How does sleeplessness affect you and what causes insomnia?
Sleeplessness causes exhaustion - you feel like a zombie all day and drink too much coffee. You’re not staying up on purpose, you’re switching off the light at a reasonable time, closing your eyes, feeling exhausted, starting to drift off to sleep… next thing you know you’re thinking about some random global problem, as if nothing is more important that you solving this right now. You have quite a good idea about how to do this, so you start planning how to put this into operation… Then you realize you’re playing through totally unrelated work scenarios… After an hour or so you check the time and realize you’ve actually been ‘sorting out all your problems’ for 3 hours! It’s as if your subconscious is wired to keep working — but isn’t that the price of success? If you were brought up with strict discipline, you’ve learned that ‘winners work hard’, ‘you must be productive’, ‘you can’t afford to be idle’ — And you have worked hard, you’ve got yourself qualified and found a job and you’re being productive, but when it’s time to go to sleep your mind won’t let you rest.
Sleep specialists use the Spielman 3P Model to categorize the various factors that cause insomnia:
Predisposing factors: Biological and genetic sleep tendencies - your body’s specific sleep requirements.
Precipitating factors: Events that directly trigger insomnia: poorly timed caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol intake - or situational stress that demands your attention: work, a relationship ending, health concerns, financial pressure, grief, or moving house, can all cause you to stay awake worrying and thinking over scenarios, trying to solve problems instead of sleeping.
Perpetuating factors: Developing behaviors that maintain insomnia - “anticipatory anxiety” develops when your brain starts to anticipate frustration and sleeplessness before you even get into bed, or napping during the day can take the edge off your sleep at night.
If you tend to be a high achiever, workaholic, or perfectionist, and you’re struggling with insomnia, the cause is most likely a combination of the second 2 Ps. Discipline, ambition, and success will make you attractive but often at the expense of self-care, which means that driving yourself like a trooper may not be sustainable over the long term. There’s also a fourth factor, that the 3P Model doesn’t measure: Self-love - Do you believe you that deserve to rest?
How does sleep hypnotherapy help you fall asleep?
Psychologists agree that 90-95% of all human function happens below your conscious awareness, including falling asleep. Sleep hypnotherapy is a naturally relaxing state in which you give yourself permission to rest. You address the conditions for your self-worth and rewrite your subconscious script - your beliefs about yourself and what you deserve. After a few sessions, your mind starts to rewire, you still work hard during the day but you’re able to stop and rest at night. Your beliefs change: sleep becomes an essential discipline that enables higher ambition and greater success. Hearing the same script every session builds association with your own permission to enter your natural resting state. The more you hear the script, the more easily you re-enter that state. Hypnotherapy helps undo all the stress, anxiety, over thinking, and worry about situations that you’re actually not unable to act on, while lying in bed waiting for sleep. You set healthy boundaries with your own mind, that give you authority so you can effectively say: “I’m not thinking now, I’m going to sleep.”
This will sound identical to something you may already have tried, which is to command yourself “I’m not thinking now! I’m going to sleep!”. These are the same words but in a completely different context. Forcing your mind to sleep is like herding cats - if you force your mind, then what is resisting to require such force? Answer: Your subconscious mind is resisting. Sleep hypnotherapy builds a healthy relationship between your conscious and subconscious mind, by giving you time for actual problem solving in your sessions. You develop solutions and rehearse them in hypnosis, where your subconscious is participating and benefiting, and feeling heard, and safe. This is how you build healthy boundaries to help you rest, that train you to let go of working at the end of the day, leave your phone until tomorrow, and trust that you have made all the necessary preparations to go to sleep and not be awake for the next 8 hours. That gives you the authority to say “I’m not thinking now, I’m going to sleep.” and your subconscious mind trusts you and agrees with you.
What happens in a sleep hypnotherapy session with Andrew?
In the first part of the session, we talk about what’s keeping you awake — the specific worries and concerns that cause you to feel stressed or anxious. We explore practical solutions, and this provides the material for your hypnosis script. In the second half I will guide you into hypnosis. Hypnosis can take twenty to thirty minutes. You’re in a comfortable space at home, listening to my voice and psychoacoustic soundtrack through your headphones. Most people with insomnia fall asleep during hypnosis, which is good, and the video allows me to see when this happens and what causes it. You could communicate if you wanted to, but most people don’t. I will teach you a simple meditation technique that you can use to let go of your thoughts, and we will spend a few minutes on this practice every session. Keeping the same session structure creates predictability, so that you develop a feeling of safety and familiarity with the soundtrack and the meditation technique, and after a few sessions your mind associates the soundtrack and meditation with permission to rest.
In this state, you can review the conditioning you received in your early and adult life, about self-love and begin to nurture a self-caring attitude, in which you value sleep as essential to your psychological and emotional well-being. You have ample time to consider that looking after yourself is not the same as being selfish in life, and that self-care is nurturing yourself to be more present and compassionate towards your self and others, whereas being selfish is taking at the expense of others. You come to realize that sleep hygiene benefits yourself first, it makes you sharper and more productive, but it also benefits everyone around you because being well rested means you are clear minded, relevant, patient, and more valuable to others. In the last 5 minutes I bring you out of hypnosis and ask you about your experience to reactivate your conscious state.
