If so, what about wake-up? Should you ‘pre-arrange’ before putting yourself to sleep?
You’re better off learning some relaxation methods. Hypnosis can and will relax you, but it’s unnecessary to learn it when plain ol’ relaxation methods will do the trick just as well.
Yes it will work, no, you will plain old wake up with your alarm.
But if you don’t set your alarm, well, you don’t need to know.
Yeah, actually it was the ‘waking up’ part that I found a bit scary, because when someone is hypnotised, it is the hypnotist who brings him/her back to ‘reality’… and I was wondering whether you could program yourself to wake up and, should that fail, what would happen.
As far as the hypnosis part is concerned, I’m guessing you could achieving some state similar to that with yoga or other relaxation techniques.
I’m with AudreyK. Relaxation is the key.
I used to have problems falling asleep. What I would do is get as comfortable as possible. Preferably in a symmetrical position (on my back). Do a little stretching and then try to lay perfectly still. And I mean don’t move a muscle. It’s a lot harder than you may think. After 5 - 10 minutes your body seems to go into a more relaxed state and it is easier to fall asleep.
My mother used to get my sister and I to go to sleep when we were still hyperactive by telling us to lie down, then she’d tell us to imagine our toes were getting heavy, too heavy to move, then our feet, then our legs and so on. It worked. We’d be asleep within 5 minutes. It’s not hypnosis, just a very strange form of relaxation.
This is off-topic, but anyway… Now when I go to sleep, I decide what time I want to wake up in the morning. Then I wake up at that time (within 15 minutes or so). I don’t use an alarm at all. Which can cause problems if I forget to tell myself what time to wake up. Can everyone do that?
i trained my self to go to sleep by reading. every night i would read some from the book i was into at the time. after a month or two, when ever i read a book, i would get very sleepy. it killed me when i had to study for school.
A simple engine search would, of course, have provided answers to my query (more than 7,000 hits with Google after I typed ‘self-hypnosis’ and ‘sleep’ :rolleyes:). Here’s one URL which is fairly interesting (it has a small section on the ‘waking up’ part)…
Hypnosis and relaxation techniques are just variants on monomaniacal self-suggestion. In practice, they’re very similar.
If you imitate Mousseduck’s mom, you really are hypnotizing your kids, and all that’s being done with that focused concentration is letting the body and mind relax.
Yes, it sounds contradictory to focus your way to sleep, but it’s what happens.
Again, remember that hypnosis has nothing to do with “programming” someone, and at no time is the hypnotizee reliant on the hypnotizer to bring them out of their relaxed state. The relationship between hypnotizer and hypnotizee is active, consensual, and cooperative.
If you’re having problems falling asleep, take a look around you, literally and figuratively, to see what may be keeping you awake. Is your sleeping area quiet, distraction-free, and comfortable? Are you tired when you go to bed, or are you wide awake? Could you be eating or drinking anything that may be keeping you awake, such as coffee, tea, caffienated sodas, or chocolate? Are you physically active in the hours before bedtime? And finally, is there anything causing you stress in your life? If you’ve answered yes to any of those questions, then hypnosis and other relaxation techniques aren’t going to help you as much as they could. You’ll need to solve those problems first.
Of course, if you are having serious sleeping problems, you should see your doctor to rule out physiological causes.
And yeah, Mousseduck, as Barbarian noted, what your mom administered to you and your sister was a mild dose of hypnosis. In hypnosis, the hypnotizer first leads the hypnotizee through a relaxation sequence, and suggests things similar to what your mom said. Of course, since the intent usually is to get the hypnotizee relaxed and not sleeping, hypnotizees are seldom told they’re too relaxed to move. 
Mouse, I hate to break it to you, but your Mom was hypnotizing you two little rascals. What you have described would induce a light trance, and she was probably suggesting how tired you were and how restful your sleep would be. That is if she knew what she was doing.
I can wake up any time I want to without an alarm, wide awake. I don’t have enough confidence to do this without an alarm for an important day though.
I thought that there could lie the problem, when hypnotizer and hypnotizee are one and the same. But, according to the URL quoted above, there doesn’t seem to be any risk involved. BTW, I’m not necessarily thinking of doing it on myself: was just curious.
As far as the alarm clock is involved, I never use one (except in special circumstances, e.g. when I have to catch a plane and get to the airport around 6:00 A.M.). As for setting a specific time for me to wake up, I don’t know, never having tried it. I doubt I’d be able to, but I know some people can.
I recently developed the ability to put myself to sleep. I was doing some temp work outside of Boston and often found myself confronted with the choice of either watching Fox local news or going to bed early, tough call…
I found that if I was in a reasonably docile state of mind, I could put myself to sleep in about 15 minutes, by pretending to be tired. If I lay on my bed and went through what I should be feeling (laying still, eyes closed, relaxing my mind) basicly acting like I would be if I were really tired, I’d actually feel sleepy in about 10 minutes.
It’s one of those situations where action dictates mood. I have a feeling that if you got really good at it you could prpbably put you self to sleep in about 5 minutes. People have been falling asleep against rocks and across tree roots for thousands of years. If you really want to, you can go to sleep. It’s only in our modern world when you are pampered with the luxary of falling asleep on a comfortable mattress with a reasonable eight hours of ‘free’ time that people allow themselves to fall asleep when they happen to, just like when they were children.
I’m not trying to trivialize the plight of those affected by sleep disorders, but sleep is by far too important a biological process for evolution to have confined it to ‘when we’re comfortable enough’. When you need to sleep, you do. And when you want to go to sleep, you just need to figure out your particular hypnotic triggers, maybe relaxing and feeling your toes grow heavier…
Yeah, there shouldn’t be any problems trying this stuff on yourself. When you self-hypnotize (and I have a problem accepting that name for it, but I won’t hijack your thread over it), you’re doing a combination of meditation and visualizing how you want to be/act. No one’s meditation or visualizing ever caused them harm.
Unless, of course, they were visualizing something dirty and got all hot and bothered and someone else noticed this and teased them about it and they were traumatized by the embarassment.
Okay, I’ll go now…
Being an insomniac, I found self-hypnosis to be fairly useful from time to time. Calming the body and mind with relaxation suggestions won’t necessarily put you to sleep, but it’s a step closer.
That’s the first thing I thought of when I read the thread title. It’s a form of light self-hypnosis. I’ve done it when I’m desperate to sleep, but I have difficulty concentrating on it because my mind wanders. When I’ve done it right, it has worked, though.
HEY! Maybe this is why **Mousseduck ** ate all his/her veggies & never talked back to his/her elders.
Zombie Thralldom-- the good old fashioned way! From Mom!