Blog
Sleep: How To Get A Good Night’s Sleep
A recent sleep survey produced some interesting results. We surveyed 781 people (face-to-face, by phone and by email), 368 of them were men and 413 were women.
Men sleep better than women: 21% of men surveyed say they never have problems sleeping, against 12% of women. 31% of women said they always or often had problems sleeping, as against 17% of men. We didn’t look into the reason for this as part of this survey, but one man said:
“I can’t really believe that we guys are more active
in the day, maybe we’re just giving the women too much to worry about.”
As well as gender differences there were also age differences. In general people in their 50’s have the most problem sleeping. 27% of women in their 50’s complained of health problems, mainly associated with the menopause, leading to a poor night’s sleep. People who are 70 and over are some of the best and some of the worst sleepers. 20% report never having any problem sleeping – this is only beaten by people in their 30’s (22%). But people in their 70’s also sleep the worst of all the groups – 32% always or often have problems sleeping.
The reasons people give for their inability to sleep does vary between the sexes: women are more likely to get up to go to the toilet in the night than men (32% as against 25%), and are more likely to be disturbed by anxiety and repetitive thoughts (44% as against 35%). Just over a third of men and women gave difficulty in switching off from the day as a reason for a restless night.
A third of respondents found difficulty both getting to sleep and staying asleep, although this wasn’t necessarily every night. Once again there were gender differences with men finding it more difficult to get to sleep, and women finding more problems staying asleep.
Strange as it may seem sleeping does not reduce our calorie intake that much, so it seems unlikely that we sleep to conserve energy. So why do we sleep? No one knows for certain, but many scientists believe that the brain appears to restructure information from the previous day during sleep. The old adage about the benefits of ‘sleeping on a problem’ may well be true. This may be part of the reason why babies sleep so much – they have so much new information to process. Sleep may be more important for the correct functioning of the brain than for any other part of the body.
This is where hypnosis and EFT come in. Listening to a soothing hypnosis CD, or even using relaxation techniques such as focusing on deep breathing as you scan your body from head to toe relaxing each muscle at a time will refocus your mind and relax you physically and mentally. Mentally tapping the EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) points while laying comfortably in bed will also work. Since the subconscious mind does not hear negatives, saying “I can’t sleep” while mentally each point will result in a message of “I can sleep” to the subconscious mind which will then take this direction and follow through. Remember that it really is “All in your mind!”, so using hypnosis and EFT will refocus the mental chatter into a deep, sound, natural sleep. For more information on insomnia hypnosis and subliminal CDs check out my store…Drifting into Sleep, Sleep…Naturally, Ease into sleep etc. Sweet dreams!
