Sleep Issues and Inner-Work

If you have sleep issues, despite good sleep hygiene and stress-management techniques or your sleep issues are severe, I recommend speaking with a health-care professional.  The root of the sleep issues can be physiological or psychological.  Sleep and how it affects the body’s functioning are too important to ignore.  Low-quality sleep is often due to mental stress or emotional issues that have not been resolved.

I have worked with many people who report that the quality and duration of their sleep improves when they do the emotional work and learn how to manage their stress.  Meditation, breathwork, exercise, and other tension-relieving activities have been linked to improved sleep.  Additionally, several have benefitted from subconscious-belief repatterning work.  Sometimes subconscious beliefs around feeling safe or having the ability to sleep need to be transformed.  The messages we tell ourselves can become our beliefs, both consciously and subconsciously.  Imagine someone who is having a rough patch and cannot sleep.  She gets frustrated and tells herself or others, “I cannot sleep,” and this becomes her reality.

I have had many clients with trauma history who had difficulty sleeping.  We work with healing the trauma through somatic work but also address their subconscious beliefs.  For example, a client who had been sexually abused by the priest at her church from a young age and at age fifty-five, she could not remember ever having a good night’s sleep.  We did the emotional healing work necessary and repatterned her beliefs to include “It is safe for me to sleep at night,” and “I sleep deeply and peacefully at night.”  She began sleeping well for the first time in her life. 

If you suspect that the issue is physiological, you will want to address this with a medical doctor or holistic equivalent.  It is possible that you could get referred to a sleep specialist who may recommend further investigation.

It is also possible that you are experiencing adrenal fatigue, which can occur when you are exposed to stress over time or have health issues.  When the adrenal glands become exhausted and are not able to produce adequate quantities of hormones, primarily cortisol, they become fatigued.  Many alternative-health practitioners diagnose and treat this condition. 

Healthy and productive sleep is imperative to optimal health.  It is worth investigating the root cause of the disturbance and taking necessary measures to get deep and restorative sleep, which greatly improves quality of life.  I developed a subconscious belief meditation called Deep and Restorative Sleep to serve as a sleep hygiene tool to enhance your sleep quality. Click here to access

(Excerpt from Mastering Self-Care: Building Resiliency Through Healthy and Mindful Living by Rev. Suzie DeVaughn, LMSW.)