Meditation

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Blog posts related to meditation

The Sleep and Anxiety Cycle and How to Get Out of it

Anxiety Hypnotherapy Meditation Sleep

Anxiety can inhibit sleep and sleep can inhibit anxiety. Your brain may keep you awake until you deal with this cycle.

What is Anxiety and Do I Have it?

The WHO lists the following symptoms of anxiety:

  • trouble concentrating or making decisions
  • feeling irritable, tense or restless
  • experiencing nausea or abdominal distress
  • having heart palpitations
  • sweating, trembling or shaking
  • trouble sleeping
  • having a sense of impending danger, panic or doom

What Happens in the Brain During and After Anxiety?

During anxiety the amygdala is significantly more active (the pea-sized area in the centre of the brain, indicated in the above image with a red dot). The Amygdala represents less than 0.3% of the brain’s mass.

Increased activity in the prefrontal cortex (12.5% of the brain’s mass, indicated in the above image by the blue area at the front of the brain) reduces activity in the amygdala.

Temporary vs. Persistent Anxiety

Everyone experiences anxiety to some extent. The frequency and intensity varies on a spectrum from person to person at various stages of life and healing. If your anxiety goes away relatively quickly and happens relatively infrequently you can consider it as “normal”. Even “normal” anxiety can be reduced and there is nothing wrong with doing so.

Anxiety disorders are, in contrast, persistent. Some clinicians say they “never” go away. This can be interpreted as a life-sentence. What they mean is that they haven’t gone away so far. Healing progress from anxiety disorders can vary enormously from person to person. For example, a person with a damaged prefrontal cortex might have a much more gradual journey of healing than a person a typically functioning one.

Types of Anxiety

There are a plethora of interconnected influences on anxiety, from neurological, to beliefs about oneself, others and the world, to genetic, to environmental circumstances.

Understanding the influences on your anxiety can help you come to terms with its unruly nature and help you begin to manage, or overcome it.

Formal categories include (NIMH):

  • Generalised anxiety
  • Panic
  • Social anxiety
  • Phobias
  • Separation anxiety

The Sleep and Anxiety Cycle

Typically during the day our focus is occupied, we are distracted from our thoughts and emotions. The contrasting mental space that opens up at bedtime can set the stage for overwhelming thoughts and fears to become unignorable.

This can make it difficult to fall asleep and the harder it is to sleep, the more worrying and stressful it can be, making it harder to fall asleep.

An accumulated sleep debt can make it harder to function well during the day in every way and it can increase the risk of developing chronic physical health problems. 

This can result in perpetual sleep disturbance, called “insomnia” and insomnia can bring on more anxiety.

How Can I get Organised to Sleep Better?

As detailed in my recent blog post: “How to Sleep Well“, you can:

  • Go to bed in a dark, quiet, cool place
  • Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day
  • Estimate when you actually fall asleep and wake up
  • Eat at least 4 hours before going to bed
  • Stay hydrated throughout the day and stop drinking 2 hours before bed
  • Avoid alcohol, nicotine and other stimulants in your bloodstream near bed time
  • Associate sleep zone only with sleep (and sex). No screens, work, or exercise… or divide space functionality with rituals
  • If you wake up for longer than 20 minutes in the night, move to another, relaxing space and do something relaxing
  • 10 mins of bright light in the morning can help regulate your sleep/wake cycle
  • While lying down, breathe fully in, breathe fully out and repeat at least 3 times
  • Progressive muscle relaxation
  • Gratitude
  • Reading, or listening to a story
  • White noise
  • Binaural beats
  • Listen to something boring
  • Organise time to worry and add one solution to each worry
  • Journalling

Anxiety Treatments (and Better Sleep)

Interventions include:

  • Hypnotherapy – helps to vividly clarify triggers for anxiety and “glimmers” for moving beyond anxious feelings. Helps to relax deeply
  • Exposure therapy – gradually builds resilience and a sense of security in relation to anxiety-inducing triggers
  • Acceptance (e.g. mindfulness) – you may not be able to control anxious thoughts and feelings directly, but by accepting their existence you can release the one thing you can control – your resistance!
  • Commitment (goal setting) – following up acceptance with commitment to build habits that further demonstrate your lack of anxiety and increase your locus of control
  • Medication – prescribed and managed only by clinicians
  • Meditation – releases identification with anxious thoughts and feelings, increases locus of control, helps to relax deeply

Sleep and Anxiety in Summary

I would recommend getting advice/support from a medical professional, and/or qualified therapist to help you understand what my be best for you. Feel free to contact me to find out more about the Hypnotherapy services I offer.

