You stay up late at night rolling from side to side, you look for a comfortable position, or you start counting up to a hundred…and yet, falling asleep is impossible. Good sleep quality is vital to your physical and mental health. Sadly, millions of people around the world struggle to get that much-needed rest linked to a balanced lifestyle. Known as “insomnia”, this sleep disruption can have negative consequences on your mental and physical health. Human beings continue turning to ineffective and harmful methods to fight insomnia ignoring that the answer has been there for thousands of years: sound meditation.
What is insomnia?
In essence, insomnia is the difficulty to fall asleep or stay asleep even if you have the chance to do so. If you suffer from insomnia, you can feel dissatisfied with your sleep or the amount of sleep you are getting. Meanwhile, you experience several side effects, which might be negatively impacting your overall well being. Such effects include low energy, persistent fatigue, difficulty to remain focused, disruptions in mood, and decreased performance at work or at school. You are not alone suffering from this condition. In fact, insomnia affects millions of people worldwide.
Insomnia is not the same for everyone; it includes a wide range of sleeping disorders for example lack of sleep quality or lack of sleep quantity. It is commonly separated into three types:
Acute insomnia or short-term insomnia is characterized by its duration. Usually, it is brief and occurs because of life circumstances. For example, you have an important work presentation or an exam the following morning and you can’t seem to relax. Many people have experienced this type of disruption at least once in their lives. Fortunately, it tends to go away without any invasive treatment.
Transient insomnia is short-term, lasting up to three nights. If you have experienced jet lag due to long haul flights, you are familiar with this type of sleep disruption. As it is short-term, you will be able to return to your normal sleep routine on your own.
Chronic insomnia is the type of disrupted sleep that happens at least three times per week and lasts up to three months. It can have many causes ranging from working hours, unhealthy lifestyle habits, and certain medical conditions. Fortunately, there are a number of at-home and professional treatments available for chronic insomnia.
“Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together” Thomas Dekker
What causes insomnia?
Insomnia is caused by a number of reasons, which vary according to each person. For years, experts have pointed out unhealthy sleeping habits, specific substances, or biological factors. Most recently, they have begun to relate insomnia to the inability of your brain to stop being awake.
To understand what is preventing you from falling asleep, you should evaluate several possibilities first, such as:
Anxiety
Do you often feel worried or nervous? Perhaps the challenges of daily life fog your brain so much that they interfere with sleep patterns regularly. Feeling anxious all the time can lead to insomnia. You might feel excessively worried about future events, stuck in past situations, or tense when thinking about facing responsibilities. It is no wonder that, when you are quiet and inactive at night, stressful thoughts take the central stage, keeping you awake.
Depression
Psychiatric conditions such as depression can cause insomnia. When you are in a deep struggle with your own mind, falling asleep can be extremely challenging. In fact, insomnia itself can lead to changes in mood and shifts in hormones. Usually, sleep problems may represent a symptom of depression. Therefore, the risk of severe insomnia is much higher in patients with major depressive disorders.
Lifestyle
You might be living a lifestyle of unhealthy sleeping habits without even knowing it. It can be that you take naps during the afternoons to compensate for a day of hard work. Although these short naps can help some people, they can also make it hard for you to fall asleep later. Or perhaps you cover irregular shifts, which in turn confuses your internal body clock hours and your body’s clock gets. This results in difficulties to sleep whenever you need it most.
Eating habits
If you find yourself struggling to fall asleep, your unhealthy eating habits are to blame. The following factors could be affecting you:
Caffeine: Don’t you love the smell of fresh coffee in the mornings? It can keep you awake and give you an extra shot of energy before a busy day. However, dependency on caffeine can cause insomnia. According to the National Sleep Foundation, people who drink four or more cups of caffeinated drinks daily are more likely to suffer from insomnia than those who don’t.
Alcohol: Alcohol is a trickster; it can make you fall asleep initially but might take its toll later at night.
Nicotine: Cigarettes of tobacco are not only bad for your lungs, but they can also mess with your sleep. When you smoke near to bed hours, you’ll likely struggle to get the rest you need throughout the night.
