Hypnotherapy is used to alter a person’s negative thought and behaviour patterns. Not all of these thought and behaviour patterns are voluntary. Some of our unwanted behaviours, like loss of sleep or interrupted sleep, occur without us going through any conscious decision making process.
I have worked with many people who wake up during the night and can’t get back to sleep and others who find it difficult to drift off to sleep in the first place. Sometimes the loss of sleep is exacerbated by stress and worry and sometimes there is no obvious reason at all for it. It can often be the case that a person simply gets into the habit of not sleeping, for example, ex shift workers commonly fall into this category.
The result of not getting enough sleep can range from feeling exhausted in the morning and tired and listless through the day, to devastatingly affecting our ability to function normally, be it at work or at home. There can be serious social, family and health implications.
Hypnotherapy can work in a multiple of ways to resolve sleep issues. As always, the treatment delivered depends on the individual and his/her specific circumstances and needs.
Where loss of sleep is habitual, hypnotherapy delivers to the subconscious mind techniques and visualisations that will retrain the mind to be able to drift off to sleep and stay asleep through the night. Often a combination of suggestive therapy and neuro linguistic programming is used to achieve this. In other cases there may an underlying cause for the lack of sleep, stress being a common one. In these cases the cause of the problem will be addressed as well as the immediate sleep issue.
In my experience, if your loss of sleep is habitual, 2 sessions of hypnotherapy is usually enough to get you back to sleeping soundly through the night. If there is an underlying cause, such as stress, then depending on its severity and complexity, 1 to 3 additional sessions may be required.
Before you embark on hypnotherapy to resolve your sleep issues you should always pay a visit to your doctor who will assess your symptoms and rule out any causes that require medical attention.