How many sessions will you need to improve your sleep quality?
Many clients report improved sleep the night of their first session because being in hypnosis creates anticipation to return to that deeply relaxed state. However, over the course of the week, the problem seems to return, as your subconscious habit pulls you back into sleeplessness - your mind defaults to what it knows. It usually takes between 4-6 sessions for your subconscious conditioning to change, depending on the complexity of your situation - The number of sessions you need to improve your sleep is directly proportional to your current stress levels. If you are moving through a turbulent period of your life or you feel stuck or out of options, those concerns require solutions before you can create a situation which is actually safe for you to rest.
The other factor that determines your timeline for improvement is how consistently you engage with the supporting soundtracks. The Soul Sanctuary is most valuable for insomniacs because all of the generic audio track are helpful for sleeping, and membership is free when you book a session. The key is that all the soundtracks use the same basic background as the hypnosis soundtrack that you hear in your sessions, (on your headphones) so your brain associates all the work we’ve done in your sessions with that sound, and remembers your self-care patterns every time you hear it. Whether you want to practice the meditation technique or actually fall asleep, the soundtracks will help you sleep and reduce the number of actual sessions you need.
Is sleep hypnotherapy effective for insomnia?
Yes, sleep hypnotherapy is highly effective for insomnia, and there’s substantial research supporting this. A comprehensive review published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that hypnotherapy significantly improved sleep onset latency — the time it takes to fall asleep — and reduced nighttime awakenings in people with chronic insomnia. Multiple studies have demonstrated that hypnotherapy helps retrain the subconscious sleep patterns that perpetuate insomnia, producing improvements that last well beyond the treatment period. This is particularly important because insomnia is often a learned pattern rather than a medical condition—your subconscious has learned to associate the bed with frustration and wakefulness rather than rest. Research shows that addressing this subconscious conditioning is more effective for long-term outcomes than approaches that only target conscious behaviors or rely on medication. A meta-analysis of hypnotherapy for sleep disorders found that participants showed significant improvements not just in falling asleep faster, but also in sleep quality, total sleep time, and daytime functioning. The effectiveness comes from retraining the automatic patterns that control sleep, not just managing symptoms temporarily.
Hypnotherapy works at the subconscious level where sleep patterns are actually controlled — this is why it produces lasting results. Your subconscious has learned to associate your bed with frustration and racing thoughts rather than rest, and hypnotherapy retrains these automatic associations. The deep relaxation you achieve in sessions teaches your nervous system what the pre-sleep state feels like, and the supporting soundtracks between sessions reinforce this learning every single night. This creates sustainable change because you’re addressing the root conditioning, not just managing surface behaviors. The meditation technique gives you authority over your racing mind — you develop the ability to let go of thoughts that used to keep you awake, which is a skill that becomes stronger with practice. Most people find online sessions as effective as in-person hypnotherapy. The familiar, comfortable setting allows you to practice the letting-go response in the same space where you’ll use it every night.
What can you expect from Andrew’s treatment?
The overall improvement is a gradual but noticeable shift: you stop worrying about sleeping, and start looking forward to going to bed. As you develop your skill with the meditation exercise, your body relaxes more easily and you start being able to let go of racing thoughts that used to keep you awake. As this happens, you start accepting on a subconscious level, that laying in bed with your eyes closed means its okay to go to sleep. Many clients describe the return of trust in their ability to sleep, which is often the most significant change — the anticipatory anxiety around sleep releases, and falling asleep becomes something that happens to you, rather than something you try but can not achieve. You start waking up feeling more refreshed, and your energy during the day improves as your sleep quality deepens and becomes consistent.
The results you should expect depend on how much you use the supporting soundtracks. Listening to the 20-minute meditation track every day before going to bed, and then using the sleeping track while you are actually falling asleep, tremendously enhances the results of the treatment. The key to the meditation technique is to develop a habit of letting go of your thoughts, because when you do this they have no power over you. You reduce them to background chatter by becoming disinterested in them, and this is something that requires practice, because most people have never even considered ignoring their own thoughts. We are taught to pay great attention to our thoughts, and this works against us when we try to relax. The soundtracks are more than just support; they’re what makes the transformation sustainable and they accelerate your progress considerably.
Would you like to talk to Andrew about your insomnia?
Sleeplessness is exhausting, and I’m sure you’ve tried many approaches already. If you’re struggling with insomnia but you don’t relate exactly to the symptoms I’m describing, you can tell me what you’re experiencing, and we can talk about how I can help. I offer a free 15-minute consultation where we simply discuss your specific situation and see if this approach feels right for you. There’s no obligation — just a chance for me to understand what’s keeping you awake and for you to decide if my methods make sense. If you’re ready to try it out, most people working on sleep find the AW Experience provides a good foundation for lasting change. When you’re ready, I’m ready to listen.