Episode 78 - Super Simple Snoozing Strategies, Part VII

Transcript

Renee Stephens: Welcome to Inside Out Weight Loss. I’m your host Renee Stephens, and together we’re accessing and adjusting the control panel of you mind/body/spirit system, bringing ease and joy to your weight loss journey and fullness to the rest of your life. On today’s show the secret ingredient to creating dreams that can come true for mere mortals. And in this last episode on our series on super simple snoozing strategies, how to easily fall back asleep when you wake up in the middle of the night.

Renee Stephens: A special welcome to new listeners to the show. We’re delighted you found us. I encourage you to jump right in to today’s episode and also go back to the beginning, starting at the prologue where I share the Inside Out Weight Loss and Renee Method philosophy, as well as why I care so darn much about ending the weight struggle. Inside Out Weight Loss is here to help you. We bring cutting edge behavior change tools with the foundation of unconditional self-acceptance, to give you a whole new experience of weight loss. And I’ll be right up front about it; I’ve got a hidden agenda. Yes, I want you to be slim and fit and healthy, and I also want you to easily lose weight, absolutely. But even more than that I want you to discover, develop and grow the rest of your life.

Renee Stephens: Lets take a few moments now to drop inside, to become present with ourselves, to go deep within. Why? Because that’s where real lasting change happens. It doesn’t happen in your head. It doesn’t happen with your mind chatter. Think about it. How successful have you been with you mind chatter getting you to make the kind of lasting change that you have so longed for. You reason, you think about logical arguments, you come up with plans and schemes and little techniques that are going to change everything this time. But how often do those little things work? Not very. Because we’re working at the wrong level. It’s like we’re just playing about at the surface, when really it’s at that deeper level where the real action happens. So lets go ahead and drop inside. Lets be present with ourselves starting by becoming comfortable, by becoming present. Because to get the grand prize of life, of a life you love to live, you must be present to win. Now lets share a moment of bliss courtesy of blisstrips.com. Shine like a supernova, a glorious explosion of brilliant color. Let yourself be the brightest object in the sky, radiating luscious hues of blue, purple, green, yellow and red. Every point of the spectrum shimmering to perfection. Imagine for a moment that all eyes search for you, for your luminous existence and dazzling glow. Feel the almost unlimited energy of your birth into being. And let yourself be a stellar presence. And go ahead and set your intent for this episode. Take a moment to reflect on the experience that you would like to have, whatever that may be. And then let it go. Release it to the universe, as you sink further into this episode.

Renee Stephens: You know, I’m a dreamer. Maybe you’ve figured that out by now. Not only do I love to dream, but I also love to help other people achieve their dreams. In fact, nothing excites me more, nothing makes my, the goosebumps on my skin stand up more than hearing a story of someone achieving a long held dream. And I like to think that almost everything is possible. And at the same time, I understand that we’re human beings in human bodies with a decidedly human experience. What does that mean? That means that ups and downs are apart of life. One of my clients I asked to write about her naturally slender self. I really wanted her to start imagining what it would mean to be naturally slender. She’d been overweight for so long that she could barely imagine it, and so I wanted her to start imagining and creating that dream for herself of the day to day life of being naturally slender. And she thought about it in great detail and wrote in detail what that experience would be like, and it certainly sounded fabulous. And also I noticed as I was reading her description, she said something about her naturally slender self never having a negative thought. Now a word like ‘never’ always gives me pause for thought. In fact, any absolute word like ‘never’, ‘always’, ‘forever’, all those words make me pause and think for a moment because in my experience the human experience doesn’t have a whole lot of ‘nevers’ and ‘always’ and ‘forevers’ in it. And I know that negative thoughts happen. Okay, maybe I’m just limited in my view, but certainly I am nowhere near immune to negative thoughts. And many a naturally slender person also has negative thoughts. It’s just like if someone says to me, “Oh I’m never going to overeat again. I just want to never ever, ever overeat again.” And I think, “Wow, that sounds kind of extreme to me. I wonder if that’s possible.” And it may very well be. But I don’t necessarily think that we need to shoot for a goal like that. Because as I’ve said before, even naturally slender people overeat. And I’ll add to that, even naturally slender people have negative thoughts. Now I don’t know if the Dalai Lama or the Pope or any other elevated religious figure has negative thoughts, but short of that, in the land of mere mortals like you and me, they happen. In fact, I have just been through a few of them as I’ve been sitting myself down to write an e-book about the Renee Method. My first thought was, “What am I going to write?” Now I’ve recorded 77, this is my 78th podcast. I guess you’d think I maybe have a thing or two to say, huh? And yet when I sit down to write I think, “Oh my gosh, what am I going to write?” Silly, huh? Fortunately one or two people close to me was able to point that out, and I’m moving into the finger flying flow that I so desire to create this product for you and others. But the fact is that the thought was there, and I am in fact grateful that it was there because I think now, “Oh wow, there’s a little bit of anxiety. There’s a little bit of something that I can now transform because I’m aware of it. I’m so glad that I’m aware of it.” And so a negative thought then becomes an opportunity for transformation. It is something that is bringing your attention to an area that is ripe for transformation. And it is also an opportunity to self-correct. Remember self-correcting? It’s all about reducing the duration, intensity and frequency of your overeating episodes. You could also say you’re reducing the duration, intensity and frequency making the dif with your negative thoughts. So you might want to think about becoming the kind of person who quickly and easily self-corrects, rather than the kind of person who never ever, ever has a blip, a negative thought or a bad day. You could think, “Gosh, I’d like to have a bad hour and be able to self-correct before it becomes a bad day.” Now that’s a great goal, that I have myself by the way. Now as you think about it, what are we doing here? We are moving away from self-criticism, from saying, “Oh, I’m bad because I’ve had a bad thought”, to self-forgiveness, to self-acceptance, saying, “Okay, whatever happens is fine”, “Oh isn’t that interesting, that’s a negative thought. It’s not true. It’s true that it’s making me feel bad right now. What can I do to feel better?” And you might do as I did. For example, I talked to a friend about it. You might have a good talking to of yourself. You might write about it in your journal. You might go out and get some exercise, get some fresh air, be in nature for example. Whatever it takes for you to self-correct. And in fact that’s exactly what my client has done, who as we speak is training for a triathlon, the first in her life and a tremendous thing for someone who when we started wasn’t exercising at all. In fact, the triathlon should be happening about the time this episode goes live, so on, on. I’m so excited for her.

