As we get back to school & back to business the calm energy & flow of the summer months begin to ebb away into the busy rush of Autumn. Whilst our routine has probably started to return to normal we may also be experiencing a rise in stress levels & disrupted sleep patterns?
Sleep plays an important role in your physical health. For example, sleep is involved in healing and repair of your heart and blood vessels. Ongoing sleep deficiency is linked to an increased risk of heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke.
There are many ways you can improve your quality of sleep – diet, exercise, relaxation,
Hypnosis
“There have been many reports that hypnosis can be a good thing for promoting sleep,” said study co-author Bjorn Rasch, a professor with the department of psychology in the division of bio – psychology and methods at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
“However, usually they’ve been based on people just subjectively indicating how well they feel they’ve slept as a result,” Rasch noted.
This study is the first to assess via measures of brain-wave activity “the positive impact hypnosis has on deep sleep and to show that it is, in fact, real,” he said.
At issue is the desire to boost so-called deep sleep, also known as slow-wave sleep.
This type of sleep “often correlates with the most restorative sleep — it’s a time for your brain to process and rejuvenate from the challenges of the day,” explained Dr. Kim Hutchison, assistant professor of neurology and sleep medicine at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.
“Over the course of people’s lives, with age, the amount of deep sleep drops off significantly. And by the time you’re 50 or 60 you hardly have any, depending on the person,” said Hutchison, who was not involved in the new research. “With age, non-refreshing sleep becomes a very common complaint, and one of the reasons can be not getting enough slow-wave sleep.”
To explore how hypnotic suggestion might help improve deep sleep, the Swiss team enlisted 70 healthy Swiss women aged 18 to 35. All participated in a series of five in-laboratory experiments, successively staged once a week for five weeks.
None of the participants had any history of sleep trouble. None were taking any kind of sleep medication. Some of the women, however, were deemed (in pre-study testing) to be “highly suggestible” to hypnosis, while others were categorized as “low suggestible” patients.
For each experiment, the women were outfitted with electrodes to monitor brain-wave activity and sleep patterns.
While lying in a bed with the lights off, the women were exposed to varying audio tapes of about 13 minutes in length. Some provided a hypnotic suggestion to sleep deeper, while others were designed to be neutral in content.
The women were allowed to fall asleep during or after the audio feeds, and all were woken up after they had spent a total of 90 minutes napping.
The study found women the highly suggestible group slept 67 percent more and saw their “deep sleep” time rise by roughly 80 percent following exposure to audio hypnosis.
Here at HypnoReiki ™ we recognise the importance of sleep & can offer you the support you need to achieve that much needed restful, deep sleep & much more.
