There are many reasons for insomnia but nearly all of them are a product of your mind. Although there are times when physical injuries and sickness can keep you awake, and the use or abuse of substances can affect your sleep, 95% of the people I see for insomnia can’t sleep because their mind just won’t “shut off”. They are just too stressed out by life. They are thinking about their job, their kids, their taxes, you name it and they are thinking about it. As a result they have trouble sleeping.

They stay awake and think about how ad their job is, or how their child is not doing as well in school as they would like or how their good friend is suffering from sickness and depression. They continue to spin these things over and over in their heads until their minds go out of control! They have trouble sleeping night after night. As a result their whole life suffers.

About a year or so ago, a lady came to me because she was having difficulty sleeping. She hadn’t slept more than two or three hours at a time in nearly six months. Now there were a lot of things going on in her life. She had a teenager that was acting out. Her father had cancer. As a result of thinking about these things she was losing sleep. The effects of insomnia on her life were she was missing work, her relationship with her husband was strained and she was exhausted.

After discussing her situation and the effects of insomnia in her life with me she decided to go through a series of hypnosis relaxation sessions with me. In these sessions I used hypnosis to help her to focus on things she had control over while letting go of things that she didn’t have control over. She took home a series of sleep and hypnosis relaxation recordings I had recorded to listen to at night when she was having trouble sleeping. She also received a simple NLP trigger she could use to use as an insomnia treatment to calm her thoughts when her mind became overactive and made it difficult to fall asleep.

The results were staggering. She really wanted to make her situation with her husband better so she talked with her him about how important their relationship was to her. She found that since she had been spending a lot of time with her father her husband had felt neglected. They figured out a plan to that allowed them to have time together which made both of them feel better about their relationship.

She made time to talk with her teenager a couple of times a week and she started focusing on what he did right instead of what he did wrong. These two adjustments caused a huge change in his behavior for the better. He stopped acting out and his grades improved to A’s and B’s.

She also continued to love her father while realizing that there was nothing more she could do to improve his health. More importantly she learned to control her anxiety and started sleeping again. As a result her performance at work improved and she was given a raise!

What is interesting is that I didn’t make any of these suggestions directly to her but rather they came about as a result of her relaxing in trance and allowing her subconscious mind to develop a plan for her to deal with her issues. In other words she discovered her reasons for insomnia and a plan to deal with them by herself.

As a hypnotist I am always amazed by the insight of my clients’ wise subconscious minds. Hypnosis is a powerful method that relaxes the conscious mind and the body. This allows the subconscious to focus on the reasons behind them having trouble sleeping. Having this insight helps them to then work on their underlying issues.

Hypnosis relaxation techniques have been used for thousands of years and have been well documented for treating all types of stress and anxiety disorders.  NLP, or Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a cutting edge method used by athletes, actors and everyday people like you and me to make changes and improvements. NLP uses sensory signals (see, hear, and touch) the mind receives and changes the manner in which we respond to them. Since we all use a primary mode (see, hear, and touch) of processing information one method NLP uses is to work with a person’s primary mode to help them anchor new behaviors.

The wonderful thing about these types of insomnia treatments is that they are natural, non addictive methods of helping people that are having trouble sleeping. They have worked for millions of people and, in the case of hypnosis relaxation techniques, for thousands of years to help people overcome the effects of insomnia and sleep again.

Wil Dieck is the founder of Total Mind Therapy and author of, “Overcoming Insomnia” an e-course you can have at absolutely no charge. Drop by http://howtosleepinfo.com/  for your copy today.