Our ‘hypnotherapy for sleep’ sessions can help you enhance your sleep naturally.
Shift Sleep Hypnosis sessions teach you how to get to sleep naturally and how to get back to sleep quickly should you awaken during the night.
Using the tools of hypnotherapy and counselling we will work with you to re-train your mind -moving it away from any negative thoughts that might be interrupting your restful deep sleep.
Our hypnosis therapist team can:
help you to deal with any issues such as stress or anxiety that are preventing you from drifting off to sleep;
teach you self-hypnosis techniques to quickly access your Theta brain wave activity so that you can access natural Delta sleep patterns and enjoy greater restorative sleep;
teach you unique ways of getting back to sleep should you awaken.
How hypnotherapy can help sleep problems and sleep disorders
Studies have shown that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can be enhanced by adding hypnosis to the process. Hypnosis is a focusing technique, a way of focusing your mind on the kinds of thoughts or images that can prepare you mentally and physically for accomplishing whatever you’re striving to accomplish. It’s all about being in the right frame of mind to reach your goals.
Sleep hypnosis techniques are a process of building a frame of mind. Whether it’s a frame of mind to take better care of yourself, perform better on a task of some sort, or, as in this program, the frame of mind to sleep well and form a new sleep foundation.
Sleep hypnosis sessions are considered a cognitive behavioural intervention, delivered hypnotically.
The purpose of learning self-hypnosis techniques when it’s time to go to sleep will help you fall asleep naturally, more quickly, and more easily. You will enjoy better sleep quality and sleep outcomes (alertness, attention span etc) using the focus and relaxation of hypnosis to help you.
What is hypnosis?
When you think of hypnosis, you may imagine what you’ve seen on TV during stage hypnosis or in a movie. Clinical hypnosis is very different and it can’t make you do anything that you don’t want to do. When you’re in hypnosis, it is called being in a trance state or hypnotic state.
Trance is like being in deep meditation. It uses guided relation, concentration and focused attention to achieve heightened awareness. Your body will be relaxed and you’ll usually feel calmer. These benefits are often an enormous relief from the symptoms of anxiety and rumination.
In this relaxed state, you can access your subconscious mind – those deeper parts of yourself that are sometimes not immediately apparent.
Over 90% of your mind is subconscious and this is where our most deep-seated beliefs and values are stored. By accessing this part of ourselves, we can treat you and make significant changes.
Sometimes part of our sleep hypnosis treatments includes helping to release emotions and past traumas so that you can heal and overcome anxiety symptoms and have a deeper, more restful sleep.
It is in the safety of the relaxed state of hypnosis that you can more easily process any triggers and treat your concerns directly.
This means you can begin to build a bridge between the fearful experience – your anxiety – and the present and teach your mind and body to trust. Trust that it is now safe and that you can choose how you would like to respond in any given circumstance.
What are the signs and symptoms of sleep issues?
Sleep is such a basic biological function that many people never even think about it. It’s just something they do. It poses no special problems for them, and they usually sleep well. For many people, sleep comes easily and is a source of genuine rejuvenation and even pleasure.
For many others though, perhaps including you, sleep doesn’t come very easily at all, and may even be a source of stress rather than replenishment.
Sleep difficulties can arise for many different reasons, some of them relatively superficial, like too much coffee or vigorous physical exercise too close to bedtime, and others more serious, such as anxiety or depression. The relationship between sleep problems and anxiety or depression is a particularly strong one. In fact, more than 90% of patients who suffer major depressive episodes report sleep difficulties, making it the single most frequent complaint of depressed patients. Sleep studies show that the sleep cycles really are thrown off during depressive episodes – and it’s not just the person’s imagination.
My sleep quality isn’t great – is this a sign of something else?
Even if you’re not depressed, there is something to be learned about sleep problems from the research on depression. Depression most often co-exists with anxiety together and their negative effect on sleep can be quite severe. Poor sleep naturally makes things even worse, perhaps exacerbating a bad mood, bringing about poor job performance and disrupting your social schedule. Disrupting this schedule can lead you to be sleepy when you’re awake and awake when you should be asleep.
