Thursday, October 15, 2009

How to beat insomnia with therapies based on sounds and music


About chronic insomnia

The chronic lack of sleep is one of the most terrible experiences that one can have in life. Only those who have experienced chronic insomnia can really understand how weakening it is to be so sleep deprived.

When you go to bed at night completely exhausted and then sleep don't come. You lie there, eyes shut trying to relax and the minutes go by, but you just can't sleep.

Some nights you maybe haven't slept at all when you see the first light of dawn begin to creep over the window ledge, or you hear the dawn chorus starting up, and you know that you are in for another exhaustingly difficult day.

Therefore, insomnia is the difficult of initiating or maintaining sleep, or both. Not only does lack of sleep make you feel bad, it also has unpleasant and dangerous side effects. If you can't sleep you are at risk and you need to fix it. Research has shown that there are many problems associated with chronic sleep deprivation.

Some facts about insomnia.

  • Lack of sleep can shorten your life. Death from all causes is lowest among adults who get seven to eight hours of sleep nightly, and significantly higher among those who sleep less than seven.
  • Intellectual performance is reduced. Critical thinking plummets (so don’t stay up all night cramming for an exam).
  • Reaction time is slowed, which could be fatal in some situations such as driving a car.
  • The immune system is damaged. Sleep researcher Eve van Cauter at the University of Chicago gave flu vaccine to subjects who had slept only four hours per night for the previous six nights. Their immune systems produced only half the normal number of antibodies in response to the vaccine. This study also showed:
  1. Heart rate and blood pressure were raised
  2. Insulin resistance, a pre-diabetic condition that affects glucose tolerance and produces weight gain developed.
  3. Leptin levels were reduced. Leptin is secreted by fat cells and inhibits appetite, so weight gain would eventually results from lost sleep. Other studies have shown similar results

But being tired isn't an impressive condition, people can't see it and they don't get it. They can't understand how bad you feel. Your doctor may know very little about sleep and sleep deprivation. The answer from the doctors is usually a prescription for sleeping pills.


Why Sleeping Pills Are Not The Answer

You can take a sleeping pill occasionally or in emergencies without harm but taking them on a regular basis is a disaster. The longer you take them the more likely you are to need to increase the dose, and then increase it again. Eventually you may develop rebound insomnia, which means they stop working altogether.

Even when they do work sleeping pills are not really giving you the sleep you need. They knock you out but they do not allow you to go through the sleep cycle in a normal way.

Sleep isn't unconsciousness. It's dynamic, cycling roughly every 90 minutes during the night through the important stages of sleep. Without this you aren't getting a normal sleep with all the refreshing benefits of sleep that you need. No wonder you still don't feel rested


A Natural Remedy For Insomnia

Because sleeping pills are not a good answer to insomnia people who can't sleep are looking for a natural insomnia cure. Brainwave entrainment is a natural remedy for insomnia that you may not have tried. Brainwave entrainment has helped many people to regain the ability to sleep well all night and all you have to do is listen.

Brainwave entrainment works to slow down the brain waves so that they move into sleep mode and allow the listener to fall asleep. If they wake in the night they can listen again.


Sleep and Brainwave Entrainment

Your brain uses electrical signals to communicate with all the systems in your body. The rate of these electrical pulses, or brainwaves, can be measured using an EEG (electroencephalograph) machine. Brainwaves vary in their rhythm depending on what we are doing.

When we are alert and busy the activity in our brains is fast and the waves are closer together. When we are relaxed the wave pattern is much slower. As we begin to go to sleep, the brain waves become slower still.

If you can't sleep your brain waves are most likely not slowing down enough. If you have a busy mind and can't stop thinking, then you are not relaxing. Your brain waves will keep on going fast in the same way as they do when you are busy during the day.

What you want is for your brainwaves to slow down to alpha. Lying in bed with your eyes closed and listening to a brainwave entrainment audio can guide your brain into a slower rhythm. As this happens you normally drift gently into a natural sleep.

When your brainwaves slow down, your heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, breathing and muscle tension all relax too. The idea is to get the brain waves to slow right down to alpha so that you can easily fall asleep. Then the entrainment continues and can keep you asleep so that after about 60 minutes you reach deep delta sleep waves.

So why isn't brainwave entrainment prescribed for sleep problems more often? Why isn't it the first line of treatment for anyone who can't sleep before drugs are even considered?

The answer is that most doctors don't know about it. They aren't taught about it in medical school and have little opportunity to learn about it later. When doctors can't sleep they generally resort to a prescription drugs-and suffer the same problems as you do!

But brainwave entrainment is getting better known now and the word is getting out that this is an easy, fast, inexpensive insomnia cure that anyone who can't sleep should at least try.

If you would like to know more about brainwave entrainment just click here- it will open in a new window. How Brainwave Entrainment works.


The Sleep Induction treatment

If you're looking to finally rid yourself of insomnia and get a good night's sleep, you should try listeneing the different sessions to sleep in sleep therapies from Mentallion.com Free online therapies for mental health.

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