Emotions and Sleep

Emotions and Sleep

This video (and transcript below) are about emotions and how they effect our sleep and of course some tips for working with emotions for a better sleep.


Transcript (please excuse occasional spelling and grammar issues)

Emotions are a really big thing. I talk about them quite a lot in my book "Better Sleep Sooner", which you can download or buy from the site. Emotions are what drives us and one of the gentlemen who was involved in creating Neuro Linguistic Programming, that's Richard Banner, he often says when he's talking about sales to workshops and to clients that we're selling an emotion when we're selling something and it's like that for ourselves. We are constantly selling an idea to ourselves and the emotional feedback we give or get from that is what sells it and that's what can often work for us and it can also work kind of against us. 

Sleep is often one of those things that kind of suffers. The thing with sleep is when it's not going well, it's kind of like a ? and it's not actually the sleep that is the problem. It's a whole bunch of other stuff that are affecting the balance within the mind/body system, which then affects the sleep. Emotions and emotional upset, even hyper emotional states will stop us from sleeping. Getting very excited about something, like Christmas Eve when I was a kid kind of way, but then there's the other things. It's like an exam the next day. Have I studied enough? Anxiety and I'm not sleeping. It could be when I was really sick many years ago when I was in my early 20s. I had many evenings where I just could not sleep. Many, many of them. That was more to do with what was going on physiologically and how I felt about that. 

Emotions are a huge part of our lives. They're such a major part of our lives and what I've noticed with working with physiological illnesses with clients over the years is that the way we feel or the emotion we have about the thing that is going on can often relate or even be the emotion that is creating the problem that is going on. An example could be asthma for me. When I used to have asthma, I used to have that and I don't have it anymore, when I used to have that, I used to get really angry and frustrated. Now the one thing I learned once I released it from my life was that it was anger and frustration that had tightened everything up to such a degree that it had generated the asthma, or those things, the symptomologies that were labeled asthma. I don't actually believe really that I ever had asthma. Asthma is a label given to a set of symptomologies and it's kind of a lazy way of dealing with symptoms. Give them a label! He's got asthma! It's not necessarily true. I didn't have asthma or I didn't have any of those things. What I was doing was I was expressing a discomfort in an imbalance, which was generalized to this thing called asthma.

That's a really important thing to consider when we talk about emotions because what we actually are saying often is "I'm angry" or "I'm angry at you". When actually what we're doing is anger. So I'm not angry. I am doing or feeling angry. Some of you may say "that's semantics" and "that's just like you're getting old", but the truth is when I say "I'm angry", then I've got to change myself or who I am in order to stop being angry, but actually anger is something that I'm doing. I'm doing it strategically actually at a deep unconscious level. I'm responding to a stimulus and that stimulus means I run a strategy, which is like I'm angry. I do anger and express that outward in whatever way. 

Now that emotion is actually, sometimes I can't control it I guess. Most of us have these emotions that we just suddenly are just feeling this way. It's how we're designed. When we pull it back a little bit and rewind a little bit, we realize that there's a trigger and there's a moment of response and there's some choices maybe and there's some strategies that we run, there's some imaginings that we have and then that means we do anger. 

Why am I saying this? That's a good question. Emotions are really, really important to be aware of. Specifically the ones that are out of control and the ones that are generating stress because those are the kinds of emotions that sit in the system and it can really influence our ability to sleep or not and usually not. 

So, I'm not going to get into a whole bunch of strategies or talks about how to do that because there are many, about as many as there are people watching this video. I hope there's more than just two or three of you! So these emotions however, are really important to understand on the level that if I'm feeling really frustrated about the lack of sleep that I'm having or that I'm experiencing, then what might be an answer to that is the frustration. The frustration being the thing that I'm feeling about the lack of sleep can be the same emotion that is generating the lack of sleep.

Now I know when I was feeling sick and at times in my life where I haven't slept very well. Often I wake up in the morning and I think "how do I feel about that? I'm really frustrated about that" so for me, I think asking myself "what's frustrating me at the moment outside of sleep in my life". It might be work. It might be relationships. It might be whatever and so if I'm able to get clarity on that and make some adjustments around the general frustration, then that releases that energy so that I can actually begin to sleep, which means I wake up in the morning and I'm not getting that symptomological response of frustration. I hope that makes sense.

Emotions are just so fascinating and they're so important to be able to work with and there are many ways of doing that. There's NRP. One thing about NRP is that to work with emotions and I'm going to do a couple of videos on this because there's quite a lot involved, is just working with sub-modalities and very quickly. A sub-modality is kind of the way that we perceive the kind of experience that leads to anger or a memory where we got angry or the context in which we got angry and how we remember that in our mind. 

