How hypnosis promotes sleep?
Hypnosis removes the obstacles to sleep while at the same time inducing brain wave patterns that promote and are conducive to sleep.

• Hypnotherapy can help with getting to sleep by:

- Re-educating your mind to expect to enjoy a good night’s sleep
- Teaching new relaxation techniques to help your mind and body to slow down at the end of the day. Sleeping becomes much easier in this state.
- Helping you to learn techniques to remove some of the noise from a racing mind. -Insomnia and most sleep problems are a very modern phenomenon and representative of the pace of modern life
- Helping you to understand some of the causes of insomnia and sleeping problems.

• Generally, hypnotherapy clients’ sleep problems fall into two categories. The first is simply not being able to fall asleep at night. The second involves waking up at an inconveniently early hour and not being able to fall asleep again. Learning effective self-hypnosis skills can help you to significantly improve your sleep patterns and can help with indirect effects of insomnia and sleep problems such as daytime anxiety and bruxism (teeth grinding during the night). Read The Full Story…

Your “sleep hygiene” describes your sleep habits. By boosting your sleep habits, you can increase your possibility of falling asleep fast, staying asleep and sleeping between seven to nine hours each night. A good night’s sleep has many health benefits. Most importantly, you will feel great.

• 1. Keep a regular bed and wake time schedule including weekends.Our sleep-wake cycle is regulated by a “circadian clock” in our brain and the body’s need to balance both sleep time and wake time. A regular waking time in the morning strengthens the circadian function and can help with sleep onset at night. That is also why it is important to keep a regular bedtime and wake-time, even on the weekends when there is the temptation to sleep-in.

• 2. Create a Bedtime Ritual. Create a nightly ritual to signal that it is time to sleep. Start the ritual about 30 minutes before you lie down to help release stressful thoughts and be ready to sleep when you lie down. A little quiet reading (not in bed) or a warm bath can be great. Avoid watching TV, since it stimulates your brain.

• 3. Do not use alcohol or tobacco products close to bedtime. Use of these products may calm you at the time of use, but they can have disrupting effects on your sleep during the night.

• 4. Do exercises daily. Daily exercise will improve your chances of falling asleep quickly and sleeping deeply. Try to exercise early in the day and never within three hours of bedtime. Exercising too late in the day can make it difficult for you to fall asleep. A daily exercise habit will not only improve your sleep hygiene, but it will also improve your overall health.

• 5. Only Sleep and Have Sex in the Bedroom – No TV. The bedroom should be used only for sleep and sex. That means no reading in bed and no TV in bed. Doing these things (or anything else) confuses your body, making it difficult to fall asleep. Give yourself about 15 minutes to fall asleep. If you haven’t fallen asleep by then, get out of bed until you are sleepy. You can do some quiet reading (pick something boring), but avoid TVs and computer screens. Remember, your goal is to train yourself to fall asleep quickly. Reading a stimulating book, watching TV or doing anything else undermines that. Read The Full Story…

Your dreams are many symbols and allegories. When you venture into the realm of dream interpretation you must try to decode your dream, you need to analyze it into the individual fragments and examine each for its particular meaning. Every one contains a small piece of the entire picture. Dreams are composed of a collection of little parts of your own life experience that are stored away in your brain symbolically.

What type of dream are you dealing with?

To interpret your dreams, you need to determine what type of dream you are dealing with. There are two categories that they fit into, those that are generated from within your physical body and mind and those that come from your spirit guides or tutors. They have different purposes and its necessary to recognize what these differences mean to you and how they interact in your waking and dreaming state.

Physical body dreams

Food: Did you ever notice that when you take a nap after you’ve eaten lunch that you can have some crazy images go through your mind. The same thing happens at night too, because food can trigger some wild and wacky dreams. If you enjoy these psychedelic excursions, then take note of what you had to eat before hand and repeat the process. On the other hand, if you’re not interested, then take note of what you ate and make certain to avoid eating whatever it was. Food is one of the generators of dreams, which are not worth interpreting.

