Are you waking during the night?

When people talk about insomnia, they often mean not being able to get to sleep, lying awake for hours and watching the clock tick by waiting for the ordeal to end. But there is another form of insomnia whereby a person gets off to sleep easily but wakes after about four hours and stays awake for up to a couple of hours before they can get back to sleep.

This area of insomnia is receiving a lot of attention now and there is an increasing amount of research into why this happens. This habit of being awake for a couple of hours during the night is now being seen as a natural part of the human condition and called bimodal sleeping. It is being argued that in ancient times we would have gone to bed much earlier and then woken for a period during the night and then returned to sleep, more in touch with our primal animal self, as animals rarely sleep for long periods without waking.

It is now thought that the introduction of gaslight and then electric light led people to go to bed later and later and to disrupt the more natural body rhythm for sleep, research led by Dr Jerome Seigal has examined this theory.  In one study within a controlled environment, a group of volunteers were deprived of time inputs and allowed to sleep when it felt right for them to do so and they quickly fell into this bi-modal sleep pattern.

The best thing to do if you are sensitive to your natural body rhythms and are waking in the night is not to lie there waiting to go back to sleep but do something for a short while and then return to bed, you will have responded to your body’s natural urge for the break in the sleep and it should then be easier to get back to sleep. Hypnotherapy can also help you with this problem, there are various techniques and metaphors that will help you to get back to sleep, or your therapist may give you recordings that will help achieve a better sleep pattern for you. To find a therapist that specialises in insomnia go to the “Find a therapist” section on the BAThH website www.bathh.co.uk

Zetta Thomelin