bucket of worry and put you into intellectual problem solving mode. The more you will listen to the CD the more you will empty your bucket.

Why is it so important that you get enough REM?

REM is the tool that your brain uses to empty the emotional content of your day. It transforms emotions into facts and stores it into your memory bank. If that job hasn't been done for a long time, you could be carrying an emotional baggage for years which will raise your level of anxiety and make your bucket spill out, triggering panic attacks and phobias. 

And who knows if you are lucky, you might discover that you have Edgar Cayce's talent: he used to be able to learn his lessons and the content of a book by literally sleeping on it.

To make an appointment, please call 07914606729.