A Good Night’s sleep
Good morning everyone and welcome to Stress Free Living.
Today’s program is about sleep, or more correctly, lack of sleep.
A good night’s sleep is very important to our health and wellbeing, but sadly many of us can’t seem to relax and fall asleep easily.
One of the main reasons why so many people find it hard to relax and fall asleep, is simply because the day to day stressful situations have not been processed out of the cells of our bodies, yes you heard correctly – every cell in our bodies feels the effects of stress – it is not just in your head.
Each and every day we experience a variety of stressful situations that can affect us emotionally and physically.
What is stress and how does it affect us?
Very simply, stress produces negative emotions – How do we know that we are experiencing emotions? – Because we can feel them!
We might feel fearful or angry or sad or frustrated.
What we are feeling are the effects of hormones that have been released from our brain. Hormones are chemicals.
Positive emotions like love, have a positive effect on our lives and we feel fantastic, but negative emotions can have a negative effect. I say can have a negative effect because I believe that all emotions – even the negative ones are meant for our good.
For instance ‘fear’ can cause you to remove yourself from potential danger.
Problems arise when we don’t respond to emotions in a healthy way.
When we hold on to anger or become resentful, or when we are frustrated for long periods of time – this is when these emotions have a negative effect on us.
Emotions are signals – we could look at emotions as messengers that we could respond to in a way that is beneficial to us.
This is not easy to do when Modern living has a reputation of presenting us with one stressful situation after another. Our bodies find it difficult to cope
Remember Emotions are chemicals – when we experience a negative emotion, chemicals are released by the brain and flood through our bodies, they attach to little receptor sights on our cells. That is why we can feel the stress –in our chest or tummy or maybe a headache. If we are able to receive the message and respond within a minute and a ½ , the stress chemical will release and will be disposed of. But……. This is very often NOT the case in modern life. It is not usual for us to have a healthy response to a stressful situation in 90 seconds so that the chemical can be released.
What happens in prolonged stress is that more stress chemicals are released into the system – these unprocessed emotional chemicals end up clogging our cells sending messages to the brain that they need to be processed – that is why we so often have a story playing over and over in our head – and we can’t relax and fall asleep.
Sometimes we can’t even isolate an incident that is keeping us from relaxing, we just feel stressed and on edge. This in itself can cause more stress, which means more stress chemicals.
It is very important for our wellbeing to be able to process the stress chemicals from our body. If we are not able to do it naturally in 90 seconds, then we need a tool to help us do this regularly on a daily basis, because when we have all those chemicals stuck in our cells, our cells are being starved of nutrition and oxygen, because there is just no room for nutrition to enter the cells.
The good news is that it is not difficult to learn how to clear these stress chemicals out of our system.
Our brain knows what the problem or problems are that are creating the stress response, all we have to do is ask ourselves a few simple questions at the end of each day. Ask yourself ‘Who has upset me today? What has upset me today? Allow your brain to do a scan of your day and to give you the information.
Please listen to the full podcast above for them complete tapping technique