Articles

Sleep disorder


(Note to the reader : Please go through the complete details, as I am sure it is going to help you understand your situation.)
 
Many people these days experience difficulty in sleeping at night, which is the normal accepted time for rest for a human being. There are many books written on the subject and practically all systems of medicine have prescriptions to help you sleep.
 
Most people complain of not being able to sleep because of worry and stress. One other major reason for not being able to sleep is pain because of any physical ailment/condition. Also there are some pains which the medical doctors are not able to find the cause by any diagnostic technique and keep calling them psychosomatic, but they also cause sleep disorder in any case.
 
Now before we proceed further, let us understand ‘how we go into sleep from a waking state’ and ‘the state of sleep’.
 
All of us have some understanding of psychology, and we know there are two parts of the mind- a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. We will limit ourselves with these two parts only for our understanding of the state of sleep.
 
We can understand the ‘state of sleep’ better if we look at the ‘relation of the state of sleep’ vis-à-vis conscious and the subconscious mind.
 
Let us look at the following table which gives us a relationship between conscious mind, subconscious mind, waking state and the sleeping state.
 
 

 

A

B

C

MIND
Waking state

Transition to/from sleeping state

Sleeping state

Conscious mind

Awake

Has control


Awake


Asleep

Subconscious mind

Awake

Awake

Taking control

Awake

Has control

 

  1. The conscious mind
  1. Awake- In the waking state all sense organs are in ‘connect’ with the conscious mind. Hence the conscious mind is able to get input from the sense organs-eyes (visual), ears (sound), nose (smell), tongue (taste), and skin and hands (touch). This information (inputs) is processed in the conscious mind and then it takes a decision for action to be taken. This decision is passed on to the brain to convert it into action for executing the decision, using our muscles,etc.
  1. Has control-·The conscious mind has a primary function of protecting the human from any threat to life.
  1. The subconscious mind
  1. It is always awake at all times whether we are awake or sleeping. It takes care of all autonomic functions of the physical body, e.g. breathing, blood circulation, digestion, etc. without our knowing. It also has to respond to inputs from senses instinctively. (e.g. Makes you run if you see a bull coming towards you at a speed.)
  1. The conscious mind
  1. During the day and in our waking time, the conscious mind receives a lot of information –message units (MUs), similar to bits and bytes of the computer. As the space where the conscious mind stores this information (MUs) is limited (specific for the individual), it keeps getting saturated. Then the processing of the information being received from the sense organs gets impacted and it becomes slow and difficult. As a result we feel sleepy and tired and have the desire to sleep.
  1.  We look for a place to lie down to free the body from holding its weight, and also a safe place where it will remain protected.
  1. Once we lie down, we start the process of transiting from the ‘waking’ state to a ‘sleeping’ state.
  1. Let us look step by step as to what could be happening when the conscious mind is transiting from the waking state to the sleeping state,because it has the secret of our inability to sleep.
  1. The conscious mind
  1. While the conscious mind is in the sleep state, it gets disconnected from all inputs from the sense organs.
  1.  It keeps working on all the MUs collected during the day and goes into a maintenance mode. It updates data bases in the subconscious mind, with the experiences of the day, and removes duplicates and/or establishes hyperlinks to similar data and experience.
  1. Ultimately the storehouse of the conscious mind become completely clean, and when we get up we feel fresh in the morning.
  1. Subconscious
  1. The subconscious remains fully awake, keeping the physical body alive, all autonomous functions keep getting performed, e.g. breathing, digestion, blood circulation, healing, growth, repair, etc.
  1. It has full control of the situation as it keeps receiving the inputs from the sensory organs with respect to ‘threat to life’ perception.
  1. The moment it receives a threat information like ‘smoke smell’ or ‘somebody touches the body that we are not familiar with’, it immediately awakens the conscious mind and tells it to investigate the threat, while handing over control to it completely and so the sleeping to waking up process gets initiated in reverse.
  1. If we slept well, the normal waking up process starts, similarly.
  1. from disconnecting itself from the inputs from the sense organs,
  1. from discontinuing the processing of thoughts within the conscious mind, and
  1. from handing over the control to the subconscious.
  1. Relaxation technique:
  1. This is a technique of relaxation that is embedded in a person when s/he is under a hypnotic trance (which is a very relaxed state of the physical body).
  1. The mind is given a trigger to associate with this ‘relaxed state’.
  1. So when the trigger is invoked by the mind in a defined manner, even in a conscious state, it tells the brain to create the ‘relaxed state’ as associated in the mind with the body.
  1. The person is able to ‘relax in a very short time’.
  1. You need to go to a hypnotherapist to help you do this.
  1. Entering sleep state after using self-hypnosis and giving yourself a suggestion at the end of inducing the self-hypnosis state.

 

Understanding

  1. The Waking state

    Characteristics of the waking state.

      1. ·It has to ensure that the soul-mind-body combination is always together, i.e. first take that action that prevents death, which is the separation of soul-mind from the body.

        To do that when it processes the inputs from the senses, it first looks for signs of ‘threat to life’, e.g. we may be doing anything but if we smell smoke we will leave everything and first look for the source of smoke, as we know fire can cause death.

        Hence we say that when we are awake the conscious mind has control, only when it does not perceive ‘threat to life’, it processes information to do what you intend to do, at that time, or we say the control is always with the conscious mind.

  2. Transition to/from sleeping state

      1. ·First step -the conscious mind remains awake for some time and transfers its control on the human to the subconscious mind, because it has to ensure that while it goes to sleep (disconnects itself from all sense organs), the human has to sense the threat to life to remain protected.

        ·Second step- when the conscious mind has evaluated that the transfer of control is complete to the subconscious, it relaxes fully and goes to sleep.

        ·Third step- All senses get disconnected from the conscious mind, but feed to the sub-conscious mind only that information that is related to ‘threat to life’.

  3. Sleeping state

Insomnia/inability to sleep

This brings us to the topic of this paper.

From ‘A’ above we can understand what is happening when we are not able to sleep. To put it simply, inability to sleep is the inability of the conscious mind.

Solution

The common denominator for the three above to happen is to be able to relax, because as you relax at the point of sleeping, all above happen and one can sleep comfortably.

What all can be done ‘to relax the physical body’ and ‘make the mind calm’ and how can hypnotherapy help you to relax?

I am giving the insight received during various sessions to help clients get over their sleep disorders:

When you go to your bed to sleep, use the following techniques in the given sequence.

To learn self-hypnosis you will have to go to a Hypnotherapist, who will also construct ‘your specific suggestion for sleep’ that you need to use, depending on your own condition of not being able to sleep.