This means you need some strategies to break you out of any bad habits you may have been starting to form or have been repeating for a long time.

Insomnia comes about without warning and very quickly becomes all consuming. And very quickly you can watch your quality of life diminish; not only do you not sleep well but this lack of sleeping starts to affect all areas of your life.

So many insomniacs suffer from constant anxiety about sleeping. In fact that is how I started helping people with this problem. Most my clients with insomnia came to me originally seeking assistance with anxiety. Often the inability to sleep would trigger the anxiety and then this would make the insomnia worse. A big problem just got much bigger, and will continue to snowball until you do something effective about it.

Lots of people will turn to sleeping pills. Yet, did you know, there is lots of evidence to suggest that sleeping pills will do more harm than good. Sure they can be a great tool if used for the short term in certain cases. But many of my clients who have tried them, tell me they find they didn’t work. In fact, many report that they did not even help their quality of sleep, which was very poor, and the next day they still felt a bit off, and they still had the sleep trouble. Nothing was addressed, except a possible dependency on something now that was neither really working nor adding to life. So if you become dependent on them, you have to deal with the potential side effects of taking these drugs.

Very many clients come to me with innumerable misunderstandings about sleep and myths – which they seem to think are facts. And the beliefs they have can cause such big problems. These need to be addressed, because what you may not be aware of is that you may have some beliefs that are actually causing you more pain and without attending to them you will not be able to be free.

You have probably already come across the need for healthy night time rituals and used lots of relaxation techniques and tricks – if not check out my blog for lots of tips and insights. For some of you this will be enough to help you. But most of you will need to go deeper. Let me explain why.

Stress in its many different forms is the culprit – or more truthfully it’s more our inability to properly deal with stress. We just accumulate it in our bodies. We store it as tension and we keep doing this a little, bit by bit, until we have stored too much. We can only accumulate so much before we have problems manifesting in our bodies.

When someone has had too much trauma in their life or too much stress (constant or intense) your nervous systems’ ability to deal with this often becomes far less adaptable. Stress triggers the ‘fight or flight’ sympathetic response. Our bodies become tenser, our minds are racing, we feel energy surging through our bodies, often at the wrong times, and so we can’t rest. This fight or flight mode is built for survival, but at night we are meant to increase our ‘rest and digest’ parasympathetic output. Consequently, if you go to bed with the fight or fight ‘switch’ still on you’re not going to have any restful sleep or, worse, any sleep.

In our Wellness clinic we have techniques for achieving greater mind–body control to improve not only sleep but also overall health and wellbeing that are truly transformational. This is more than just learning how to sleep better – it’s about improving yourself and your life. Obviously, the better you sleep the more energy you will have for life. And the better your body is at dealing with stress the healthier you will be.

Many researchers believe that stress is the cause of 95% of all our diseases. And if you’re at the point where you have insomnia then your body is screaming at you to make a change, to do something. The first step is to break you out of some of these disruptive night time rituals that you have created and to lower the stress that is stored in the body – this is a must!

How we help people at Inspiring Wellness:

• Reduce fight or flight – Sympathetic Nervous system over activity
• Release stress that has been anchored into the body. This effects your posture and your breathing. For example, if you are going to bed with tension your quality of sleep is far less effective too and you wake up feeling tired. Less tension equals better sleep and a more restful start to the day – wake up with more energy.
• Help you uncover your patterns of thought that are causing your pain and get control of your thinking patterns (this is very important)
• Learn a few techniques that you can do before bed and if you were to wake up in the night can help you more easily get back to sleep – worry free. This is the most valuable tool that gives people control over the situation: it is what my clients tell me has helped them change the most.

The body and mind are connected. Our work is focused on the nervous system to give you more peace in your body and mind.

If you are struggling with insomnia,  come in and see us, so you can get some sleep – not in my office though ☺