Are you having difficulty sleeping?

A better quality of sleep is a great benefit of solution-focused hypnotherapy.

It has been scientifically proven that the human brain needs to rest in order to process emotions, thoughts and feelings. This process can sometimes be disrupted by the brain being in a state of hyper-vigilance, due to stress or anxiety levels being too high.

So what causes this to happen? The main cause of insomnia and poor sleep quality is our old foe, negative thinking. 

How can negative thinking affect my ability to sleep?

Quite easily. Negative thinking will lead to your anxiety levels creeping up, which will eventually lead to a loss of intellectual control. 

As we have one brain, but two minds, this means that as our anxiety levels increase our brains will automatically default from the intellectual, sensible side, to the vigilant, primitive part.

This is the same default process which occurs when our brain believes that we are in some kind of crisis or emergency. For example, if we ran into a hungry, restless polar bear who wanted to attack us!

This is the part of the brain which is very negative, obsessive and more often than not, on high alert. 

The effects of our brain being on high alert are that we will find it difficult to get to sleep and, when we do, our brain will struggle to relax enough to process thoughts, emotions and feelings which have not been stored.

It’s during our dreaming phase of sleep, also known as REM (Rapid Eye Movement) that we process these thoughts, emotions and feelings.

Unfortunately, if we have become anxious over a period of time then we will find it harder to process during our REM phase of sleep as this process is restricted to around 20% of our sleep process. 

The downside of this is that if we try and overdo our state of REM the mind will automatically awaken the brain and we will be wide awake at three o’clock in the morning, feeling quite miserable, unable to get back to sleep again. 

We have all been there and it is not a pleasant feeling. The mind will be often racing, you will feel extremely restless and the chances are you will be staring at the ceiling unable to drift back into a relaxing sleep. 

When this happens, it simply means that your brain is operating within the primitive side of the brain and in a state of high alert. This state of vigilance only occurs as the brain cannot process the thoughts and feelings built up through negative feelings.

How will solution-focused hypnotherapy help me?

One of the first benefits clients often experience through hypnotherapy is that their quality and length of sleep tends to improve remarkably within the first few weeks.

This happens as trance replicates the REM process and allows the brain to process more thoughts, feelings and emotions. Therefore, a client's high anxiety levels will decrease immensely and they will move back from the primitive, highly vigilant side of the brain to the conscious part where thoughts, feeling and emotions are processed and filed within the brain's vast networks of memory stores.

A ‘solution-focused approach’ is particularly effective as it allows the client to target the areas within their lives that they wish to improve. 

This is achieved through the client scaling how they feel and visualising before they commence trance what an improvement to their issue of concern would look like by going up the scale.