Yoga therapy: To ease sleepless nights

Easing sleepless nights using Yoga Therapy

Yoga Therapy to ease sleepless nights, sleeplessness affects everyone from time to time. If you’re someone who has issues or ‘hang ups’ around sleep or perhaps feel you feel you do not have good quality sleep / enough sleep, it can be easy to become caught up in a self-perpetuating cycle of negative rumination about heading to bed and the lack of of sleep you are getting. In some people, overtime the mental rumination can turn into a level of anxiety about going to sleep, or even fear that you won’t be able to sleep at all, or that you’re certain you will wake up in the night. It becomes a cycle and source of huge difficulty in helping us rest.

This is where yoga therapy can often help.

Yoga therapy offers smart solutions for interrupting disruptive sleep cycles and unhelpful thought rumination. As through yoga therapy, we look at the whole person and not just the issue sleeping. During the sessions, your yoga therapist will gain a picture of the individual’s life and their habits from morning til night. They will view them through connecting layers of what makes us human; for example, the persons body, how and where they might be holding tension and why. They will consider the way they are breathing and if there are breathing patterns that are impacting the nervous system to be either calm or alert. They will also explore emotions, including any deep seated or recent emotional situations that may be causing emotional dis-regulation.

Additionally, enquiring into the mind, specifically the thoughts or subconscious thoughts that are keeping them up at night, and finally, they a gentle enquiry into the person’s level of contentment in life. In our sessions together, we then look at the different yoga therapy interventions that are needed to help that individual flourish and be in their optimal state to achieve a good night’s rest.

How can yoga therapy help?

With a plethora of practices in the yoga tool kit to help, the easing and soothing effect of the practice is what sets this therapy apart. The key is in the practices offered to the individual, as not all forms of yoga are appropriate for improving sleep. For sleep, it’s important to soothe the hyper-arousal of the nervous system which if over active as we lay down at night, can contribute to disrupted sleep. During a session you might experience varying practices. Some physical postural stretches utilising particular release work on key fight and flight muscles, along with down-regulating breath work and mindfulness practices tailored to the person, are excellent ingredients to help someone drift into a naturally induced sleep. If you find that your someone whose mind is overactive before bed, or that you’re waking you up in the night, you might also discus the feelings and circumstances of your thoughts so your therapist can offer you a practical tool kit to help calm and soothe those mental fluctuations.

One of yoga therapies crowning health benefits is its magical ability to activate the rest and relax part of the nervous system called parasympathetic nervous system. This resting and relaxed state is highly important to help us move out of and to not remain in the feelings of anxious or fearful when it’s time to sleep. Therefor, together, we will gather a picture of you and your needs to help resolve the root causes of your lack of sleep and guide you on a different path to feel more at ease when it comes to bedtime using yoga therapy tools to light the way.

Our therapist Paula, works with us in Yoga Therapy.