Now I'll give you an example. I went to a movie recently and the movie was a three dimensional movie and I think it was Guardians of the Galaxy. How they get so much into a movie and the technology to make those sorts of things must be ferocious because it meant silly glasses on and looking at this right there and there were things popping out at me, I looked at that thing respectively and I thought "no wonder that gets under the skin". It's so huge and because everything is coming at you, it's so real and because it's bright and it's so loud and there's galaxies and space ships and having to even work this stuff out to choreography is beyond me. So the modalities of that were all extremely huge and close and loud so some modalities, if I was to speak about sound, sound is a modality or hearing is a modality. So volume would be a sub-modality. Tempo would be another sub-modality. Pitch would be a sub-modality. Tonality is a sub-modality. Distance would be a sub-modality because if something is aware that they're making a sound, it's quite different to being right here making a sound. So with visuals or the visual, brightness, closeness, size, speed, three dimensional and those sorts of things. They're all sub-modalities. 

So why is that important. Well when we do emotions sometimes the way around it or the way to understand it is to say "what am I thinking that kind of inspires me to feel this way". For example, if I'm working with someone who is having nightmares, the nightmare is normally quite big and ugly and bright or really dark or heavy, but it's right there. So the sub-modality of that would be to change the distance, so if I pushed that away to about five meters away, right over there, what happens to the emotion when you have all this distance between you and the thing and generally, not always, but mostly the person would say this actually doesn't feel as emotionally intense. So if we made it smaller as it moved away, we made it smaller and maybe a little fuzzy, what happens then? Generally, not always, but generally the person will say it just looses it emotional intensity. 

A positive example of that is when we remember a wonderful event. I remember going to Movie World or something in Movie World. It was the stupidest ride I've ever been on in my life. It was a video. It was the Simpsons. It was a Simpsons thing and you lifted up through a hatch and you're in the middle of this three dimensional video. It's not even real, but I just about threw up because I'm just surrounded by the stuff and the things rocking and people screaming. There were only six of us in the whole thing and it's just going like this and it's crazy and it's all three dimensional and suddenly I'm flying through space. The sub-modalities of that was it's right there so if I wanted to relax afterwards, spread it out and give myself more space. Give myself more time and let things soften. That's just an example.

So when we're noticing we're feeling emotional and we know that the emotion is influencing our sleep, then it's a really good idea to check out some possible ways of working with those emotions to soften them. NRP is a really good way. EFT, emotional freedom technique is a really good way. It works for many people. Not all, but there's been a great success with EFT and NLP for US veterans, war veterans and things and that's a pretty extraordinary situation to be in. 

So once again, emotions. In summary, the emotions we feel about the thing that is going on can often give us insight as to the emotion that's generated the thing going on. Example, if I'm feeling frustrated about lack of sleep, it could be the frustration in my life that is generating the lack of sleep. Now I say 'could be' because I'm basing this primarily on a lot of my own experience with hundreds of clients and I've found that when we discuss the emotions and what's going on in their life, there is a very, very strong correlation between the emotion they're feeling about what's going on and the emotions that are generating what's going on. Not always and yet most of the time and I think that's really fascinating and it gives us a head start, if you like, a foot in to making the changes that we would like to make so that we can just have more choices about how we feel about our life and of course so that we can maybe sleep a lot better this night.

So if you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to email me and I'll get right back to you.

Helping children with nightmares etc

In this video I talk about nightmares/fears, worries etc and how to help children with these disruptive challenges.

Structure
The structure or How the child is thinking about the nightmare is the most important factor when talking to them about it. And what we want the child to experience is a lessening of the intensity of the emotion they were feeling so that they can relax and get back to sleep.

The video is just over 8 minutes long, and below is a written transcription of the video.


 

Transcription:

Hi there. Just a short video with respect to helping children sort out their problems with worrying at night. Bad dreams, fears about things that go bump in the night, that sort of thing. What we're going to talk about really is structure, not content. The thing that we learn in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) , which is so useful is that structure actually makes most things work and what I mean by structure is like if I can think of what kind of ice cream I like, what I have to do is picture in my head and then I mention it once, kind of strawberry looking and that picture is kind of life size and I can imagine kind of holding it and get a compulsion of I really want it. So the content, it could be chocolate, it could be anything, I'm sorry. Any flavour, but fundamentally where is it? How am I picturing it? If I pictured it in black and white, would it really be as exciting? Probably not. 

