What a brilliant weekend!

I could go on and on about how utterly amazing it was to watch the Bournemouth Symphony orchestra playing Beatles songs with a backdrop of breath-taking fireworks on Friday night in Meyrick Park near to where we live. Wonderful…

However, it is my Saturday night that I want to reference here today…

On Saturday night we went to a friends birthday party at a bar that was hired out for our exclusive use. Favourite old music was being played, we drank and ate too much, I got carried away and excited at every chance, danced applenty and we went to bed far, far later than any respectable people in their mid-30s should!

I got up and did a few bits on Sunday and we had a fabulous lunch… Then Katie and I started malfunctioning as human beings…

I mean, having had 3 hours sleep meant we were emotional in ways that we would not have been usually… Hahaha, we both cried at a film we watched… We got melancholy about certain things, we discussed aspects of our lives we don’t usually, we craved sweet and stodgy food and so ordered pizza and ice cream… We wanted very little interaction with the outside world and avoided it… Basically, we malfunctioned as human beings all the way up until bed time… Which was 8pm!

I know you’ve had a Sunday or two like this, haven’t you?

It is amazing that having almost no sleep can affect you in such a way, isn’t it?  

I dread to think what on earth it must truly be like for those that regularly do not or cannot sleep well… I work with many people each year for overcoming insomnia or simply getting their disrupted sleep patterns into shape again and so this hypnosis article article in the Liverpool Echo caught my eye, it states:  

LACK of sleep was leaving Kate Byrne so tired she was walking round like a ‘zombie’ and in danger of losing her job.

The 43-year-old sales assistant from Huyton was able to get little more than an hour’s sleep a night for a year.

“Sometimes, I could get no sleep at all,” says Kate. “And on other nights I would sleep for half-an-hour, then wake up for three. Then maybe get another half hour, then wake up … it was a nightmare.

“I felt like a zombie. I just couldn’t function. I was having to have time off work because of it and if I was off again I would have got the sack.”

Such worries only put more pressure on Kate and made her problem worse.

Blimey, an hours sleep a night! Of course, the vicious cycle she mentions is a common one… Worrying about the effects of poorer sleep going on to cause poorer sleep… Uh-oh… Now then, you are never going to guess what put things right for this young lady? 😉

The article continues:

But now she is sleeping like a proverbial log after receiving help from Liverpool hypnotherapist Kate Davies.

Says Kate: “Kate came to see me because she had not slept for over a year — yet she had still been going to work on a daily basis, literally ‘running on empty’. She works in the retail sector and therefore had to mask her exhaustion and try to be pleasant to customers when she’d been awake all night, every night.

“Understandably, she became chronically stressed, every aspect of her health and her life was being adversely affected by her problem.”

Kate has suffered from insomnia before, but her most recent spell began following an operation last year.

“After the operation, I was forced to sleep on my back and that disturbed my sleep pattern,” says Kate. “Then I just couldn’t get a night’s sleep.

“I have been through every other option, including counselling, which didn’t work because they just wanted to talk about depression and I wasn’t depressed, and medication.

“In the past, I have been on triple strength sleeping tablets, diazepam, temazepam, but they didn’t work and, in any event, I don’t want to rely on drugs.

“I just wanted a good night’s sleep.

“Not being able to get sleep was leaving me unable to work, then I worried I could lose my job and this was causing me more stress which made it harder to get to sleep — it was just a vicious circle.”

After trying every other option, Kate was advised to see a hypnotherapist and sought help from Kate.

“I was very cynical,” she says, “but Kate concluded I was stressed. I don’t think there was any one thing which had caused it, just a build-up of things which made it impossible for me to relax.

Personally, I would make no such conclusions… It is for the client to do that much… But heck, if it works… It carries on:

“I thought it wasn’t going to work but I was encouraged to persevere — with financial help from my dad as such help isn’t available on the NHS, though it should be — and eventually I could feel a difference. And, as Kate said, it had taken a year to get to the stage I was at, it wasn’t going to go away overnight.”

Kate Davies adds: “Even the birds singing outside disturbed Kate so much she could not switch off. She would ask me to remove the clock from the room as its ticking was a huge distraction from her going into hypnosis.

“Over the weeks, Kate began to notice small changes. Initially, both she and others saw her being a little less easily agitated and feeling a bit more calm within herself. Over time, she responded to hypnosis more and more, to the point that she called me one day to report that she has slept for eight hours. She was delighted and so was I.

“Since then, she has not looked back. Her normal sleep pattern has resumed and her friends have all witnessed the difference in Kate’s outlook and general well-being.”

Kate says: “I have been taught to relax using deep breathing techniques and I play a CD of one of our sessions at home on my own.

“I feel so much better, I have energy and I’m much calmer generally. It’s made me not overact or get wound up at work. I feel like a different person.

“I can’t tell you how good it feels to get a good night’s sleep.”

Likewise, I can’t tell you how good it felt waking up this very morning with my sleep caught up on! Looking forward to the week ahead!