“Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker is the most compelling book on the importance of sleep.
After reading the book I became even more certain, that being able to sleep well and long enough is one of the most powerful cures and prevention medicine for most ailments.
The book is a summary of scientific research on sleep to date, providing insight on how sleep affects cognitive and physical performance in both the short and long term, and what you can do improve your own sleep.
Any individual, no matter what age, will exhibit physical ailments, mental health instability, reduced alertness, and impaired memory if their sleep is chronically disrupted.
Sleep is therefore the most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day and hypnotherapy can help a great deal with improving quality of sleep.
What happens if we don’t sleep long enough?
Obtain anything less than eight hours of sleep a night, and especially less than six hours a night, and the following happen:
• Concentration failures – Playing out most obviously and fatally in the form of drowsy driving.
• Cognitive impairment – Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance.
• Emotional and psychiatric problems.
• Memory loss.
• Increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, dementia, diabetes, and cancer—all have recognized causal links to a lack of sleep.
• Weight gain – short sleep will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.
• Immunodeficiency – sleep deprivation vastly increases your likelihood of infection and reduces your response to flu vaccine.
Trance or Hypnosis is a very powerful therapeutic tool to address sleeping issues and prevent ailments.
How do you know if you are sleeping enough?
If you didn’t set an alarm clock, would you wake up on time?
Do you find yourself re-reading things?
Do you need caffeine to function optimally before noon?
If the answer to any of these three questions is yes, then it is very likely that you suffer from sleep deficiency.
What are the benefits of sleeping well?
• REM sleep exquisitely recalibrates and fine-tunes the emotional circuits of the human brain; help up empty the stress bucket and be more in control of our emotions.
• Sleep fuels creativity.
• Of the many advantages conferred by sleep on the brain, that of memory is especially impressive, and particularly well understood. Sleep has proven itself time and again as a memory aid: both before learning, to prepare your brain for initially making new memories, and after learning, to cement those memories and prevent forgetting.
• Post-performance sleep accelerates physical recovery from common inflammation, stimulates muscle repair, and helps restock cellular energy in the form of glucose and glycogen.
What’s Stopping You from Sleeping?
Six key factors have powerfully changed how much and how well we sleep:
(1) constant electric light as well as LED light. A good start is to create lowered, dim light in the rooms where you spend your evening hours and stay away from screens. Maintaining complete darkness throughout the night is equally critical, the easiest fix for which comes from blackout curtains. Finally, you can install software on your computers, phones, and tablet devices that gradually de-saturate the harmful blue LED light as evening progresses.
(2) regularised temperature. Room temperature, bedding, and nightclothes dictate the thermal envelope that wraps around your body at night. A bedroom temperature of around 18°C is ideal for the sleep of most people, assuming standard bedding and clothing.
(3) caffeine.
(4) alcohol
(5) long working hours
(6) excessive stress
So how can you improve you sleep?
Rule #1 – Stick to a sleep schedule.
Rule #2 – Exercise is great, but not too late in the day. Try to exercise at least thirty minutes on most days but not later than two to three hours before your bedtime.
Rule #3 – Avoid caffeine and nicotine.
Rule #4 – Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed.
Rule #5 – Avoid large meals and beverages late at night.
Rule #6 – If possible, avoid medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep.
Rule #7 – Don’t take naps after 3 p.m.
Rule #8 – Relax before bed. Don’t overschedule your day so that no time is left for unwinding. A relaxing activity, such as reading or listening to music, should be part of your bedtime ritual.
Rule #9 – Take a hot bath before bed whenever you can.
Rule #10 – Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom.
Rule #11 – Don’t lie in bed awake.
If you are already doing all of this with no luck, try Solution Focused Hypnotherapy. No past or current sleeping medications on the legal (or illegal) market induce natural sleep. One of the most effective way of treating insomnia is Solution Focused Hypnotherapy. Working with a hypnotherapist for several weeks, patients are provided with bespoke tools intended to break bad sleep habits and address anxieties that have been inhibiting sleep.
Matthew Paul Walker is an English scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a public intellectual focused about sleep.