Episode 73 - Super Simple Snoozing Strategies, Part II

Transcript

Announcer: This program is brought to you by personallifemedia.com.

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 your mind, body, spirit system. Bringing ease and joy to your weight loss journey, and fullness to the rest of your life. 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 to 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.

You'll get many times more out of this program than you put in, but you must put in to get out. The way I see it if your weight loss journey isn't easy yet; you've got more work to do. "Inside Out Weight Loss" is here to help you. We're here to bring easy and joy in a way that you perhaps never even realized was possible to your weight loss journey and to being naturally slender.

I encourage you to do the homework, to join the Yahoo! group, there are over 1400 active members already. It's a great place to support and be supported. You'll find a link on the right hand margin of my blog at personallifemedia.com/renee. Now I invite you to drop inside because the deeper you go, the easier your journey becomes. As I share a moment of bliss courtesy of blisstrips.com, which will deliver a daily dose of joy in the form of a free Bliss Trip email to your inbox each morning.

As we are well into spring and close to early summer I particularly like this Bliss Trip. "Immerse yourself in the idea of green, symbolizing life and renewal, feel green permeate your entire being, let it bring you health and possibility. Sense a field of green grass rolling on and on until it fades into the horizon. Or wear an entire outfit made of shiny green leaves shimmering and shaking as you walk down the street. Litter your house with green emeralds emanating magical powers as you go about your day. Feel the balance, harmony, and stability of green washing over you. New growth is yours."

So much about "Inside Out Weight Loss" is letting go of the old, so that we can welcome new growth, new possibilities, new ideas, new lives, and new bodies. Now with that go ahead and set your intent for this episode. Perhaps to get what you need today, or to serve your highest good, to learn something new, or to transform or heal in some small or big way. The sky is the limit and remember that we have a very interesting tendency to get what we ask for.

I was spending a lot of time in my life lately focusing on enjoying the moment and feeling good and grateful for what I already have. The fascinating thing about it is from one perspective it would be quite easy for me to look at my life recently and say "my gosh, I've lost so much!" Yet the fascinating thing for me is that I have never felt more grateful, or more abundant. Something about losing things and something about imaging that I was going to lose a great deal more than I actually lost caused me to reflect on how much I already have of what really matters.

The ability to be truly present for someone and accept them just as they are. The ability to connect in a genuine way with someone. The ability to help someone, not because I think they need it and I really have to change them, but rather because they asked and I have something to offer. That happened to me on my recent trip to visit a friend of mine from elementary school.

Her 21 year old nephew was there and he asked me, or someone asked me, what I did and I said "oh, well I'm a hypnotherapist and a coach." He was so excited he said "you're a hypnotherapist? No way! Really? Oh my god, would you hypnotize me?" I just loved his enthusiasm about the whole thing and his fascination with something that obviously to him appeared to be very unusual and maybe brought up all sorts of imagines of barking like a dog, and who knows what else.

So since he asked, I did help him. It was a really beautiful experience to have him learn about it and go into trance so easily. It was really wonderful, what a blessing that was. Oh yes, but I digress as I have been known to do. The point of the matter was that I had been using my own abundance anchors, my own feel good anchors and lots of great stuff has been happening. For example my daughter loves to do ballet, she lives for ballet and for dance. We were thinking "gosh, it would be nice to take her to a show, a ballet show so she could see some professional dancers dance."

But I didn't get myself together to actually go buy tickets, I didn't want to spend a lot of money and low and behold I was just offered four free tickets to a ballet performance for this Friday. So these tickets have just magically appeared in my life and it is an absolute delight. So I want to make sure I pause to really appreciate this because I have to remind myself, if I don't I'll just forget and it will slip away. As I think about it the more that I have been focusing on being in the present and enjoying the moment, enjoying being present with my friends, with my clients, with my family, the better that I have been focusing on feeling now, the smoother things have been going, and the less that life's little craziness bothers me.

Now what does this mean when it comes to weight loss? It means, as I've been teaching a whole bunch of clients lately, that if we remind ourselves to feel centered and balanced in the moment, if we use an anchor, or a thought, or just consciously take ourselves to that place, how are we going to be when it comes to be time to eat? When we go to happy hour and they plop down in front of us a bunch of chips or munchies? Or we walk by the office goodies? If we're in a centered and balanced place feeling good within ourselves I bet, I'm guessing, well I know that it's a whole bunch easier to think about doing something that's really going to feel good over time than it might otherwise be.

