When life goes off track, sleep follows.
Personal or professional worries stealing your night? Gentle methods to let go, reduce anxiety, and avoid conditioned insomnia.
Problem description:
A difficult breakup, job loss, or temporary depression often come with insomnia. Action must be taken quickly before insomnia becomes "conditioned" and continues to haunt you even when your worries are behind you.
Major worries are often accompanied by stress, which will cause your sleep problems. Indeed, stress has physiological consequences that result in an imbalance of the autonomic nervous system. Your body is ready to face a danger situation; you are in what is called an alert state, characterized notably by the release of neurotransmitters that keep you awake by stimulating your arousal center.
Objectives:
1. Letting go by occupying your brain, to prevent you from ruminating on your problems.
2. To help you move from the alert state, where wakefulness and vigilance are stimulated, to the resting state where you are less reactive to all your worries, as if you were slightly anesthetized.
How Dodow helps you:
By focusing on the light signal and synchronizing your breathing to its rhythm, you occupy a large part of your attention with a more relaxing activity than ruminating on your problems. As a result, you pay less attention to your anxious thoughts. Moreover, the regular pulsing of the light has a hypnotic effect. Thus, after a few minutes, you are able to let go and find sleep.
By breathing long enough at Dodow's pace (6 breaths per minute), you stimulate the baroreflex, a small physiological mechanism that restores balance to the autonomic nervous system. Thus, you quickly shift from the alert state (activation of the sympathetic nervous system) to the resting state (activation of the parasympathetic nervous system), the same state you are in during digestion: slightly drowsy. In this state, you will be much less sensitive to your stress, your metabolism will slow down, the secretion of neurotransmitters that kept you awake will have stopped, and you reach the threshold of sleep.
Other situations: the eve of an important event such as a job interview, an international equestrian competition, end-of-year exams, or your wedding.
Discover the others
Types of insomnia:
• Stress
• Thoughts racing in your head
• Worries