Sleep problems lead people to try all kinds of things to cope – from taking sleep medications to drinking alcohol. Alcohol is a particularly poor choice to make since it has been shown in brain scans to aggravate the same neural pathways as depression. Alcohol may reduce anxiety in the short run, but it creates many more problems than it solves and so should be avoided in people who have issues with their sleep.
What about sleep medications?
Medications intended to help people sleep better can end up becoming more of a problem than a solution, particularly when they are using them more than occasionally. Potential problems aside, the reality is that sleep medications don’t work as well or as effectively in the long term. Developing good sleep skills are a more natural and effective clinical sleep medicine.
Are you experiencing one, or several, of these symptoms of a sleep disorder?
The disturbance in people’s sleep patterns generally takes one of three forms.
The first pattern is when you have difficulty falling asleep initially. This is called initial or sleep onset insomnia and for some people results in chronic insomnia. It is most often associated with anxiety such as worrying and negativing thinking at sleep time.
The second pattern of disturbance is when you have difficulty staying asleep, falling to sleep quickly and easily, but waking up after only a couple of hours, then having difficulty falling back asleep. This is a pattern called middle insomnia and can arise for many different reasons from excessive worry to a weak bladder.
The third pattern of sleep disturbance is when you wake up much too early in the morning, well before the time that he or she actually needs to wake up. This pattern is called terminal insomnia as it is a disruption of the terminal or final phase of sleep. This pattern is most common among people suffering from depression.
In each case, the inability to sleep can take its toll on you, your body and your life. It can leave you walking around feeling tired, deeply fatigued, and as if your head is in ‘a bit of a fog.’ Sleep deprivation makes it difficult to think critically and it’s difficult to make good decisions. Consequently, you may end up feeling quite irritable or sensitive and moody. And so, stemming from the sleep disturbance itself (whatever its cause might be), there can be other problems that arise on other levels of your daily life.
Does hypnosis work for treating sleep difficulties?
There is much evidence to support this. In a recent study published in the medical journal Archives of Internal Medicine, psychotherapy interventions like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) easily outperformed the prescribed sleep medication in people with sleep problems. People fell asleep more quickly, stayed asleep more regularly and experienced restorative sleep. They also saw a measurable increase in sleep ‘efficiency’ which is the number of hours of actual asleep in relation to the amount of time available to sleep.
These are impressive results. People are generally much better off learning to guide themselves to sleep than using medications. Unless it’s just a very short term use – for the occasional difficult night that everyone experiences from time to time. When people take the time to give sleep the attention it deserves, addressing the very issues that are addressed in the Shift at Brisbane Natural Health sleep hypnosis sessions, their sleep improves and stays improved over time.
How clean is your sleep hygiene?
Sleep experts agree on certain specific recommendations what many experts call sleep hygiene.
Good sleep hygiene refers to the kinds of good habits people can develop to give them better sleep. Some of the most important of these include:
honouring the body’s natural biological rhythms by going to sleep at roughly the same time each night;
minimising disruptions to your body’s need for a consistent sleep wake cycle;
avoiding eating or drinking heavy foods, caffeinated or alcoholic drinks well before bed;
making sure the room you sleep in is quiet, dark and cool in temperature;
not using your bed for working, reading or watching television so you can condition yourself to use the bed only for sleep; and
using the skills of relaxing and focusing on pleasant images or sensations to lead you into sleep.
Getting your headspace right for deep sleep
Are you problem solving or ruminating?
One especially prominent factor that influences your quality of sleep is rumination. Rumination is the anxiety-provoking and frustrating tendency to spin around and around and around the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same concerns over and over again in your head.
It is a redundant process of endlessly worrying about, and analysing, your ongoing issues and problems. Trying to analyse and solve problems at the time you’re trying to go to sleep is counterintuitive. It only agitates you and prevents good, restful sleep. Problem solving is best left to your waking hours. But it means establishing a clear limit or boundary such that when you go to bed, you strive to clear your mind of the everyday stresses and concerns.
Bedtime is not problem solving time
Learning new ways to clear your mind at bedtime should be a consistent goal because bedtime is not problem solving time. Many people spend too little quality time with themselves each day because they’re always externally focused – wrapped up in their tasks or responsibilities and meeting the demands that life places on them. Being so busy, you may not have much time to think carefully about your experiences and reflect and process them, but everyone needs time to think and problem solve.