Anxiety can be a powerful underlying issue preventing you from getting a decent night’s sleep and lack of sleep can contribute to anxiety.

It is important to address underlying anxiety in addition to organising your life and environment to sleep well.

Meditations to Help You Sleep

A Gratitude Rhyme To Send You To Sleep (FREE MEDITATION)

Sleep Meditation: Progressive Relaxation (Insight Timer Plus users)

Rhyming Sleep Meditation – Mountain Trees To Tropical Beach (Insight Timer Plus users)

Sleep Meditation – Gratitude For Your Amazing Body And Mind (Insight Timer Plus users)

Do You Want to Take the Conversation Further – Ask Questions and Contribute Answers?

Join Believe – Relieve – Conceive, my Insight Timer group.

How to Sleep Well

Anxiety Depression Hypnotherapy Meditation Sleep

Why do we Sleep?

We spend a third of our lives doing something that leaves us defenseless to attack, unable to eat, drink, or reproduce! Sleep! We don’t know why, but it must be important and our lives can become seriously impacted when we’re not able to do it well.

Lack of Sleep

Lack of slumber is associated with diabetes, obesity, hypertension, pulmonary heart disease, memory loss, lack of concentration, poor mood regulation and can be an underlying factor in many psychological issues.

Furthermore being tired feels rubbish!

Managing Expectations

When we keep trying we usually succeed, right?

Not with sleep.

Lying awake at night and trying to sleep is actually an effective way to set yourself up for failure!

Your body knows how to sleep, so your energy would be better spent finding ways to step out of the way of your mind.

How Much do I Need?

We all need different amounts at different times in our lives. If you can function well during the day and you don’t find it too difficult to wake up at the right time you are probably getting enough.

Listen to your body and how you feel upon going to bed, waking and during the day. Estimate the time you spend asleep, when you feel well rested and when you don’t. You don’t need to feel guilty for getting as much as 9 hours, or deprived for getting only 6 hours.

Sleep Cycles

There are different levels wakefulness that we naturally cycle through, with very different levels of brain activity. It is normal to briefly wake up multiple times during the night and go back to sleep again.

The lighter levels are associated with dreams that we remember and are more vivid, the deeper levels are where the body grows and repairs itself and where new pathways in the brain are forged.

What Can I do to Get a Good Night’s Sleep?

Counting sheep

While the biggest contributing factors to sleep disturbances come from within us, you can make things easier for yourself by also setting things up externally for a good night:

  • Don’t count bed time as the time you fall asleep. Give yourself enough time to wind down, go to bed in a dark room, with low lighting and no screen time, with relatively low ambient noise. It may be 30 to 45 minutes before you actually fall asleep.
  • Aim to make this bed time procedure a habit to stick to. Eye masks, earplugs and guided meditation can help to reduce ambient light and noise.
  • If possible sleep in a bedroom with a temperature of around 18°Celsius, or 65° fahrenheit.
  • Eat at least 4 hours before going to need
  • Stay hydrated, but drink fluids no later than 2 hours before bed time
  • Avoid having alcohol, nicotine and other stimulants in your bloodstream at bed time
  • Build an association between your bedroom and sleep. Try to avoid exercising, or working in the same space. If you can’t avoid this, change the lighting and create other rituals that characterise the change in function of the space.
  • If you do wake up in the night for roughly more than 20 minutes, move to another space and engage in a relaxing activity with low light.
  • Soon after you wake up, spend time in bright light, preferably sunlight, preferably outside, without wearing sunglasses and without staring directly at the sun. 10 minutes should be enough. Light lamps, or any artificial light can be an option in the winter or if working night shifts

The Elephant in the Bedroom

A major cause of disturbance includes, of course, mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and seasonal affective disorder, for example.

Addressing these issues through therapy and meditation, for example, may be the most effective way to sleep well.

Do You Want Help to Work Through Something That May be Blocking Your Replenishing Sleep?

Do you believe you may be suffering from anxiety, depression, or another existential issue, and that it may be preventing you from getting a good night’s sleep? You can learn more about my approach to Hypnotherapy and how it could help you here.

Meditations to Help You Sleep

A Gratitude Rhyme To Send You To Sleep (FREE MEDITATION)

Sleep Meditation: Progressive Relaxation (Insight Timer Plus users)

Rhyming Sleep Meditation – Mountain Trees To Tropical Beach (Insight Timer Plus users)

Sleep Meditation – Gratitude For Your Amazing Body And Mind (Insight Timer Plus users)

Do You Want to Take the Conversation Further – Ask Questions and Contribute Answers?