That's why renewal is so important. Renewal and taking care of ourselves so that we cultivate that state of balance, centeredness, and feeling good within our own skin. Heck that's why we do all this, isn't it? Which leads me right into the renewal idea activity of sleeping, snoozing, conking out. What could be more renewing than a good night's sleep? By the way, did you remember to automatically open your heart to all the other fellow journeyers listening to this podcast across space and time? Those who are on their own journeys send them your love and feel their come back to you magnified millions of times over.

Now last episode we talked about what a lack of sleep does to your appetite. In short it increases it, and it especially increases your desire for sweet, salty, and starchy foods. Yikes! I think what we're saying is you could even snooze your way slim. What a concept that is! Kind of reminds me of that whole quality down time thing we've been talking about.

My goodness we have a lot of cover in this series. But right now it's time to take a break to support our sponsors. You're you're listening to "Inside Out Weight Loss" on Personal Life Media and I'm your host Renee Stephens.

Carrie Runnals: Hi this is Carrie with "Words to Mouth" an author interview talk show where readers meet authors beyond the printed page and win free books. Come join me each week as I speak with authors about their lives and the books they write. That's "Words to Mouth" at personallifemedia.com.

Renee: We're back now. Before the break we were talking about snoozing our way to slender-hood, is that a word? I don't think so, but you get the idea. Now I first want to explain a little bit about sleep itself. Because I think that many of us don't really understand what our sleep cycles are. So I thought we'd spend a few moments going over the four stages of sleep. These stages go from light sleep to a very, very deep sleep. It turns out that we go through all four stages about four times in a typical night. So that means we would have four cycles of sleep where we would go through progressively each stage of sleep from light sleep to very, very deep sleep. Each stages lasts about an hour and a half.

The first stage is called, appropriately enough, light sleep. In this stage we have a relaxed body, a slower heart rate, and irregular breathing. This is the REM sleep phase, the rapid eye movement sleep stage where we have our dreams. So dreams occur when we are in a very light state of sleep, which is why some people can remember their dreams when they wake up. Because they've been in that very light stage of sleep. Stage one is characterized by paralysis. Just as well, isn't it? Because if we weren't immobilized when were dreaming we might be running all over the place given the things that we dream. Another characteristic of stage one sleep is sexual arousal, even if we're not in a sexy dream. But again immobility is a part of this stage of sleep. So enough said about that one.

Stage two is called sleep spindles. The spindles refer to the brain wave pattern that we have when we're in this stage, we think of it as sleep and it has this special kind of spiky brain wave pattern.

The third stage is called delta waves. Delta are very slow brain waves, large and slow, it represents a greater loss of consciousness.

Now the fourth stage is the stage of deep sleep where we are completely oblivious to the world. This is what some people refer to as sleeping like a baby no matter what we do we're completely out of it. If we're awakened during this stage we'd be disoriented. So each night, or each day if you are a person who works night shift, but each sleeping session, each eight hour approximately sleeping session we start off, we go into sleep. In that first cycle, in other words that first pass through all of these stages of sleep we actually reach our deepest state of sleep. Our deepest and most renewing states happens during that first about an hour and a half of sleep.

That means two things; One if you are woken up during that first hour and a half or so of sleep you're likely to feel not well rested the next morning. It also means, though, if you are woken up later in the night, or towards the morning that you've already got your highest quality of sleep so you can feel a little bit better knowing that you've already gotten that. Now if you are one to wake up during the night, you're probably waking up, almost assuredly, during stage one of sleep. Your REM sleep time, the light sleep period, you will have come out of your deepest sleep and wake up at that time.

Now I'm going to sleep in here a really great snoozing strategy to go back to sleep if you're one of those people who wakes up during the night and can't get back to sleep. Now if this is a pattern that you have, we'll be covering in a future episode in this series specific techniques that you can use to drift right back in to sleep even if you happen to wake up during the night.

All right so now that we understand the four stages of sleep and that we have about four sleep cycles in a given night let's talk about some of the things that can get in the way of a good night of snoozing and, of course, remember, hey guys, this is "Inside Out Weight Loss," of course, not just the problem but the solution. Specific techniques so that you can get a great night of sleep.

One of those things is that we don't have enough time to sleep. We have a crazy schedule, we're super busy, we've got a long commute, we work long hours at our job, we've got a family that needs our attention at all times, we're running a household. Whatever the heck it is. And, of course, other things that can get in the way of a good night's sleep are not being able to fall asleep in the first place, or, as we just mentioned, waking up and having a difficult time falling back into a deep and restful sleep.

