Sleep

Transforming Minds

0.0 Introduction
0.15 Sleep problems
0.34 The Human Givens Institute theory of sleep and depression
1.23 Effects of excessive stress on effective sleep patterns
2.00 The toxic cycle of stress and poor sleep
2.30 Getting Better sleep

Grab your PDF here!

Alan Patching with another edition of Transforming Minds, and today we are going to talk about sleep.

In past posts in the last series we spent quite a bit of time talking about sleep. It’s a major problem for individuals, for people in relationships and for people in business, because if we don’t get enough of it, we just fail to function properly, and the more and more we continue to stop functioning properly – to not get enough sleep – the worse and worse the situation gets. In fact, the Human Givens Institute in the United Kingdom is of the strong opinion that sleep has a lot to do with depression. Their argument is as follows…

One of the functions of sleep, there are three basis functions, but one of the functions of sleep is to help us deal with the stress of the day, by giving our body time to recover, and one way we do that is, during sleep, the dreams that are normally associated with taking us into deeper levels of sleep where our immune system can recover and become strong … that dreaming process gets diverted.

If we’ve got too much stress in our lives during the day that we haven’t dealt with effectively, the brain will give us dreams at night time to allow us to neutralise the stress. Now that’s a good thing. It helps neutralise stress. But if we have far too much stress and the stress continues mounting, that means we need more and more dreaming to deal with that stress.

A concern with that is that dreaming is not a very deep level of sleep – contrary to popular opinion. So, when we are doing a lot of dreaming, we are doing less very deep sleep and as a consequence of that, we wake in the morning feeling tired, and quite often if we wake in the morning feeling tired and lethargic we spend a fair bit of the next day thinking, “wow, I’m tired and lethargic” and we get anxious about having to work while we are tired, which creates more stress and therefore we dream more dreams the following night to deal with that stress. And so we create this toxic cycle ,and eventually that can, according to the Human Givens theory, deteriorate into depression.

So, if we want to avoid a lot of stress and anxiety we need to introduce relaxation on an active basis into our life and we need to introduce techniques to make sure we sleep well deeply and effectively.

Now to that end, this blog site has a couple of plans in mind, and sometime in the future I’m going to be adding some relaxation exercises completely free of charge to the resources page and at sometime in the very near future I’ve prepared an entire program for people who either have difficulty getting to sleep, having difficulty staying asleep, or wake very tired and lethargic, and that program will explain later to help people overcome sleep problems.

Of course, if you are having really severe sleep problems and they are not reacting to any relaxation etc. you really should see your family doctor and talk to him or her about that problem, because no matter what’s causing the sleep problems we need to get on top of them if we are going to have a healthy, happy, full and effective life.

Good luck with your sleep therapy, or whatever approaches that you take to overcome any problems you have in regards to that.

I’m Alan Patching, we will be back with you with another post in the very near future. Bye for now.