Join Believe – Relieve – Conceive, my Insight Timer group.

Get Started With Affirmations for Manifestation Work

Meditation Other

It is important to start out with effective affirmations, so they support and charge your manifestation work, rather than inhibit it.

What Are Affirmations?

Affirmations are declarations. We are stating observations about ourselves, others and the world. They do not describe how we would choose for ourselves and the world to be, they describe ourselves and the world as already being how we would choose them to be!

This is a subtle, yet important distinction.

Two, or More, ‘Already Trues’

We may need to hold two paradoxical observations in our consciousness simultaneously.

For example, we may at first need to hold the following two truths and open our minds enough to see them both as simultaneously true:

  • “I feel insecure, anxious and frightened by social situations”
  • “I feel secure, confident and delighted in social situations”

If we deny the negative truth and pretend only the positive truth is true, the one we deny (or resist) can become more persistent.

We do not always consider the possibility of having two (or more) selves. Two or more realities and truths

Even for someone who has objectively high social anxiety, it is very rare to be anxious in every single social situation, with all people. There are nearly always exceptions, where we feel secure and confident. So for most people, there are already two, or more already trues. The difference is that these exceptions may not have been part of the story we tell others and ourselves.

Learn more about how hypnotherapy can help with anxiety.

When Crafting Your Affirmation

A notebook with an orange pen on top. In orange writing it says "I am the author of my story". The notebook is set against a background of a white knitted woollen blanket
  1. Create your affirmations intuitively. Ask yourself what would really bring you fulfilment.
  2. Design it to help you feel something you want to feel (“acceptance”, “fulfilment”, “gratitude”, “love”, for example). If the affirmations are what you enter into the satnav, the emotions are the fuel that gets you there.
  3. Design it so that it sparks your emotion and imagination to see, hear and feel yourself having accomplished it
  4. Design it so that what you affirm can be seen as true every day that you affirm it, as well as the day that you have accomplished it. Are you already a millionaire? If not, would you affirm, that: “you are a millionaire”, or “you have the abundant mindset of a millionaire”?
  5. Speak in the present tense (“you accept”, rather than “you will accept”). You are creating the conditions of your desired outcome here and now.
  6. Refer to yourself in the second person, as “you”, not “I” (“you joyfully help others live fulfilled lives”, rather than “I joyfully help others live fulfilled lives”). Imagine telling yourself “I love me” and see how it feels. Now imagine someone else telling you “I love you”. Which is likely to have more impact? We tend to believe and take seriously positive messages from others over ourselves.
  7. Keep it simple. Aim for somewhere between 1 and 25 words. As you become more adept at the manifesting process you can try adding more complexity and see how it works for you.
  8. Imperfect affirmations are perfect! Just get going with something that is good enough. If there are improvements to make they will come to you as you progress.

Begin Crafting Your Affirmation

Here is an affirmation that works for me. If you are unsure where to begin, you can take this and make it your own:

“You joyfully help others live fulfilling and satisfying lives”.

“You graciously accept the abundance that, hence, cascades into and flows through your life”.

Put some initial ideas for your affirmation in the chat now.

Do You Want to Start Manifesting?

Check out my free content, a great way to get started with manifesting:

Check out my course, guiding you through each stage of manifestation:

Do You Want Help to Work Through Something That May be Blocking Your Positive Manifesting?

Do you believe you may have acquired negative manifestations that get in the way of the life you would choose? You can learn more about my approach to Hypnotherapy and how it could help you here.

Do You Want to Take the Conversation Further – Ask Questions and Contribute Answers?

Join Believe – Relieve – Conceive, my Insight Timer group.

What Could You Already Be Manifesting Without Realising It?

Hypnotherapy Meditation Other

To What Extent is Trauma a Form of Negative Manifestation?

Trauma can initiate negative manifestation. It can inhibit your self-esteem, your ability to move towards goals and to motivate yourself. Trauma that may have been picked up during the course of life can replay and loop after the event is long gone, during a variety of different external encounters. This can block our ability to think clearly, be creative and imagine.

Trauma can be encoded, even in the context of “perfect” parenting. The Still Face Experiment highlights how even a short moment of absent expression on the face of a parental figure can leave a child distressed.

You could be the greatest parent of all time. If a timely opportunity is not provided for the child to return to positive, comfortable interaction with the parent, the formation of a traumatic experience can follow.

