Total Mind Connection’s Weblog

Nearly all sleeplessness is a product of the mind. Although there are times when physical injuries and sickness can keep you awake, and the use or abuse of substances can affect your sleep, 95% of the people I see for insomnia can’t sleep because their mind just won’t “shut off”. These people are thinking about their job, their kids, their taxes, you name it and they are thinking about it. The reason they are unable to sleep is because they continue thinking about them in a negative context or are trying in their minds to fix things that are out of their control.

For example, a lady came to me because she hadn’t slept more than two or three hours at a time in nearly six months. She had a teenager that was acting out. Her father had cancer. Her relationship with her husband was strained. She was losing sleep and missing work. She thought her job was in jeopardy. This lady had real challenges in her life and, as a result, wasn’t sleeping.

After talking with her we had a series of sessions that focused on her concentrating on things she had control over and letting go of things that she didn’t have control over. I also gave her two simple NLP triggers to use to calm her thoughts when her mind became overactive when she couldn’t fall asleep.

As a result she talked with her husband about how important their relationship was to her. She found that since she had been spending a lot of time with her father her husband had felt neglected. She made time to talk with her teenager twice a week for an hour. She started focusing on what he did right instead of what he did wrong. These two things caused a huge change in his behavior. She also continued to love her father while realizing that there was nothing more she could do to improve his health. More importantly she learned to control her anxiety and started sleeping again.

What is interesting is that I didn’t make any of these suggestions directly to her but rather they came about as a result of her relaxing in trance and allowing her subconscious to develop a plan to deal with her issues. In other words she came up with the solutions by herself.

As a hypnotist I am always impressed by the insight of my clients’ wise subconscious minds. Hypnosis is a powerful method that relaxes the conscious mind and the body. This allows the subconscious to focus on the issues the client wants to work on.

Hypnosis has been used for thousands of years and has been well documented for treating all types of anxiety disorders. NLP, or Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a cutting edge method used by athletes, actors and everyday people like you and me to make changes and improvements. NLP uses sensory signals (see, hear, and touch) the mind receives and changes the manner in which we respond to them. Since we all use a primary mode (see, hear, and touch) of processing information one method NLP uses is to work with a person’s primary mode to help them anchor new behaviors.

The client I am referring to in this article used auditory (hearing) as a primary mode of processing information. Since that was the case I gave her an auditory trigger (humming a tune that she found relaxing) along with a physical trigger (touching her arm a certain way) to anchor a new response of being calm and relaxed for when she began to get her “anxious feelings.” This helped her to relax and go to sleep.

If you are having troubles sleeping I have a FREE e-Course that can help with sleep problems

Next: Using Yoga to help you sleep