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| 13 Mar 2007 09:06:18 pm |
 Sleep for Insomniacs |
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Your brain has a natural cycle of sleep and wakefulness. It knows how to sleep, just as it knows how to breathe and pump your heart at the correct speed.
There are six golden rules of sleep which you must follow until they become automatic habits. As you do that, the mind exercises will work to re-calibrate the settings of your unconscious mind to release your capacity for deep, comfortable, refreshing sleep. You have to be patient for a few days only and your sleep will improve. Many years of research in sleep laboratories have proved that these are the most effective behavioural changes to improve your sleep.
(1) Set a new, earlier wake-up time – and stick to it!
Wake up and get out of bed every day 20 minutes earlier than your current wake-up time. Clinical research at sleep laboratories has demonstrated that it’s the singe most effective strategy for curing insomnia. Because sleep is a natural cycle – and falling asleep is something that happens to you – you don’t do it deliberately. But you can control when you get up – this re-adjusts your body clock and the rest of the cycle moves with you.
(2) Go to bed only when you are sleepy
This might seem strange, but far too many people think they ought to go to bed at a certain time, or believe that going to bed early will help them ‘catch up’ on their sleep. But you can’t force yourself to sleep. In fact, you must take a cue from your body.
When you feel tired and ready for sleep, your brain releases melatonin. It makes you feel it is so warm inside and so cold outside, all you want to do is cuddle up and let your mind wander. As sleep begins, your mind wanders more and more, your breathing becomes slower and deeper and gradually your brain-waves change. Feeling sleepy is the body’s signal of readiness for sleep. Once your new sleep-cycle is established, this will tend to happen at a regular time.
(3) Limit what you do in bed
There are only three things you are allowed to do in bed: make love, read these words and sleep. Don’t eat, read books, watch TV, chat on the phone or socialise. As you follow this rule, you make sure that bed is associated with sleep, not with being alert and active. Your bed should be a quiet, comfortable place dedicated to sleep.
(4) Get up if you’ve been awake for 40 minutes
If, after getting into bed and trying to get to sleep, you are awake for more than 40 minutes, get up and do something boring. The mind needs to learn that it will not be rewarded with anything interesting if it keeps you awake. Get up and do your accounts or clean the floor!
If you wake in the middle of the night, the same rule applies: if you are not asleep again within 40 minutes, get up and do something boring, Then, when you are drowsy, tired and sleepy, go back to bed.
(5) Don’t rest during the day
Sleep researchers have identified four distinct phases of sleep. Stage one occurs as we are just falling asleep when our thoughts continue from our waking state but are not longer under conscious control. Researchers have discovered that many people who are awoken in stage one sleep do not realise they have been asleep. That’s why napping during the day is disruptive. Resting with your eyes closed, you could drift into stage one sleep without realising it. That would upset your sleep pattern and reduce the impact of the urge to sleep at bedtime.
Most of your sleep at night is spent in stage two. The brainwaves show a pattern called sleep spindles and muscle tension decreases. In deep sleep, stages three and four, slower brainwaves, delta waves, appear. We normally get all the deep sleep we need, less than two hours, early in the night.
Later, we spend more time dreaming, most of it in what’s known as REM sleep, named after the rapid eye movement that can be observed beneath the eyelids. The best way to make sure stage one sleep at night leads into stages three and four, is to make sure you are awake all day, so you are ready for sleep at night.
(6) Sort out your worries during the day
Sometimes our unconscious mind waits until we have stopped the ‘busy-ness’ of the day to get us to think things over. If you find yourself worrying about something at night, follow this procedure: -
First, find the positive side of the worry. For every worry we don’t want, there is a corresponding solution that we do want. For example, if you worry about your overdraft, what you do want is more money. Now think of at least one step, however small, that you can consciously take the very next day to move towards your solution. Make a note and promise yourself to take that step tomorrow.
As you think, you will hear your inner voice speaking the thoughts. The voice might sound stressed, alert or excited. But you need to change that voice to make it sound tired and sleepy. Whatever you think, it must be in a relaxed voice that sounds as if it is about to yawn. That way, your mind will start to feel as if all it wants to do is snuggle up and be comfortable and warm and asleep.
There are four further points that research has shown will provide the optimum state for a good night’s sleep –
(1) Make sure you have a warm bed in a cooler room. Your bedding should be snug and the air around you slightly cooler.
(2) Take some exercise early in the evening, such as a brisk walk. This stimulates your muscles and heightens your alertness, which increases the need for rest later on. The sleepiness of your natural cycle is reinforced by physical tiredness when you go to bed.
(3) Make sure you eat in the evening, preferably a light meal.
(4) Cut down on alcohol and caffeine. It is not true that alcohol helps us sleep. It does emphasise tiredness at first, but it can wake many people later in the night. And even one cup of coffee during the day can affect your sleep at night if you are sensitive to it.
Adapted from Paul McKenna ‘Mindpower’
You can contact me via www.theconsultingrooms.co.uk. Personal consultations are available in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset which is easily accessible from Bristol, Bath and North Somerset, South Wales, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Devon. You will find me very close to the M5 junction 22 at Brent Knoll between Bridgwater and Weston-super-Mare |
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Category : General Practice
| Posted By : consulting2 |  Comments[0] |  Trackbacks [0] |
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| 22 Mar 2007 06:09:48 pm |
| Rapport - The Skill of Building Co-operative Relationships |
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Rapport skills enable you to quickly put others at ease and create trust. Mastering the skill of building rapport requires sensory acuity and behavioural flexibility on your part. These are the only two limits to your ability to produce results in this area: the degree to which you can perceive other people’s postures, gestures and speech patterns; and the elegance with which you can match them in the dance of rapport.
Matching
The fundamental elements of matching are:
Body language
- posture
- orientation
- weight distribution
- gestures (arm/hands and legs/feet)
- facial expression
- eye contact
- breathing rate
Voice
- volume
- tone
- pitch
- tempo
- sounds
Leading
Leading changes the other person’s behaviour by getting them to follow your lead (e.g. leading them from slumping into a more upright posture, or leading them from speaking quietly to speaking more loudly). This is one way to test that you do indeed have rapport. Having rapport and hence being able to lead others, allows you to achieve mutually desired outcomes (e.g. reaching agreement!). It also allows you to take responsibility for the outcome of all your interactions. It is, however a choice. There may be some people with whom you would choose not to be in rapport. In which case you have the choice of mismatching.
Mismatching
Mismatching allows you to break rapport, to interrupt or to avoid communicating. To mismatch, simply alter you body and/or voice to make them different from the other person’s. This will subtly and unconsciously interrupt the flow of communication giving you the opportunity to redirect the interaction. (NB If rapport is well established, you may find that the other person follows your behaviour as you mismatch - i.e. you are effectively leading them; you’ll then have to keep changing your behaviour until they cease to follow you and you achieve a conclusive mismatch).
You can contact me via www.theconsultingrooms.co.uk. Personal consultations are available in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset which is easily accessible from Bristol, Bath and North Somerset, South Wales, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Devon. You will find me very close to the M5 junction 22 at Brent Knoll between Bridgwater and Weston-super-Mare |
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Category : Personal Development
| Posted By : consulting2 | Comments[0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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