So with children, it's really important I've found and sitting with our daughter, Phoebe is talking about what happened and what it's all about is actually kind of like a little bit like red rag to the bull or flicking a bit of fuel in the flame. What really is more important is you know, is it in colour or black and white? Well, it's in colour daddy. Is it life size or bigger or smaller? It's kind of bigger than life. And how close is it to you in your dream? It's right there. Well, lets be fair. If something larger than life, colourful and right there, it doesn't matter what it is. It's going to be pretty freaky. So here's the thing, what we do is we say okay, what would happen if it was a little bit further away? Does it feel as bad when it's a little bit further away, like two or three meters away? Well, no but it's still there. Of course. Okay so it's over there and you make it smaller so it's like that big, but it's five meters away. It's on the other side of the room and it's that big. How does it feel? It's still there, but it doesn't feel okay. If you imagine it kind of a little bit fuzzy and stuck red hair on it. See that's the thing. As soon as you do something like that, you change the structure. The first thing that happens is something changes with respect to how they feel about it because it's different, it changed and also they realize unconsciously that they changed it and they didn't know they could. That's the most important part. Learning that they can change how they feel by changing how something looks in their head because they can't see it out there, but it's kind of there because they're hallucinating it. 

Rather than getting into the content, the story, the narrative, which could be really interesting. What was the beast doing? It's actually more important to consider is it in color? Get into the structure and it's kind of fun and what you notice is that their body starts to relax quite quickly because there is an unconscious recognition that this thing is no longer as frightening or worrisome as it was.

Now the thing that is also quite cool is that if this is a recurring dream or if it's a dream that's happened once or twice and they're kind of similar, like monsters and things like that, once again, it's the unconscious doing its thing. The unconscious doesn't really know that what it's doing is freaking us out because it's just doing what the unconscious does and so what we want to do is while the child is awake and not in bed, nowhere near going to bed, just say now that dream you told me about the other day, was that in colour or was it in black and white? Well it was in colour. Was it life size or bigger? It was life size. How close would it have been? It was right here. What would it have been like once again if it were smaller and further away, black and white and a little bit fuzzy, a little bit out of focus? What would it be like?

What you're doing at that point is you're giving them an unconscious experience. You're bringing something that is normally unconscious up to the present and children are great for this because they live unconsciously most of the time and you shift it or at least you teach the unconscious that there can be some element of control and then they take that information inward and they might not necessarily see it straight away, but they learn something and that could also influence the way the unconscious is doing what it does. Assuming it worked for us and it certainly worked for me.

I had a recurring dream for many, many years. It was quite horrific and a bit graphic. Don't tell the psychotherapist about this, but what I suddenly awoke to, excuse the pun, was that what if I did something with this during the day. So I brought this memory of the dream to mind and I started to change certain aspects of it. Well, interesting enough, it was actually that night, I knew something was different and I never had the same kind of dream, but what I did do was I got myself out of it and that was about two days or a week later. I can't really remember. It was such a long time ago, but I actually found myself in the dream again, but I got myself out of it because I knew that I could change it. 

A very graphic experience with a client many, many years ago who would refuse to go to sleep anymore. She was a young woman who was just really exhausted, huge red eyes and she was having the most horrifically graphic dreams where she was actually the person doing it and it was quite horrific. So the long and the short of this, I don't want to get into a lot of drawn out content of the story, but all we had to do was I said to her, I asked her to close her eyes for just a few seconds and I asked her to go into that dream that she was really scared of, which kind of sounds horrible, but I knew that this was going to have an input. I see all the [unclear 6:12] and all the knives are made out of [unclear 6:17] and immediately colour came back into her face and she opened here eyes and said "can I do that" and I said "well do you want to do that" and she said "yes" and I said "well go back and do it again, but this time imagine you're in a clown suit" and she started laughing. 

The thing that we forget is that we're in control. The thing that we're being told over and over is you can't control it. It's not a good thing. The unconscious is curious and if it only knows one way of doing something, it's only ever going to do that one way of doing it until we initiate a new way of doing it or give a new suggestion and as we start to take control and teach our children how to have a healthy degree of control in their thoughts and their feelings and of course their sleep and of course their day to day outcomes. So give it a try. Move away from content. Move away from the story and just simply ask "was it in colour or black and white"? What you might have to do is say "listen, I can see you're really upset and I can see this has been very scary for you", not condescending, but really acknowledge it for them because they need to know that you're acknowledging and understanding that they've been really scared. Then say "listen, can I ask you a question. This might sound a bit funny, but was that dream in colour". "Oh, it was in colour". "Was that dream like how big was it"? "It was like really big". "Like were you right in it"? "I was right in it". So then you say "okay, what would it be like if you weren't in it and it was like over there somewhere. What would that be like"? You might be surprised by what you get back from them.

Give it a go. It's really interesting and it's so much fun. I mean, not fun, but it's fun to see the change and it's fun to give your children a tool because what we noticed with our daughter is this actually starts to positively influence the way she thinks about so many things. She starts to take control of her thoughts, her feelings and ultimately her behaviour.

Have fun. Enjoy.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Thanks
Aaron