The 5 Step System For a Good Night’s Sleep

Napoleon, Florence Nightingale and Margaret Thatcher would get by on four hours a night and Thomas Edison claimed it was a waste of time.

Most of us mere mortals, however, do tend to function at our best with 7-8 hours sleep and if we don’t then things can get a little miserable, there is ample science that proves a good night helps everything from brain optimisation to balancing hormone levels.

So how do we sleep, what’s normal and how do we correct poor sleeping habits?

Sleep pattern’s start light for about 20 minutes then develops into slow-wave sleep for around two hours. Your brainwaves then speed up and you spend about 20 minutes in REM sleep. Your brainwaves slow down once again and you go through light sleep to slow-wave sleep again. You don’t spend so long in slow-wave sleep the second time. Ordinarily, you go through this cycle three or four times during the course of the evening. If your cycle of sleep is interrupted and you are having difficulty in dropping of following the steps below.

If Anxiety is the cause of your loss of sleep follow these steps:

• Positively visualise yourself at your best and revisit memories from the past where you have previously pulled through.
• If negative chatter formulates in your mind, turn your negative story around into the positive outcome you wish to have happened.
• Recognise in every difficulty there is always an opportunity, you can’t have a negative without a positive, bear in mind over a period of 37 years author and researcher Napoleon Hill discovered that people’s greatest break thoughts came directly after what looked like their biggest failures “In every seed of adversity there is an equal or even greater seed of an opportunity”.

 Correcting Your Sleep Cycle With The 5 Point System Below

• In order to sort out your sleep, you need to reset the whole set of cycles to make the subconscious urge to sleep stronger. The way you do this is to increase your readiness to sleep by bringing forward the end of your sleep cycle. When you wake up earlier in the morning, it pulls forward the time at which your body is ready to go to sleep at the end of the day. If you normally get up at 7 am, for the next few weeks get up at 6.30am. Clinical research shows this is the single most effective strategy for sorting out insomnia. If the body gets used to catching up on sleep late in the morning, it does not prepare properly for sleep at the beginning of the night.

• If you are unable to get to sleep get on with all the tasks you’ve been putting off and go to bed only when you feel really sleepy. When you first start using this system you may find that you are up much later than usual. Don’t worry, that is normal. After a few days of going to bed late and getting up earlier, you will find your natural sleepiness begins to show up earlier in the evening.

• The desire for sleep is much like appetite for food. Snacking all day may disrupt mealtimes, but if you don’t snack between meals you will have a healthier appetite at dinner. No to naps during the day. Go to bed only at night, and only when you feel sleepy.

• Slow down your internal dialogue and if you have thoughts or images running through your mind practice, slowing down the images and internal sounds. Also, ensure that you are focusing on sleeping blissfully to the exclusion of anything else. If you I say to you don’t think of the colour blue it will instantly appear in your mind’s eye. If you think ‘I don’t want poor sleep’ you are likely to induce poor sleep.

• When lying in bed remember times and places where you slept deeply, this cognitive recollection reminds your subconscious mind how you use to sleep and this is sometimes the nudge you need to sleep well.