Health Your subconscious knows a lot about you that you don’t, or maybe don’t care to know. Often times it will tell you something about your practices or lifestyle to tip you off about what its needs are. In dreams it tries to get the point across to you, sometimes politely, at other times not so.

Psychology: Stressful relationships and social situations can cause our mind to get out of kilter but our subconscious intervenes to straighten things out. Read The Full Story…

Note: This guest post was written by Dr. Rick Donald. Check out his websites: www.stopmysnoringnow.com and www.slimtone.com.au

Snoring is a worldwide health concern that affects more than fifty percent of all adults and, yes, it can be successfully treated without the need to spend any more money on ‘yet another’ stop snoring treatment, or even worse still, on dangerous surgery.

But there’s no such thing as a ‘wonder snoring cure’, so stop looking for it right now because it doesn’t exist! In fact, if you do ever read about one, put it in the snake oil category along with magic potions to re-grow hair on a bald head. It’ll simply be a con.

Instead, the two best natural stop snoring treatments are to firstly address your daily food and drink intake and secondly, assess the impact of the lifestyle choices that you have made on whether you snore or not.

Otherwise you will always be behind the eight ball, because these contributing factors that may well be causing your snoring in the first place will still be there to haunt you and your sleeping partner, night after noisy night.

For example, it’s common knowledge that milk can cause upper respiratory tract congestion, which then may exacerbate snoring. But most snorers are unaware that consuming certain specific carbohydrates groups after 3pm, such as potatoes and dried fruit, can also influence whether they snore of not. Read The Full Story…

Note: This guest post was written by Dr. Rick Donald. Check out his websites: www.stopmysnoringnow.com and www.slimtone.com.au .

• Snoring is definitely no laughing matter. You may think it funny, even make jokes about it, but please, think again. Snoring is not only an annoying inconvenience for those sleeping within earshot, it can also be an indication of more deep-seated health issues. Snoring has been linked to marriage break-ups, engagements being called off, being socially black-listed when weekends away with friends are organized … even death.

• Now this last complication is a big call I know. And I am not talking here about a frustrated sleeping partner finally flipping out and pulling the trigger. Instead I am referring to actually dying either in your sleep, or departing from this world as a direct result of your snoring.

• Scary thought isn’t it, but it does actually happen. And unfortunately, the probability of this occurring actually affects more people than most of us would care to imagine. If someone does die as a result of their snoring, it is usually due to complications that have arisen as a result of the respiratory disorder Obstructive Sleep Apnea (O.S.A.).

• However luckily most snorers suffer from what is often referred to as ‘simple snoring’. They do not have the breathing disorder Sleep Apnea and this article primarily refers to this more common form of snoring. If you do feel that you may have O.S.A., always have it checked out by a healthcare professional because as mentioned, it can lead to serious health issues developing. Read The Full Story…

Sleep apnea affects numerous people. It is a condition where a person stops breathing while sleeping. It can affect anybody of any age, race, or gender. There are three types of sleep apnea: obstructive, central and mixed. The cause of each type is specific and determining which type you have is necessary to see what type of treatment you should get.

Only your doctor or sleep specialist can tell you which treatment option is best for you.

1. Obstructive Sleep Apnea (or O.S.A. for short) is about as bad as it gets. People may joke about it, but O.S.A. iscertainly no laughing matter because it can kill you. And according to the Mayo Clinic, up to 1 in 4 Americans suffer from this deadly health concern. Now this is a really worrying statistic to say the least.

- Positional therapy: Apneas be predisposed to be worse when sleeping on the back as gravity makes it more likely for the tongue to fall back over the airway and/or for the airway muscles and other tissue) to collapse and block the airway.

- Weight loss: Sleep apnea can be weight-related. Additional fat around the neck may make the airway narrower, making obstructions more likely to occur. For some overweight people, especially those with mild cases, losing weight can be an effective treatment. Read The Full Story…

Sleep is one of the body’s most mysterious processes. REM sleep is the part of sleep when there are rapid eye movements (REM). Dreams occur during REM sleep. We normally have 3 to 5 periods of REM sleep per night. They occur at intervals of 1-2 hours and are quite variable in length. An episode of REM sleep may last 5 minutes or over an hour. About 20% of sleep is REM sleep. If you sleep 7-8 hours a night, perhaps an hour and half of that time, 90 minutes, is REM sleep.

