Justin wakes up every night at 3am on the dot and can’t fall back asleep. He’s been doing this for over 10 years.
This inability to fall asleep is a pattern that, once repeated over time can translate into a deeply embedded habit. Unconsciously, this pattern will override the mind’s natural habit of falling and staying asleep.
“I’ve always been a bad sleeper”. For Justin, this was a belief that he had convinced himself was true.
He had said something like this to himself hundreds of times. So did his mother. As a child, when he woke up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, he would see her reading a book or watching TV, because ‘she couldn’t fall asleep’. It was often a topic of discussion at breakfast as he grew up. When he himself began having difficulty falling asleep during stressful times in his career, he was not surprised. He described this habit as inherited when instead, it was a belief about himself that was learned from his mother and supported by his own expectation.
There is an old adage about what you expect to happen is likely to happen and it’s quite true of the way our unconscious mind helps us to perform the most natural physical processes. If you think you’re a bad sleeper, you have already set the unconscious expectation and your mind will likely follow through.
Hypnotherapy is the process of communicating with the higher organizing unconscious part of our mind to change beliefs that interfere with our mental, emotional or physical wellbeing.
Justin had the ability to fall asleep all along but through seeing his mother’s struggle with insomnia, he learned to expect that he couldn’t. In a hypnotic trance, he learned to train his mind to restore his natural ability to fall asleep and to stay asleep all night.
Now he refers to himself as a “good sleeper”.
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