Renee Stephens: Lets go ahead and take a break now to support our sponsors. This is Renee Stephens, and you’re listening to Inside Out Weight Loss on Personal Life Media.

Renee Stephens: We’re back now. Last episode, and in fact in the episodes preceding, we’ve been talking about super simple snoozing strategies, both how to prioritize getting enough sleep, why the heck it matters that we get enough sleep, and then finally how to really have a restful night. And I wanted to share with you a few things that I read in an article by Melinda Beck in The Wall Street Journal the other day, and she mentions that “chronic inadequate sleep”, I’m quoting here, “raises the risk of cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes and obesity…”, wow, “It impairs cognitive function, memory and the immune system, and causes more than a hundred thousand motor vehicle accidents a year.” And of course she adds that “sleep depravation also changes the body’s metabolism, making people eat more and feel less satisfied”, not what we want. She continues that, “sleep is associated with lower GPA’s among college students and with elevated levels of thisfatin, a hormone secreted by belly fat…”, ikes, “that is associated with insulin resistance.” Not good. Plus sleeping more makes you more attractive. What could be better? That’s why they call it beauty sleep, right? Last episode, as you’ll recall, we talked about specific techniques to fall asleep, things that you can do that will cause you to drift in to a deep and restful sleep. This sort of technique is rarely discussed in a culture where we’re more inclined to pop a pill than to actually learn how to use our mind to allow our body to rest. And the essence of it is that ability to drop inside. You know how we drop inside deeper and deeper with every episode of Inside Out Weight Loss because that’s where the transformation occurs? Falling asleep is a very similar thing. So the more that you practice dropping inside, really going deep within, the easier that you’ll find it to fall asleep. Now what happens if you fall asleep just fine and dandy, thank you very much, but later on in the night you wake up and have trouble falling back asleep? Turns out that this is a very common type of insomnia and is often characterized by waking up and the mind starting to whir away thinking about whatever’s going on in your life, worrying, anxiety, and so it’s almost as if we get a shot of adrenaline and off we go and we have difficulty falling back into that beautiful deep and restful sleep. What can you possibly do if this is your pattern? And it turns out that the very same techniques that we discussed about falling asleep in the first place also work in the middle of the night.