With only a partially developed brain, a child can easily blame themselves for this, potentially holding this belief for a lifetime.

This can colour our relationships with ourselves and others, if not addressed in therapy, or meditation, for example.

Such interpretations function just like affirmations. However, they often contain a polar opposite message to the abundance, or confidence, or love you might choose.

So, whether or not you have obtained traumatic experiences, you may have a build-up of existing negative manifestations.

You may, or may not be completely aware of them, or any resistance they present to the manifestation process.

“Portrait of Carl Gustav Jung“, by Barabeke, under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED

It may be that this can be overcome through committed habituation of affirmations and foresense alone. On the other hand it may be that, significant emotional, or behavioural resistance arises and blocks you from effective manifesting.

In which case, you may choose to seek professional help in working through that resistance. The key here is not to try to push these feelings and interpretations about yourself and others away. As Carl Jung said “What you resist not only persists but will grow in size“.

The key is to learn to remain with them with calmness, to be curious and responsive, not reactive.

When you get help to overcome negative manifestation, you can reduce the fear enough to release its power and control over you, leaving you free to manifest as you would choose.

Do You Want to Start Manifesting?

Check out my free content, a great way to get started with manifesting:

Check out my course, guiding you through each stage of manifestation:

Do You Want Help to Work Through Something That May be Blocking Your Positive Manifesting?

Do you believe you may have acquired negative manifestations that get in the way of the life you would choose? You can learn more about my approach to Hypnotherapy and how it could help you here.

Do You Want to Take the Conversation Further – Ask Questions and Contribute Answers?

Join Believe – Relieve – Conceive, my Insight Timer group.

Steps leading up through woodland into light, symbolising a path to manifestation mastery

What does it take to master manifesting?

Meditation Other
Steps leading up through woodland into light, symbolising a path to manifestation mastery

The secret delight in manifesting is not what you get, but what you give

Going all in – manifesting is investing!

This investment involves investing in yourself! Unlike most investments, if your investment is not performing, you can do something about it. What you ultimately get from manifesting can multiply your initial investment. The universe is generous, but you need to make the first moves with integrity and dedication.

Overriding the “sameness” mode of your brain and system

Thoughts are words and words conjure images and emotions. Thinking is like breathing – it happens automatically, but when you think about breathing you can shape your breathing. You can choose to breathe quickly, slowly, shallowly, deeply, through your mouth, or nose. You can even choose to hold your breath for a time. While you may not be able to stop your unhelpful thoughts directly, you can change the way they sound and even think new thoughts in new ways.

One of the things your brain does is to create familiarity. This neural circuit doesn’t really care whether you feel satisfied and fulfilled, or miserable and anxious. It is unconscious. If what you think, feel, do and how you engage with your environment is familiar, your system can function more economically. However, by investing a little more energy you can shift gears. You can change your brain and manifest a new, self-determined way of showing up in the world. When you show up differently in the world, the world shows up differently to you. Once you are firmly on the path of your self-determined reality, once this is familiar, your brain’s passion for familiarity will help you to keep it consistent.

Your consciousness, in contrast, which may not be entirely localised to your brain, is not limited by having been optimised for sameness. Quite the contrary, you can choose thoughts to think and emotions follow based on your core values and intrinsic goals. In time and with familiarity these thoughts are generalised and become beliefs. Beliefs produce behaviours that directly and indirectly change your environment.. The notion that the presence of consciousness indirectly alters the nature of matter is, perhaps, obvious. The notion that it directly alters the nature of matter within the human body may not be so far-fetched either.

Feeding subtlety over intensity

Some word and feeling combinations contain a greater emotional charge than others. When you want to make a change in your life you may need to invest your presence emotions with a lower charge. Emotions that are not so strong right now, but are ultimately better for you. This involves being willing to go beyond a stronger and more detrimental, but temptingly familiar feeling. Giving your attention instead to a more subtle, yet nourishing feeling. You don’t need to get this right every time, but you do need to be prepared to make this sacrifice.

With practice, soon enough, and quicker than you may think, the emotion that serves you well will become more and more familiar and amplify in intensity.

Mental manifestation with or without deliberate action?

Manifesting your deepest desires requires mental and behavioural work. Many manifestation processes focus only on the mental. This can seem, on the surface, to be enough for your desires to simply fall into your lap! There is something deliciously appealing about rubbing a lamp, making a wish, sitting back and waiting for it to come true. Well. However, if you approach manifestation by repeating your affirmations and visualising your future, without walking the talk and changing what you do, things may not work out the way you had anticipated. Personally, even if I were able to manifest in this way, I wouldn’t want to. Ordering take-away occasionally is nice, but something changes if you do it all the time, because the personal investment is low. Alternatively you could buy quality ingredients, invest your time and apply your love and creativity in preparing a meal. Doing this can open up a world of satisfaction and health benefits that you can’t get from ordering-in. True fulfilment is multiplied by your personal contribution.

