THE SLEEP WELL
AUDIOS
All audios are available to download on www.thepositivehabit.com with the password ISLEEPWELL.
Please listen to the short instructional audio track ‘Instructions’, if you haven’t already done so. It will provide you with an overview of how to listen to your hypnotherapy audios every day.
Tonight, please start listening to ‘Week Two: Habit Two’ of the Sleep Well audios. Please listen to this audio for a minimum of seven nights. Please do not skip ahead to Week Three until you have listened for a full seven days.
Please also continue to listen to your morning meditation and your rest ritual tracks each day.
Measure Your Sleep
BEFORE YOU BEGIN Week Two of the Sleep Well Programme, please take a moment to rate your sleep. On a scale of 0 to 10, how well have you slept in the last week? (0 is ‘terribly’ and 10 is ‘very well’.) Please use the image on the opposite page to mark where you feel you are on this scale.
Welcome to Week Two
MANY PEOPLE FEEL an almost immediate benefit of listening to the audios and shifting their mindset towards sleep in as short a period as a week. If this is you, wonderful. If not, no problem – the most important thing is to keep going and the faith will come. You will make the progress you need in your own way, in your own time. Sleep is definitely not a competitive sport.
This week you are going to learn about the neuroscience of what happens when you go to sleep. You will explore the importance of letting go so that you can sleep. You will look at how feeling safe at a biological level is essential for you to surrender into sweet slumber. You will complete the very worthwhile exercise of writing your own sleep story, starting from when you were a child. This can be very illuminating and something most of us never take the time to do. Once you have written this you will begin to question some of the conditioned negative beliefs you may have about how you rate yourself as a sleeper.
This week’s habit is one of my favourites. It turns bedtime into something you genuinely look forward to. Habit Two, ‘Create a “blissful hour” 60-minute bedtime routine’, is exactly that: pure bliss.
The Scientific Door to Sleep
DURING THE SPANISH flu pandemic that raged across Europe just after the end of World War I, Austrian neurologist Constantin von Economo discovered something spectacular.8 He studied two types of flu patients: the first type fell into a deep lethargy or coma before dying; the second type did not sleep at all before eventually surrendering to death. Von Economo conducted autopsies on the two different types of patients’ brains and discovered that they had different types of lesions. In the brains of the patients who had slept before they died, he found damage in the posterior hypothalamus, the upper part of the midbrain. Von Economo coined the term ‘wakefulness centre’ to refer to the part of the brain that maintains wakefulness. The patients who had not been able to sleep before dying had lesions in the preoptic area of the anterior hypothalamus, and this part came to be known as the ‘sleep centre’.
This seminal work enabled scientists who conducted autopsies on people who died after being in a coma to discover that the brain-stem plays a significant role in wakefulness. They learned that there are two major circuits in the brainstem that inte