You need to sleep regularly, deeply and for long enough to maintain a healthy body, which includes getting to a weight that fits the body. For many people, that kind of sleep is elusive. Tapping can make a huge difference in falling asleep and staying asleep.
There are several questions to look at with sleep issues which we deal with in the section on sleep. You may want to look at that and then come back to this section. I will address one potential sleep issue and show how you might use tapping to alleviate the issue and sleep better and longer without having to use outside substances (other than warm milk, which really does help – as long as you don’t have an issue with dairy!) Let’s look at airborne allergens as potential sleep disruptors.
Starting with airborne allergies, you would identify what it is there that is getting in the way of you sleeping well. Let’s say that you have snuffles, which tend to lead you to snoring/choking in the middle of the night, which then wakes you up, and there you are looking at the ceiling in the middle of the night.
You want to address each of these items separately: snuffles, snoring, choking, being awake when you want to be asleep. Then you take each item and examine what it is that is the problem for you, particularly paying attention to the emotional content!
For example, looking at the snoring, you might be aware of causing distress to your bed partner, but you might also be aware of your own fear because it ends so often in choking/waking up choking/not being able to breathe. Looking at the “being awake when you want to be asleep” issue, you might be aware of your concern about getting enough sleep when you have a big project to complete the next day, your fear that you won’t have the energy you need, and the anger about not being able to sleep when you want to. Each of these items is, as we say, “tappable.”
It doesn’t matter that much what you start with. If giving it a number is helpful to you so you can follow your progress, then give it a number, or perhaps just saying it is high, medium or low in how it affects you. Don’t worry too much about what to say, start tapping, and say, for instance, “even though I hate it when I realize I’m snoring, because I know I’m going to end up choking and waking up choking and I wonder if one of these days I’m just going to die and that’s so scary, I totally love and accept myself and how I am right now.” Do you see how this works? You get as clear as you can about what it is that really frightens you or really bugs you, and then you name it as well as you can without worrying about it too much, tapping all the while. You do that a couple of times, and then you tap around the points, saying key words or key phrases, and perhaps you go around the points a couple of times, and then you take a big breath, and ask yourself how it feels now, and see what, if anything, has shifted.
Sometimes the shift is minor, sometimes, all of a sudden, you have an aha! moment, and think, you know, I could try that nasal rinse thingie and see if it would make a difference. Or, you think, this choking reminds me of when I almost drowned when I was six, and my grandpa pulled me out of the water, and he was so angry, oh, but now I see that yes he was angry, but he was also terribly scared that I had almost died, of course he was angry, not at me, just angry!
And then you tap around the points for that memory “even though grandpa was angry and I was scared because I thought I had made him angry, and the truth is that he loved me so much that he was afraid…” and you keep tapping and talking until you realize that you feel very calm now. Then you think about the choking again, and how do you feel?
Sometimes, you will get clarity about some of this, perhaps recall a memory, and not know how it relates, just that it came up, and you’re not sure of what to do with it all. This would be a great time to write down what you started with, and what the memory was, as best you can grab it now, and take it to your tapping therapist, or you can email me for a session.
Sometimes, you will do the work, and feel closure. Sometimes, you will do the work, and not feel closure, but then you will realize that a week has gone by, and you have not choked at night, when you used to do it at least every other night.
And, I suggested that there were several tappable issues when we pulled apart “airborne allergens” and only walked through tapping on one of them. You would want to go back, and open at least some of the others up, probably not all in one session!
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