Sleep and the Monkey Mind

Here is another chance to listen to the audio presentation:  Calming the Monkey Mind and get for practical tips and strategies to relax your mind and get to sleep quickly.

The phrase ‘Monkey Mind’ is a Buddhist term which can mean uncontrollable, unsettled, erratic, confused or indecisive. Just as a monkey jumps from tree to tree, so our minds can jump from one topic to another, seemingly outside of our control, no matter how hard we try to stop it.  Almost as if our mind has a mind of its own!

In this audio recording, you will get:

• 6 tips to get your body and mind into a state of deep relaxation so that you can go to sleep

• Information about the biological reasons that can cause our thoughts to get stuck on a mental treadmill

• Information about 3 states of consciousness and how these states help us to sleep or keep us awake
• You’ll also learn why trying to empty your mind can sometimes be the worse thing you can do

To access the recording immediately, please enter your email address in the form below:

What type of insomnia do you have?

What type of insomnia do you have?

Insomnia is usually defined as trouble falling sleeping, trouble staying asleep or waking up too early.

But there are many different reasons or causes of insomnia.

Secondary Insomnia

For example, Sally experiences insomnia because chronic back pain keeps her awake. Sally suffers from secondary insomnia.

Secondary insomnia is where your sleeping difficulties are a sort of side effect of another illness or condition such as depression, chronic pain, asthma or menopausal symptoms.

Primary Insomnia

Richard is now in his thirties. But he’s been unable to sleep since he was four years old. Apart from never having been able to sleep well, Richard is in quite good health. He doesn’t have a stressful job and he lives in a quiet area.

Richard suffers from a form of primary insomnia.

Primary insomnia refers to long term sleeping problems that can’t be attributed to an illness, noise in the environment or a psychological illness.

Idiopathic Insomnia

Idiopathic insomnia is a rare form of primary insomnia. This is where someone has had trouble sleeping since their childhood in spite of being in otherwise good health, suffering no stress, not having bad sleeping habits and not having any psychological conditions. Experts say that this form of insomnia may be due to an overactive awakening system in the body. But there are no known causes.

Psychophysiological Insomnia

Charmaine’s inability to sleep was first triggered off when she began having problems with her boss. She was unable to sleep due to the worry and stress of the situation. Charmaine changed her job and is now happier in her work. Unfortunately she’s still unable to sleep and her anxiety about her bullying boss has now been replaced by an obsession with being unable to sleep.

Charmaine, like Richard, suffers from primary insomnia. However she suffers from a condition called psychophysiological insomnia. People with this condition have a tendency to worry in general. But their worry that they won’t be able to sleep tends to become a self-fulfilling prophesy
The build up of tension around the idea of not being able to sleep can develop into an obsession and a persistent lack of sleep.

Finding Solutions

Understanding the type of insomnia you have can help to move you towards a solution.

For example, if you have secondary insomnia, you work mainly on alleviating the illness or condition that is preventing you from getting to sleep.

With primary insomnia, you may focus on “retraining” the deeply ingrained habits that brain through learning cognitive behaviour techniques or relaxation techniques.

If you’d like more information about getting the brain to enter into a state of sleep, visit my website: Meditate2Sleep.com and pick up a free audio recording.

Do I have a serious problem with insomnia?

Do I have a serious problem with insomnia?

Sometimes people are unsure about whether or not they have a serious problem with insomnia – especially if they don’t know whether it may just be a symptom of another problem such as stress or back pain rather than a problem with sleeping itself.

So here are some tips and questions to assess yourself before you follow up the matter with your doctor.

For a week or two, keep a sleep log recording how long you slept each night, how many times you woke up and observe whether there is a pattern or whether your sleeping habits are random.

You can also expand your sleep log to include what you ate that day, and what you drank, or any workplace or family situation that was going through your mind as you were lying in bed trying to sleep.

And here are some general questions that you can ask yourself.

When did you first begin to experience sleeping problems? What was going on in your life at the time? And what is going on now?

Do you have a problem falling asleep? Or do you have a problem staying asleep? Or is it a combination of both?

Do you continually have to work changing shift patterns?

How much alcohol do you consume a week?

If you are you a smoker, how much cigarettes did you smoke?

Do you exercise and if so, what time of day do you exercise?

Do you experience mood swings?

When you do get to sleep, do you have bad dreams?

This is just a first step in moving towards a solution to your insomnia problem.

Because the solution to insomnia is often connected to the cause. And there are many causes of insomnia. Matching the wrong solution to a particular cause is one of the many reasons why sleeping remedies don’t work for many people.

Sometimes a one size fits all approach to solving this challenge can’t resolve the issue.

If you’d like more information about relieving insomnia and stress naturally, you might like to visit my website: Meditate2Sleep.com and pick up a free audio recording with sleep and stress management tips.

Insomnia: What’s Your Story?