Insomnia can mean difficulty getting to sleep, waking up several times a night, waking up during the night and being unable to get back to sleep or still feeling tired when you wake up. Persistent insomnia can have a significant impact on your quality of life. It can limit what you're able to do during the day, affect your mood, and lead to relationship problems.
Causes
Insomnia can be caused by stress, anxiety, excess muscular tension and/or excessive thinking or worrying. If you're a person who finds it difficult to relax or struggle to slow down an overactive mind sufficiently to enable sleep, then you're more likely to suffer from insomnia. Persistent insomnia can lead to anxiety over your lack of sleep and worrying about what sort of night you're going to have, which makes the condition worse.
Of course, you may not suffer from tension, stress or anxiety and just find if difficult to switch off your thoughts at bedtime. The thoughts don't have to be worries to prevent you from sleeping. They could just be trivial thoughts that keep your mind active. Insomnia can also be triggered by a stressful period in your life, but even when the stress is no longer an issue, sometimes your sleep remains affected due to the changes in your sleep cycle.
How does it work?
The approach will vary depending on each individual's specific requirements, but will typically involve learning how to lower arousal, calm the mind and relax muscles, removing unhelpful behaviours and thinking patterns around sleep, and using hypnosis to encourage positive thinking and behaviour relating to sleep.
Learning rapid deep relaxation techniques lowers stress, anxiety, agitation and muscular tension. Excess tension in the muscles increases the amount of activity across the whole nervous system, including the amount and speed of your thinking. By learning how to deeply relax the body and mind, and retraining your nervous system to a more relaxed state, you can fall asleep quickly, stay asleep and awake refreshed.