INSOMNIA RELIEF

Neurofeedback Therapy can make a powerful, positive impact on your ability to get a good night’s sleep. This technology helps to identify the brainwave imbalance that may be contributing to your inability to sleep. By retraining the brain and improving brainwave function in those key areas affected by insomnia, the brain is rewarded through neurofeedback for creating healthier patterns.

As the brain learns new responses, new patterns and pathways develop improving brainwave function as you begin to sleep better and for longer periods of time. Generally, when someone experiences poor sleep it’s often the result of a low alpha response. When you close your eyes, alpha should increase, creating a feeling of alert calmness, which then helps you cycle into theta, and eventually fall asleep.

However, when something is interrupting your alpha rhythms, whether it’s mental illness, a trauma response, chronic pain, or apnea, falling or staying asleep becomes difficult, sometimes impossible. In our experience, sleep is one of the first things to improve in neurofeedback training, regardless of what rhythm or section of the brain we are working on. As the EEG dynamics stabilize, people often require more sleep, and it’s a good sign that the training is working. In Alpha/Theta Neurofeedback training, we can teach the brain to produce more alpha waves on its own, simply by providing the brain with feedback every time it spontaneously produces the alpha rhythm, which helps improve sleep, anxiety, concentration, and focus.

Clinical studies have shown neurofeedback to be an effective, drugless, natural approach to insomnia, especially for people who have struggled for years. If you are ready to be able to fall asleep and stay asleep, for improved energy, health and wellbeing, then it’s time to relax and reward your brain for improved function with Zone Health & Performance Psychology Neurotherapy program.

Audio-Visual Entrainment (AVE) is a technique that uses pulses of light and sound at specific frequencies to gently and safely guide the brain into various brainwave patterns. Zone Health & Performance Psychology in partnership with Mind Alive Inc. provides our clients portable hand-held AVE devices that can be utilized at the convenience of their home to provide a cutting-edge, non-invasive, drug-free approach to help you improve the onset of sleep with five specially designed sessions: Schumann for Sleep, Meditate to Sleep, Alpha/Theta for Sleep, SMR for Sleep, and Delta.

AVE is most effective for helping people fall asleep by turning off or shutting down the mental “chatter” after a busy day. People who have difficulty falling asleep often have low levels of serotonin. AVE helps boost serotonin which converts to melatonin. AVE sessions used during the day reduce stress and anxiety, which also provides for a better quality of sleep – the more relaxed your day, the more relaxed your sleep. To help you sleep even better – we suggest using blue or a blue-green blend on our multi-color eye sets.

Breathwork Therapy helps to regulate the natural rhythm of your breath. We don’t think much about breathing, mostly because we don’t have to. This autonomic reflex occurs in healthy adults whether or not we consider what’s going on when we inhale or exhale. But breath is a remarkable tool we can use to heal a variety of conditions. Breathwork for insomnia is just one way you can use your own body to heal itself. Breathwork describes a group of exercises that teach you to manipulate your breathing rate and depth with the goal of bringing awareness to your breath and ultimately providing the same benefits you might get from a meditative practice. Clients will be taught a wide variety of different breathing techniques, programs and exercises. For example, clients will start to understand how the simple practice of mouth taping at night to ensure nasal breathing while sleeping can dramatically improve the quality of their sleep. Most formal practices involve 20 minutes to an hour of sustained, rhythmic breathing techniques. It is important to understand that there is a direct interplay between breathing, emotions, and sleep:

• If your breathing patterns are poor, mood regulation, and sleep will be poor.
• If sleep quality is inadequate, the emotions are unbalanced, you feel tired and anxious, and breathing is dysfunctional.
• If the emotions are high, you may have difficulty falling asleep or suffering from insomnia, and breathing will be fast, in the upper chest and effortful.

When we engage in deep, slow, diaphragmatic, and rhythmic breathing, we activate the Vagus nerve, turn on our parasympathetic nervous system, and put the brakes on anxiety and stress. Slow breathing also causes the body to produce melatonin. New research also suggests that slow breathing may help orchestrate oscillatory brain activity, providing a mechanism to alter brain waves. This has implications for the potential modulation of brain activity to promote sleep.

With the aid of Apps, guided practices, and technological devices such as Oxygen Advantage Sports Mask, Heart Math’s Emwave Pro, and Thought Technology’s eVu-TPS clients will learn how to self-regulate their nervous system at the convenience of their home so that they can improve the 3 pillars of their Functional breathing:

1. The mechanics of breathing (diaphragm function)
2. The biochemistry (exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide)
3. The cadence (the speed and rhythm of their breath)

Breathwork is a powerful way to access your body’s innate intelligence to heal itself. Breathwork, the conscious awareness of your breath, is a practice that is thousands of years old, and while there are many variations, styles and names, all types of breathwork offer the chance for personal transformation through improved mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being.

Mindfulness-Based Therapy for Insomnia-Research suggests that various types of meditation can help improve insomnia, and may even improve sleep quality for those without existing sleep problems. Mindfulness meditation, in particular, appears to improve sleep quality and reduce daytime disturbance in people with chronic insomnia and older adults. The principles of Acceptance and Letting-Go from MBCT (Mindfulness Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy), MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction), MBTI (Mindfulness Based Therapy for Insomnia) and ACT (Acceptance Commitment Therapy) in conjunction with Neurofeedback, HRV (Heart Rate Variability) Biofeedback Breathing enable our clients not only fall asleep faster, stay asleep but also achieve a more restorative sleep. Our therapeutic program is designed to cultivate a mindful approach to your sleep concerns which in turn, will help guide your personal inquiry into your own sleep needs and the optimal state of mind for initiation of sleep (at the beginning or middle of the night).

In doing so, bring attention to changing your relationship to sleep rather than to the amount of sleep you get each night. As you begin to change this relationship, you might notice an improvement in the quality of your sleep. Later, you will likely see an increase in the amount of sleep you get. This approach requires discipline and consistency but follows the principles of mindfulness outlined below:

• Beginner’s Mind: Remember that each night is a new night. Be open and try something different! What you have been doing to this point is probably not working well.
• Non-striving: Sleep is a process that cannot be forced, but instead should be allowed to unfold. Putting more effort into sleeping longer or better is counterproductive.
• Letting go: Attachment to sleep or your ideal sleep needs usually leads to worry about the consequences of sleeplessness. This is counterproductive and inconsistent with the natural process of letting go of the day to allow sleep to come.
• Non-judging: It is easy to automatically judge the state of being awake as negative and aversive, especially if you do not sleep well for several nights. However, this negative energy can interfere with the process of sleep. One’s relationship to sleep can be a fruitful subject of meditation.
• Acceptance: Recognizing and accepting your current state is an important first step in choosing how to respond. If you can accept that you are not in a state of sleepiness and sleep is not likely to come soon, why not get out of bed? Many people who have trouble sleeping avoid getting out of bed. Unfortunately, spending long periods of time awake in bed might condition you to being awake in bed.
• Trust: Trust your sleep system and let it work for you! Trust that your mind and body can self regulate and self correct for sleep loss. Knowing that short consolidated sleep often feels more satisfying than longer fragmented sleep can help you develop trust in your sleep system. Also, sleep debt can promote good sleep as long as it is not associated with increased effort to sleep.
• Patience: Be patient! It is unlikely that both the quality and quantity of your sleep will be optimal right away.

These are just some ways that mindfulness principles are related to sleep. You might discover other connections between these principles and the process of going to sleep or falling back asleep. We encourage you to explore this for yourself and share your experience throughout this program.