Sleeping Techniques and Natural Sleeping Remedies
For those who find it hard to get to sleep or stay asleep here are a few natural sleeping remedies that may help.
Cognitive focusing This technique focuses on positive thoughts and pleasant images and is especially useful when you wake in the middle of the night with your mind racing with anxieties preventing a return to dream land. Visualizing actual scenes on a movie screen or even as if you are there is a great way to set yourself up to relax and let the cares and worries fade to nothing. A perfect scenario would be a beach scene where you picture yourself walking along with the sand pressing between your toes, the sun warmly caressing your skin, the sounds of children playing and the waves lapping. You find a quiet sheltered spot to lie down and feel the weight of your body filling the soft sand as all the worries disappear into the blue haze and you’re asleep.
Progressive muscle relaxation This is especially useful if you have high muscle tension. Get in a comfortable position lying on your back, legs out straight, arms by your side and eyes closed. There are 640 muscle groups in the body but with this technique focus on the major ones. Tense each muscle group in turn and hold for a few moments then suddenly let them go limp. Wait for a few more moments thinking about the difference in the sensation between the muscles whilst tense and relaxed. Start at the feet and work up your body tensing and relaxing each large muscle group until you reach your head, that’s as long as you aren’t fast asleep by then.
Sleep restriction therapy It might seem counter intuitive that restricting sleep is a way to treat insomnia but it helps when too much time is spent in bed with too little sleeping. This technique helps those people who have problems sleeping and have disrupted their sleeping patterns by going to bed at markedly different times of the day or night. If you think you normally sleep for 4 hours even though you have gone to bed to give yourself every opportunity to get 8 hours, then sleep restriction therapy says that you should start by spending just 4 hours in bed. This time gradually increases until you get enough sleep, probably around 7 to 8 hours.
Sleep affirmations If you are one of those people who need absolute silence with no distractions before you fall to sleep then the likelihood is that you were the firstborn. Parents are keen to keep everything quiet around their new firstborn even though babies are likely to sleep through anything, something parents often realize with subsequent newborns. So in this pristine quietude babies learn that perfect sleep comes only from these quiet circumstances. Of course these perfect conditions are rarely found but if you are someone who needs such conditions, try teaching yourself to sleep by silently repeating the following as you lie in readiness. I will sleep deep and easy throughout the night and only wake up for an emergency. It is amazing and true what you can train yourself to hear specifically above any background noise when you are sleeping; like a mother only tuning in to her baby breathing for instance.
Stimulus control therapy If, when you think of your bed or bedroom, you think nice, sleepy, comfortable, relaxing thoughts then you are probably a good sleeper but if your associations with your bedroom is negative and include worries, thinking too much or simply lying awake in bed then you probably suffer from some form of sleeping problems. How we behave can be affected by the objects around us or by the association that we have with those objects. Changing the message we receive from the objects around us is called stimulus control therapy and for people with sleep problems it means learning to regard the bed and bedroom as a comfortable space for indulging in those 2 (of 3) mainstays of life sleeping and sex.
Lifestyle changes It’s important to first understand the need for and mechanics of sleep and then examine the daily patterns of your life to see what factors may be having a negative effect on the quality and quantity of sleep. These factors will include your diet, amount and time of day that you exercise, work and leisure routine, your relationships and the pattern of your sleep-wake regime. This is too big a subject to be properly covered here.
For many who have had sleeping problems these natural sleeping remedies are some of the many sleeping techniques that have proved successful.
About the Author
Lelliot has been a long term sufferer of insomnia and movement related sleep disorders and has been researching into natural sleeping remedies and all things sleep related for about 15 years. Get more insights into sleeping plus a free email mini-course at www.SleepandSleepingTips.com.
Bliss – Sleep Will Come
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