People Building produce Hypnosis MP3s which you can purchase from their website or from iTunes. There are Hypnotherapy audios available for those who want to get better at getting to sleep at night.

Here are some other useful things for you to think about: You must have some sort of bedtime routine. This is important because it gets your body into a habit of knowing what to expect next, so if you have a bath before you go to bed that’s a great way to relax and that lets your body know it’s wind-down time and of course in order for your brain to switch off and allow you to go to sleep, first of all your body has to relax. It’s kind of the same in hypnosis – in that your body relaxes first and then the mind can follow.

And let’s face it, the two things are not that dissimilar. We know for example that the word hypnosis comes from the Greek word Hypnos which means sleep. It’s a great misconception to think that hypnosis is sleep, they’re not the same. There’s different levels of brain activity that occurs between sleep and being in hypnosis.

Hypnosis would be a lighter version of sleep, even though they’re on the same kind of sliding scale. When we do professional hypnotherapy training for those who wish to become a hypnotherapist, we have what we call a sleep curve to demonstrate this. The top of that sleep curve is ‘Beta’, which is your usual awakened bright and lovely state. Then there’s ‘Alpha’ state. Now a lot of us spend most of our time there as well because we’re floating in and out of daydreaming and imagining and watching TV and being in a light trance when doing things like that.

And then we move into ‘Theta’ and this is where we start to move into the sleep side of things. This is when we drift into a light to medium level of sleep. At the very lower level is ‘Delta’ and Delta is your deep, dreamless relaxing sleep.

Delta is the kind of sleep that you have when you get into bed and go to sleep then wake up and it feels like only three minutes has passed by, even though you might have been there for hours. Your body is in exactly the same position and you had not moved at all. In theta state it would tend to be are more of a rapid eye movement kind of a sleep – so a dream sleep. A sleep where you’re asleep but your mind is still busy filing things and sorting information out and if anyone were to watch you they might see you moving around a little bit in that sleep. Your eyes moving under your lids and your body being perhaps a little bit twitchy.

It’s no good coming home from a busy day and trying to jump straight into bed. You need to have that little bit of wind down time first.

There are obvious considerations such as not eating too late, not drinking too late, avoiding caffeine and avoiding alcohol. All those things will affect your sleep quality. So, if you’re having issues with sleep at the moment whether it’s ‘I can’t get to sleep at night’ or whether it’s ‘I get to sleep at night but I wake up a couple of hours later and can’t get back to sleep’, really have to think about those things and what it is you know the quality of the stuff that you’re eating during the day.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk