Let’s face it, as much as we hate to admit it, Holidays and stress go hand in hand. Whether it’s family that irritate us even though we love them, or the stress we put on ourselves to get just the right present or attend all the parties or to find just the perfect recipe for a family get together, stress is almost always in abundance and when you combine the increased stress of the holidays with the already stressed life you have, it will often lead to problems sleeping.
Sure you can ignore the problem, and just wait till the holidays are over to get a good night’s rest, but that just creates more stress in your life. It is really important to get to the cause of the stress so that you can get a good night’s sleep all through the year without these periods of sleepless nights.
There are many types of sleep problems
The most common is when you lay down but you can’t seem to get your brain to quite down so you can fall asleep. This is very typical of the over stressed brain, especially when the stress is due to mental / emotional stress. This is a problem that we work wonders with here at the office but let me take a bit of your time and explain what’s going on and give you a few tips that you can try to resolve the problem at home.
Encountering Events
Your brain must process and react, chemically, to every event that happens in your life. If the event is overwhelming it could trigger a response called flight or fight. Basically in that mode your brain switches to defense mode. This was the survival technique that was needed back in the cave man days because when you were stressed an animal was about to attack or another tribe was trying to steal things. Your brain had to start to process every last detail it could to determine what needed to happen to allow you to survive the threat. Just because 21st Century stress of family and job etc are not life threatening doesn’t mean that the brain has learned to process things any differently.
In this mode your brain can become completely overloaded and that is why when you try to go to sleep, you brain won’t seem to shut down. It is in survival mode and trying to detect any threat. In this office, we are able to reduce the tension in the spinal cord which will take the brain out of survival mode and allow the brain to relax when you go to sleep. But if things aren’t too bad, here are a few tips that may help you solve this.
1) Aerobic exercise
This type of exercise can really help your body reduce the amount of stress and possibly keep you from crossing that threshold into fight or flight. 20 minutes of activity with your heart rate increased by at least 20% so figure about 25 minutes of exercise is really healthy for everyone even if this isn’t your problem.
2) Meditation
This form of relaxation is very powerful in allowing your brain to organize things. There are plenty of sources to help with this. YouTube is a good place to start also Depak Chopra and Opra have a series of 21 day meditation challenges that are amazing.
Watch Our Video! https://youtu.be/oCbU-fYA2yY
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