Everyone needs time to think about their lives and the actions they need to take in order to live well. The natural time to do so is when you finally have some quiet time to yourself to do your thinking and processing. Unfortunately, that time is most often when you go to sleep. When you’re alone with your thoughts and there’s little to distract you.
But if you want to sleep well, from the time you go to bed to the time you wake up well rested in the morning, strive to have your mind clear of unnecessary clutter.
To help accomplish this, try and set aside sufficient problem solving time and thinking time throughout the rest of the day. Create pockets in your day where you can have time to think and reflect and make good decisions. Don’t have to give up your sleep time to ruminate about ongoing issues and concerns in your life.
Do you wonder what goes through people’s minds who sleep well when they are falling asleep?
We think we know the answer and it is not much.
Or, if they wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and come back to bed, there is nothing in particular on their minds so they fall back asleep. There is nothing immediate pressing on them. They feel no internal pressure to solve problems, or to hash and rehash the injustices or the difficulties of life. It’s not that they don’t have problems – of course they do just like you and me and everyone else. They just don’t focus on them when it’s time to sleep. Everything fades into the distance for the good sleeper. For right then it’s just about going to sleep and nothing else.
Good internal boundaries for problem solving
Can you see how important good internal boundaries are to help separate sleep time from problem solving time? Good personal boundaries are so important in so many ways, including making sleep better. And so this is the target we’re aiming for in this program’s experiential process, being able to distance yourself greatly from the everyday concerns and issues so that you can have some quiet time in your mind to be able to sleep more comfortably and with greater rejuvenation as a result. Always remember, it is your ability to create a peaceful and pleasant atmosphere within yourself that makes sleep possible. Learning to manage worry and keep it out of your bed. Learning to relax and focus on the positive and building good sleep habits are all vital skills to master if you want to sleep well.
Pricing
An initial hypnotherapy appointment is $195 and is approximately 90 minutes long. Return appointments are $180 and are one hour long. Our well-known Quit Smoking Program is just $695 for the session.
Booking
You can book your appointment using our easy online appointment scheduler 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Book your hypnotherapy appointment here.
The current wait time for an appointment is approximately 1-3 weeks – be sure to check the next few weeks for availability in your search results. If you have an urgent concern that cannot wait, please call us on 07 3367 0337 and we will do our best to fit you in earlier.
Arrival
When you arrive at Shift at Brisbane Natural Health you will start your appointment with our hypnotist learning more about you and what you’d like to work on using hypnotherapy. During the initial 90 minute session, we spend a lot of time guiding you into a relaxed state. We want to create an environment where you feel safe and secure and able to share your issues. We have an amazing team who will make sure you are comfortable during and after your session.
Treatment
Hypnotherapy can help to facilitate some profound changes in your body. Patients that benefit the most are those that have identified that they have some habits, behaviours or thought processes that are not healthy – and they want to make a change.
There are several reasons to try hypnotherapy for sleep, anxiety and depression or weight loss or quit smoking hypnosis at Shift at Brisbane Natural Health.
Hypnotherapy is safe, affordable and effective for the treatment of many issues including experiencing a very relaxing sleep hypnosis. Think of it as healing and strengthening the mental and emotional part of you. The part where we often store our most deep-seated fears and the part which can stop us from reaching our full potential.
Providers of clinical hypnotherapy to help with sleep
At Shift at Brisbane Natural Health, we have a range of services that can help you improve your mental health and ultimately, help you live a happier and healthier life.
We are here to support you with any mental health condition you are concerned about. People often come to us with anxiety disorders and have been to their medical doctor, or sought other professional medical advice that has been unable to help them long term.
You will leave after your appointment with a hypnosis recording session to listen to at night so you can continue to consistently retrain your mind and your neural pathways towards better sleep.
Related services
Ready to see a Shift Hypnotherapist?
Hypnotherapy appointments can be done face-to-face or online from anywhere in the world. We help our patients with hypnotherapy every day to work through all kinds of issues including anxiety and other mental health conditions.
At Shift, our highly trained hypnotherapist Gary Cosier uses a combination of hypnotherapy, psychotherapy and other techniques to help you to Shift your mind.
Head here to book an appointment online or call us on 07 3667 0337.