REM sleep is characterized by a number of other features including rapid, low-voltage brain waves detectable on the electroencephalographic (EEG) recording, irregular breathing and heart rate and involuntary muscle jerks.

During REM sleep, you dream actively, but your limb muscles are immobile. Your breathing is rapid, irregular, and shallow. Your heart rate increases, your blood pressure rises, males may have penile erections, and females may have clitoral enlargement. Your brain is at least as active during REM sleep as it is when you are awake.

Infants spend about 50 per cent of their sleep time in REM sleep; after infancy, you spend fifteen to twenty per cent of your sleep time in REM sleep.

REM Sleep Disorder Causes

The exact cause of REM sleep behavior disorder is unknown, although the disorder may occur in association with various degenerative neurological conditions such as Parkinson disease, multisystem atrophy, diffuse Lewy body dementia, and Shy-Drager syndrome. In 55% of persons the cause is unknown, and in 45%, the cause is associated with alcohol or sedative-hypnotic withdrawal, tricyclic antidepressant (such as imipramine), or serotonin reuptake inhibitor use (such as fluoxetine, sertraline, or paroxetine) or other types of antidepressants (mirtazapine). Read The Full Story…

Sleep and weight loss have a power connection. They are invert relation: sleep loss, weight gain and sleep more, weight loss. Sleep loss appears to do two worst things that affect our weight: boost the appetite that makes you take in more calories and reduce the metabolism which helps to burn calories.

Study:
Researchers at Laval University in Quebec looked at 276 people for six years who were part of a larger Canadian study.

Sleep duration was determined from a questionnaire and the participants were classified into three groups: short sleepers slept five to six hours a night, the average got seven to eight hours, and the long sleepers put in nine to 10 hours of sleep every night.

Some of the findings:
Over six years, short sleepers were 35% more likely to gain 11 pounds than average-duration sleepers.
Over the same time period, long sleepers were 25% more likely to gain 11 pounds than average-duration sleepers.
Short sleepers gained 58% more around their waists and 124% more body fat than the average sleeper.

Sleep Apnea and Weight
Weight loss to treat sleep apnea can create an interesting dilemma. While losing weight reduces the symptoms of sleep apnea, losing weight when you have sleep apnea can prove to be a difficult undertaking. The reason for this is simple: when you can’t get enough sleep, you are too tired to exercise for weight loss. Read The Full Story…

Aromatherapy treats mind and body together. The scent of the essential oils used can have a powerful effect on the emotions while the oils’ chemistry affects the body. There are many essential oils that can be used to help you relax or make it easier to get to sleep there are a few that are particularly good in fulfilling those needs.

Here is a description of each scent that make you sleep better:

1. Lavender – helps sooth and calm nerves, reduces tension, insomnia, headaches, and depression. Effects of lavender: Calming, Therapeutic

2. Bergamot comes from citrus fruit rind. It does its job by relieving stress and enabling the subject to relax. It has a lovely citrus scent that will make you feel refreshed and give you that sense of well-being. Interestingly bergamot is the main ingredient in earl grey tea.

3. Sweet Marjoram – helps treat anxiety, headaches, and insomnia. Effects of Sweet Marjoram : Soothing, Warming

4. Roman Chamomile – help relaxation, reduces excessive anxiety, and treats insomnia

Effects: Soothing, Relaxing

5. Sandalwood – promotes relaxation, beneficial for depression, stress, nervous tension, and insomnia Effects of Sandalwood: Warming, Relaxing

6. Mandarin - has two different types of oil, one green and the other red. It has several advantages one of which is that it is gentle enough that you can use it with children as well as adults. Interesting the scent is closer to that of a bergamot oil and less like the tangerine it’s expected to smell like. Mandarin oil is a very successful treatment for sleep difficulties almost rivaling lavender. Read The Full Story…