Renee Stephens: So for example paying attention to the sensations deep inside your body. Paying attention to those sensations deep inside your body. Also, interestingly enough, EFT is a great solution. Now you may think, “Well I don’t actually want to be that active because I’m wanting to fall back asleep”, but I have even gotten up and gone and sat in a cold bathroom in the middle of the night to do a round or two of tapping so that I can then fall back asleep and it works beautifully. So you can either sit up and tap while you’re sitting up in bed, or if you have a partner and it’s better to go in another room you could actually do that as well to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the calming down part of our nervous system and drift back into sleep. The wording of your tapping would go something like this: “Even though I’m wide awake and I’m really worried because I have to go to work tomorrow, I still choose to fall back into a deep and restful sleep. Even though I’m all hyped up and I’m worried about”, whatever it is, “I still choose to easily fall back into a deep and restful sleep”, taking your time to bring up the anxiety as you do this tapping because as you may recall when we do the tapping procedure it’s very important that we actually activate the negative emotion, the negative feeling, the negative state that we want to release. If we don’t activate it, we can’t release it with EFT. And that can actually be a relief in the middle of the night because we might be in a situation where we’re busy telling ourselves, “Oh no, don’t think about not sleeping. Don’t think about it.” And you know what happens when we give the mind a negative command; it actually doesn’t hear the negative, it forgets the negative and goes straight to the actually command. So if we say, “Don’t think about…”, we start thinking about it.

Renee Stephens: And here’s another technique that you may find very helpful to fall back asleep. You may or may not remember your dreams. But chances are when you wake up because of the way that sleep cycles work, we are in REM sleep, typically the lighter stage of sleep, before we wake up. That means that we’re in the dreaming state of sleep when we wake up, or we’ve just left the dreaming state. So if when you wake up, say you wake up and go to the bathroom and you come back into bed, you settle in. You can think, “Now what was I dreaming?” You can just allow yourself to go back into your dream, say, “What was that dream about?” Whether or not your remember it, there might be a feeling to the dream, you can say, “What was that dream about?”, and go back into your dream. And the dream will just ever so gently pull you, lead you back into sleep and begin your sleep cycle of rest again. So going back into your dream is a wonderful way to fall back asleep.

Renee Stephens: Now if you happen to be a person who has had a bad dream, a scary dream, then I recommend that you do a couple rounds of tapping on that scariness and then use one of the other techniques. So it would go something like this: “Even though I’m really scared because of that dream, even though that dream was very upsetting, even though it makes me think about Joe and how scary the whole thing is, I still choose to fall back into a deep and restful sleep. Even though I’ve had this terrible dream, I still choose to easily fall back into a deep and restful sleep. Even though I’ve had this scary dream, I’m choosing to let it all go now as I easily fall back into a deep and restful sleep.” Get the idea? Great!

Renee Stephens: That brings us to the end of our series on super simple snoozing strategies. I’d love to hear how they’re working for you. What’s your experience with them? Do you have a sleep technique that I haven’t mentioned here that you’d like to share with others? If so, please go to the blog at personallifemedia.com/renee and post a comment letting us know what works for you. We’d love to know. And also know that every time you post a comment, every time that you participate in the Yahoo group, you are contributing to this positive community. I love the idea of paying it forward. In other words, doing a kind deed in advance, like making a deposit in your karmic bank account to yield rewards later on down the road. It both feels good now, and it creates goodwill for the future, because you know that you’ll get many, many times out of this journey what you put in, but you must put in to get out, and the best way to put in is to connect with others. Overeating is a pattern of isolation and the antidote is healing community. You’ll find a link to the Yahoo group at the blog, personallifemedia.com/renee.

Renee Stephens: That brings us to the end of our show today. Thank you for being present. Speaking of staying connected, if you go to www.personallifemedia.com/signup, you can register for a free email notification that will tell you every time a new episode of Inside Out Weight Loss is available to you. And I believe that we will also announce there, I’m not sure, maybe I should check this first… We’ll also announce there when my e-book is available for purchase sometime in the Fall of 2009. Now that I’ve told you I guess I’d better start writing it, huh? But I will and I am because I am passionate about helping you, I am passionate about ending the weight struggle, in fact, eradicating it from the planet, enabling you to develop and share your abundant souls gifts. Changing the world begins by changing ourselves. Imagine for a moment a world where simply every person who has struggled with their weight, who has struggled with self-criticism, with self-hatred, were to turn that around just for a moment. Say they turn around 50 percent of their self-criticism and released that 50 percent to enjoying their lives, to their creativity, to their passion. Imagine how many more smiles you’d get on the street. Imagine how many more drivers would let you in when you needed to change lanes. Imagine the increase in charitable acts, in services that create beauty, that help others, that bring joy. And you’ll begin to get an idea of why this whole thing matters so darn much, and you’ll begin to get an idea of your critical role in the entire picture, of where you fit in, of what your job is. And I’ll leave you with that. This is your host Renee Stephens. Take good care.