How to Sleep Better

With Energy Healing & Mind-Body Techniques

Can't sleep? Here you'll find ideas for how to sleep better using energy healing and other natural, alternative tools and tips for getting the rest you need.

So many of us struggle with sleep. Some of my most unhappy, miserable clients are the ones who aren't sleeping well.

Poor quality sleep leaves us feeling foggy-headed in the morning—sometimes through the whole day. It reduces mental sharpness and emotional resilience and makes our muscles ache. It also has a huge impact on our physical health. Long-term poor sleep:

• doubles your risk of having a heart attack
• increases your risk of Type 2 diabetes
• increases the likelihood of obesity.

Without good sleep, it's hard to stay well. In fact, when scientists (cruelly, in my opinion) inflict long-term sleep deprivation on rats, they eventually die.

What Good Sleep Gives Us

Good sleep gives us mental clarity, physical vitality, emotional stability, better performance at work and in sports. It gives us greater resilience to illness (and probably to accidents, too), more balanced hormones, and less inflammation. All of which adds up to a longer, happier, more productive life.

Sleep is kind of like a wonder drug, except with no co-pays or side effects.

The Energetic Importance of Sleep

But there's an energetic piece, too. When we sleep, we plug into Source energy. All night long, with our busy minds shut off, we are connected to the Source from which comes our life force, our intelligence, our wisdom, our intuition, our creativity, and our love. Without this, we soon turn into a hollow shell.

How To Sleep Better With An Energy Healing Technique

The medical world doesn't have a lot of great alternatives for helping us get the deep rest we need. Sleep-aid drugs can knock us out, and if you have a serious case of insomnia they're better than nothing, but a drug-induced sleep isn't really the same as real sleep. So trying energy healing for sleep makes sense. What do you have to lose?

Here's a technique to try.

If you're lying in bed with your brain whirling, place your thumbs on your temples and rest your fingers comfortably on your forehead, where (on many people) there are two slight bumps. Hold them there, breathing slowly and evenly until you fall asleep.

How To Sleep Better With Acupressure

Try these acupressure points when you can't get to sleep. Hold each for about a minute.

1. Heart 7, "Spirit Gate"
   Location: On the inside of the arm in the crease of the wrist, in the depression in line with the little finger.
   Function: Calms an overactive mind, eases anxiety, relieves insomnia

2. Spleen 6, "Three Yin Intersection"
   Location: Three to four finger-widths above the tip of the inner ankle bone, just behind the shin-bone.
   Function: balances emotions, eases insomnia and anxiety (also headaches and menstrual cramps). Don't use when pregnant.

3. GV 16, "Wind Mansion"
   Location: In the center back of your head, in the large hollow under the base of the skull.
   Function: clears the head, benefits the central nervous system, releases mental stress, helps when you can't sleep, nightmares, trauma, fear, and headache.

How to Sleep Better with Belly Breathing

Belly breathing -- deep, rhythmical breathing all the way into the lower third of your lungs -- is one of the best ways to relax your nervous system and fall asleep. It bridges the gap between the physical and subtle bodies, soothing the energy as well as the body-mind, and helps to connect us to the universal energy. Plus, personally it helps me feel better to know that even though I'm awake and I'd rather be asleep, at least I'm doing something great for my health!

If you need instructions, you can learn how to belly-breathe here.

Surrender to Wakefulness

It seems counter-intuitive, but somehow surrendering to being awake helps you go to sleep. Don't get up and do something else, as some experts advise, and don't start thinking. Just lie there and be OK about being awake.

On an energetic level, I think that giving up your resistance to being awake somehow breaks up an energetic blockage, a sort of a shell that hardens around being awake and keeps it in place.

Lavender Essential Oil

Lavender essential oil is a classic aromatherapy remedy for promoting sleep, using the energy of the lavender plant to help soothe and smooth your energy field. Put a few drops into your pre-bedtime bath or on your pillow. You can buy it at most health food stores, and online at places such as Mountain Rose Herbs.

How to Sleep Better with Delta Wave Binaural Beats

Delta brainwaves are the signature of deep sleep. By listening to sound tracks that contains delta frequency binaural beats, you can entrain your brain to produce delta waves, thus encouraging sleep with all the energetic benefits it brings.

You can get inexpensive i-phone applications that allow you to customize sound tracks with the kind of brain-wave binaural beats that you want -- in this case delta waves to help you sleep better. (But you can also choose alpha waves for relaxation, theta waves for creativity and meditation, and beta waves for alertness.)

Or try out this free on-line resource that allows you to customize a mix of soothing sounds, such as the ocean, birds, a steady drum beat, etc., AND add to it binaural beats for the brain state you want to achieve -- in this case, sleep. You set a timer, press start, and away you go: http://www.soundsleeping.com/index.php

You can also buy or download wonderful delta-wave sleep-promoting CDs from The Relaxation Company.

More Resources

Dr. Andrew Weil's site offers a good compendium of more conventional sleep tips, including a recommendation for a couple of natural sleep aids.

Dr. Weil also makes these recommendations for restless leg syndrome, the maddening twitching that prevents some people from resting deeply:

• Stop smoking, which may impair blood flow to leg muscles.
• Avoid caffeine and alcohol.
• Take calcium citrate (500 mg) and magnesium (250-500 mg) at bedtime to calm nerves and muscles.
• Exercise, stretch or massage your legs before bed.
• Take a hot bath.
• Consider mind body therapies, such as clinical hypnosis and guided imagery, which can help address underlying stress and anxiety.

A Roundup of Yet More Ideas for How to Sleep Better

• The problem: You're not going to bed early enough.

  The fix: It's very unlikely that what you're doing is more important than sleep. Especially, stop with the electronics before bedtime. The blue light they emit is a signal to your body to wake up! Make a sleep chart or set up an accountability buddy to keep you on track. Love yourself enough to prioritize this magic healer called sleep, and go to bed.

• The problem: Chronic pain

  The fix: Pain usually improves with good sleep, but what if pain is preventing you from sleeping well? Here's a link to some energy healing ideas for pain. Also, Google "anti-inflammatory diet" and adopt it. Sugar and alcohol are low-hanging fruit here.

• The problem: You suspect sleep apnea.

  The fix: Go to your doctor, get diagnosed and follow the prescribed treatment (usually a C-PAP machine).

• The problem: Environmental factors

  The fix: Noise? Get a white-noise machine. Light in your bedroom? Fix it. Whatever the problem, love yourself enough to solve it.

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I hope these natural remedies for how to sleep better are helpful. I wish you a deep and restorative night's rest, tonight and every night. Nancy

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Image by Eugenie Gershoy [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons