My pattern got interupted last weekend… That is, having stayed up into the early hours with my friends, my sleep pattern got interupted…
Snuggling up with my wife each night at a very reasonable hour is something which brings complete joy into my life… It has become one of those patterns that ensures I get all the deep sleep hours that I believe myself to need for the hectic and busy life that I lead… Very ironic that I should disrupt that pattern… Let me explain why…
Just recently, I have been working with a teenage client in my hypnotherapy consulting rooms. Her parents had requested that I work with her as I had helped one of them previously. They asked me to work with her because “she couldn’t wake up in the morning”. And they gave me permission to refer to her in other aspects of my work.
It turned out that this very pleasant 13 year old had had increasing difficulties getting out of bed and to school on time in the morning, which had started a few months earlier, and had gotten progressively worse. The standard of her school work had taken a nose-dive…
Every now and then, she would fall asleep in class… My history teacher used to make me feel the same, but his monotone voice and my lack of interest are different reasons than this client…
In order to help their daughter, the loving parents had tried to get her to go to bed at what they thought was a reasonable time for a girl her age (10 PM — just pat my own bed-time these days!), once in her room she kept the lights on, and alternated between watching TV, texting her friends, and listening to music until 1, 2 and sometimes 3 in the morning… Now that is some mental stimulus to have immediately before attempting to go to sleep.
Here in England, there is a move afoot from one Schools headmaster to make school start later to help teenagers who struggle to get it together in the mornings… He is offering up researched proof of the effectiveness of such a scheme!
What?! What?! What?!
Anyhooo… This pattern that the girl had gotten herself into made it very difficult for her to get up at 6:20 in the morning in order to catch the bus, be in class on time, and to function at even the most basic of levels… Which I empathise with…
On Saturday, having spent an excited and high-octane day and night with my best friends from school… Not going to bed until 3am and even then my sleep quality being diminshed by one or two beers too many…
I malfunctioned as a member of the human race… I was not coherent the following day, I found it tough to laugh as much as usual, get excited about much… Even the beauty of my garden bathed in spring sunshine was not inspiring me to feel upbeat… I felt regretful… I slept like a baby Sunday night, even though, Monday, I did not have my usual vigour and vitality in all my working roles… And I only just feel back together today… Sort of… Err, just about…
Of course, we can joke about me being that age where this is not as easy to do anymore… I have been armed with self-hypnosis to help enhance my sleep for almost all of my adult life… A tool which has transformed every aspect of my life… Yet when a strong pattern is interupted… Boy oh boy does it have a knock on effect…
When we see the power of this, of course, in modern hypnotherapy and other forms of therapeutic intervention, we can interupt unwanted and unprogressive patterns to stimulate change and development and let those ripples interfere with the individuals life in a good way.
The first questions I had for this young woman was whether she understood that her sleeping patterns were problematic, and if she was interested in changing them so as to improve her situation at school and to feel more alert and better overall during the day. She answered yes to both, which was heartening, since without active cooperation, it is nearly impossible to bring about changes in a teenager’s sleep patterns… Or any other patterns for that fact… We need them on board…
We discussed the main problem, a circadian phase delay, or derangement of her inner clock, caused by her staying up late and sleeping in late, especially on the weekends. We also discussed the fact that sleep deprivation makes you sleepy, and that by napping one reduces the sleep pressure to fall asleep, and makes it easier to stay up even later. Finally, we discussed the negative effect that poor sleep hygiene has on falling asleep.
I am happy to report that after her getting her on to a regular schedule, the most important part of which was maintaining a regular and consistent wake up time 7 days a week… She did lots of practical things that enhanced her ability to do this before she even started using her newly demonstated self-hypnosis skills and seeing the results from the hypnotherapy sessions with me.
We talk about patterns a great deal in modern therapy… I was reading in the Metro last week about a young man I had seen on TV here in the UK, who has been hiccupping for more than two years now… Whoa, that is some pattern he is experiencing…
I often ask my clients to spend a week doing something completely different on a daily basis, just to get them being more flexible and open to change… And even more prone to beneficial change… Have a look today at all the things you do without thought… Look at what you do on autopilot… Then remember that much-used expression that we all seem to know and all seem to take for granted these days… “If you alwasy do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got…” The amount of people that do the same things each day adn expect different results is staggering…
Needless to say though… I’ll be falling back into my lovely progressive sleep routine again this week… 😉