The importance of sacrifice and contribution

To contribute something must necessarily involve sacrificing something else. In this case energy, time and instant gratification were sacrificed for a greater, more complex system of rewards and possibilities. Preparing a meal requires applying your existing skills and acquiring new ones, being creative, solving problems and fulfilling a need for yourself and/or others. It is a multi-sensory, multi-faceted experience.

Sacrifice, in this sense, is not a symptom of scarcity, but a demonstration of your belief in an abundant world. When what you give away, or let go of is seen as part of your manifestation process, what you ultimately receive is sweeter, deeper, more worthwhile and longer-lasting.

The magic of synchronicities

This magic is exciting, beautiful and awe-inspiring! How wonderful to notice when something that happens is just too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. When you are left speechless at how something amazing reveals itself to you, indicating that what you are putting in is making waves! Inspired by ancient Eastern wisdom, Carl Jung recognised the importance of the mystical. He identified “synchronicities” as those moments where your dreams converge with waking life. He framed these events as markers that life is flowing in the direction that was consciously intended.

While engaging in the manifesting process you might notice something unexpected during your day that reminds you of something you had manifested. You then have a choice as to how you interpret it: as your brain making connections and perceiving patterns in the environment; and/or a convergence of forces more universal than your brain alone. Either way the effect can be powerful. Identifying synchronicities can validate your process of manifestation and spur you on, so embrace them and enjoy them!

Reflection question

Which of the following values would you choose to make one of your strongest, to apply to your manifesting process?

  1. Dedicated graft/work
  2. Personal sacrifice
  3. Delayed gratification
  4. Integrity

The Role of Community and Journaling in Manifesting

Feeding your learning forward – Using your own experience to inspire and support others through their own manifestation journey

When you feed your learning forward, you use your own experience to inspire and support others through their own manifestation journey. Not only do you get the delight of helping another soul to learn and grow, you solidify your own learning and growth. You get to master the craft for yourself. If your learning ends with you, you might settle for a somewhat vague understanding, compared to the level of integration you cement when you pass that understanding on to others.

This feeding forward can be done with anyone whom you feel would be responsive and welcoming of your support and encouragement. Loved ones, family members, friends, or colleagues, for example.

In my (premium) Insight Timer course, “Manifestation From The Inside Out”, there is a course classroom, which is an ideal space to feed this kind of learning forward. Additionally, my (free) Insight Timer and Facebook groups of the same name, “Believe – Relieve – Conceive”, are great spots to give and receive assistance.

So start the whole process knowing that you will be inspiring and supporting others to do the same and notice the difference this makes from day 1!

Journaling your manifesting journey

Journaling your experiences, desires, setbacks, successes, fears, courage, struggles and breakthroughs once a day, every day is golden! It can help in so many ways to balance, maintain and develop your mental wellbeing. Furthermore, it works wonders for your manifestation journey, especially if you don’t currently have so many people around you who you feel comfortable opening up to!

Journaling needn’t take up much of your time. Even if you write 3 simple words just before you go to sleep, or when you wake up, there exists a conversation you know you have every day, acknowledging what it is like to be you and tracing a path of your existence and wellbeing.

If you choose to keep a journal of your journey of manifestation, this can serve to:

  • Consolidate the affirmations, visualisations and feelings
  • Work through difficult moments, so they become learning moments
  • Identify areas to work through that you can bring to the classroom for this course
  • Track the development of your skill and habit
  • Identify what works and what doesn’t serve you
  • Remember your synchronicities and tune yourself in to notice more
  • Help to remain consistent in your approach to manifestation
  • Become a record of a meaningful and important journey that you can look back on with fondness

All you need is a pen and notepad, or a notes app on your phone. Just date each entry and write!

Reach out to me here if you are looking for personalised guidance in manifestation.

Reflection question

Much of the manifestation process is internal, at least in the beginning, but the results involve radical differences in the external world. In a sense it is an art of making the internal external. Which method of externalising do you feel resonates most deeply with you?

  • Sharing and guidance in online classroom, or group settings, as mentioned above?
  • Journaling?
  • Sharing and guidance with family, or friends?
  • Other ways?