So let's start by talking a little bit about us super busy ones. The ones who just can't quite fit in enough hours to get enough sleep. So what's going on in this cases if you just can't fit it in. You know the last time each human being on this planet, in fact each being on this planet, had the same 24 hours in a day as everybody else. We're all completely equal in that sense. Slim, fat, rich, poor, doesn't matter. Everybody's got those same 24 hours. Some people manage to fit in enough sleep, as much sleep as they need, which varies, of course, and some people don't.

So what's going on? Whenever someone says to me "I don't have enough time for exercise, I don't have enough time for sleep, I don't have enough time to eat healthily." I always translate that to "it's not a priority for me, other things are a higher priority for me than getting enough sleep, getting enough exercise, eating well." Now from time to time they'll say "oh gosh I've gotten so fed up with my weight, with my health, with my body, with my tiredness that I'm going to go on a new regime and I'm going to really dedicate the time, I'm going to get fit, I'm going to do what it takes.

For that period of time taking care of ourselves gets bumped up to the top of the priority list, but unfortunately if deeper level adjustments haven't been made as soon as life starts getting in the way then those priorities start to slip down and we run out of time. I've had this happen with people who contacted me to help them, they'll say "oh well it was all going great, but then so and so got sick, but then my work got crazy, but then duh-duh-duh-duh..." something happened.

Now do you think that the perpetually slender have this kind of situation come up in their life, too? Do you think that the perpetually fit and healthy have this kind of situation come into their lives? Now I notice that Barack Obama is a regular worker-outer and I also notice that George W. Bush was a regular work-outer. Now surely can you be busier or have a more demanding job than the job of President of the United States? It's hard to imagine a job that is bigger than that one. Yet these guys fit it in.

Sure you can say "oh yes, but they have all the advantages and the gym in their place." But you know what Barack Obama didn't always have that, maybe George W. Bush did. I don't know, I have no idea, but I know that people who are dedicated to fitness always find a way. People who prioritize a good night's sleep always find a way.

I want you to think for a moment, and in fact this is going to be your homework, I want you to think for a moment about what you value most in life. I'd actually like you to write this down in your journal, in your "Inside Out Weight Loss" journal. Write down "what are my highest values?" Is it connection with others? Is it truth? Is it kindness? Compassion? Whatever it is, write it down. Write down your highest values, the greatest virtues that you can think of. If you are having a little trouble getting the juices flowing think of someone that you really admire, someone who you think "wow! That person's just got it going on, I really respect that person."

Now think about what about that person you do admire. What do you think is so great about that person? Find out what qualities, what values are reflected in that person. Once you've written this down, I now want you to make a list of what your top priorities are. What are the top priorities in your life? What is the most important thing? Is it family? Is it friends? Is it work? Achievement? Survival? So write down, after the show is over, your top values, and your top priorities, what matter most to you.

Now, here comes the bit that's a little bit more involved, I want you to keep a time diary. If this area of your life is out of whack, if you never have enough time for things, I want you to keep for one week a time diary. You've done the food diary, I'm sure you have because just about every dieter on the planet seems to have done that. You've done a hunger diary, now it's time to keep a time diary for a week. I can tell you that I've done this myself and it really opened up my eyes. I found, in my case, that I was spending tons of time transitioning from one type of activity to another. I lost loads of time

So I made some simple changes in my schedule so that I was doing all of the same type of activity at one time. Seeing clients at one time, doing administration at another time, and I cut down on those transitions and drove up my productivity and efficiency dramatically. So you've got your homework values priorities, time diary, and then you're going to look at all of these things together and see if your time diary, if how you're spending your time reflects your priorities and your values. Is everything in sync, or is there something out of whack here?

That brings us to the end of our show today, thank you for being present. Remember to visit the blog at personallifemedia.com/renee. You'll find links on the right hand column to products and guided journeys available on my site that can accelerate your progress. Such "Sabotage Sell Sabotage" or the "Appetite Adjustor: To Downgrade your Appetistate." If you want to find out when the latest episode of "Inside Out Weight Loss" goes live go to personallifemedia.com/signup and enter your free subscription today so you'll get email alerts telling you when the latest episode is available.

This is your host Renee Stephens and I am on a mission to eradicate the weight struggle from the planet. Enabling you to develop and share your abundant soul's gifts. Take good care.

Announcer: Find more great shows like this on personallifemedia.com