Day doesn’t end just because the light is off.
Stressed at bedtime? Leave the alert state and restart falling asleep with guided breathing effective for calming the nervous system.
Problem description:
Various stressful events have put you on alert. When you come home, you are tense and relatively irritable. In fact, you have activated a defense mechanism called the alert state, characterized by hyperactivation of the autonomic nervous system.
Your body is ready to face a danger situation. Noradrenaline is secreted, which helps stimulate the wakefulness center and keep you awake. In prehistoric times, this physiological mechanism would have prevented you from falling asleep in a hostile environment and being attacked by a bear, but today it prevents you from sleeping when the danger is not real.
Normally, the transition from alert state to rest state happens automatically, but accumulated stress slows the process and a few hours will be needed instead of a few minutes.
Objectives:
1. Rebalance your autonomic nervous system to leave the alert state caused by your difficult day as quickly as possible and return to a restful state conducive to sleep.
2. Let go by completely disconnecting from the stressful events of your day.
How Dodow helps you:
By breathing long enough at Dodow's rhythm (6 breaths per minute), you stimulate the baroreflex, a small physiological mechanism that restores the balance of the autonomic nervous system. Thus, you will quickly move 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 will be at the gates of sleep.
Synchronizing your breathing with a light that pulses at a slow and steady rhythm has a hypnotic effect (the phenomenon is similar to watching a pendulum). Thus, after a few minutes you are able to let go and fall asleep.
Other situations: in a hotel room when you are traveling on the other side of the world or on Sunday night when the anxiety of Monday keeps you from falling asleep.
Discover the others
Types of insomnia:
• Stress
• Thoughts racing in your head
• Worries