Heavy meals: Be careful with what you eat before bedtime. Heavy meals have the potential to disrupt your sleep. When you eat too much, too late in the evening, it can make it difficult for your body to settle in and relax. Spicy meals, in particular, can cause heartburn and jeopardize your nightly rest.
Insomnia in numbers
Throughout the years, sleep has become more and more scarce. If you travel back in time to 1942, you would find out that people in America had 7.9 sleep hours on average per night compared to 6.8 in 2013, making it a 13% decrease. According to the Centers for Disease and Prevention, 35% of adults don’t get enough sleep (7 hours per day). What’s more, 40% of people aged 40 to 59 reported that they are getting less than the recommended amount of sleep.
30% of the adult U.S. population suffers from insomnia and 10% from chronic insomnia, making it the most common sleep disorder. Living with this kind of disorder has many damaging consequences. In fact, 75 to 90% of insomnia sufferers have an increased risk of conditions such as hypoxemia and GSD (glycogen storage disease). An estimated 10 million people in the United States remain undiagnosed.
Insomnia and sleep deprivation are not only harmful to yourself but can endanger the lives of those around you. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, over 100,000 deaths can be attributed to medical errors caused by sleep deprivation. Similarly, sleepiness leads to almost 20% of all car crash accidents and injuries.
What is high-quality sleep?
The best way to avoid the terrible consequences of insomnia, apart from eliminating harmful habits, is understanding what high-quality sleep is. Sleeping is vital for your physical and mental health. What’s more, good sleeping quality can help you live longer. If you suffer from insomnia, you struggle to find hacks or routines to adjust your sleeping habits. According to experts, adults should get between seven and nine consecutive hours of sleep per night. This is known as sleep quantity.
On the other hand, sleep quality refers to how well you sleep. For adults, good sleep quality involves falling asleep in 30 minutes or less to later sleep soundly throughout the night with no more than one awakening and drifting back to sleep within 20 minutes if you do wake up.
In order to feel excellent and become the best version of yourself, you should focus on both sleep quantity and quality. The perfect formula is a combination of the two. For instance, thwarting the amount of sleep you get makes it hard to function and, at the same time, poor sleep quality can leave you feeling exhausted the following morning.
Beautiful sounds: the best method to fall asleep naturally
When looking for the best method to end insomnia for good and get the rest you yearn for, you can come across many unfit options. Pills, sedatives, and beverages might do more harm than good, or offer no solution at all. What many people ignore is that the answer has been there for centuries and it is music.
For as long as history can account for, sound has been a key promoter of physical and emotional health, deeply rooted in ancient cultures and civilizations. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Egyptians used vowel sound chants in healing because they believed vowels were sacred. When native Americans shamans were summoned to heal an ill member of their tribes, they would fast to receive a song in a dream or vision instructing them in how to carry out the treatment of their patients.
Sound Meditation and Science
Science has also taken an interest in the perception of sound, creating a specialized field called psychoacoustics, which focuses on understanding how sounds can be used as medicine. To understand the fundamentals of sound healing, we must first understand the key role of our brain waves. These are the nucleus of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are the communication between neurons. Brain waves are generated by way of electrical pulses working in unison from masses of neurons interacting with one another.
Brain waves are divided into five different bandwidths (all named after a Greek letter) that are thought to form a spectrum of human consciousness. The slowest of the waves are delta waves (0.5 to 3 Hz), which are the slowest brain waves and are present mostly during the deepest state of sleep. The fastest of the waves are gamma waves (25 to 100 Hz), which are associated with higher states of conscious perception. Alpha waves (8 to 12 Hz) are present when the brain is daydreaming or consciously practicing mindfulness or meditation.
A series of experiments conducted by neuro-electric therapy engineer Dr. Margaret Patterson and Dr. Ifor Capel revealed how alpha brainwaves boosted the production of serotonin — a chemical commonly linked to sleep. Dr. Capel explained: “As far as we can tell, each brain center generates impulses at a specific frequency based on the predominant neurotransmitter it secretes. In other words, the brain’s internal communication system—its language, is based on frequency… Presumably, when we send in waves of electrical energy at, say, 10 Hz, certain cells in the lower brain stem will respond because they normally fire within that frequency range.”
Travel the world and listen to thousands of beautiful sounds before going to bed
Finding the perfect music to relax or unlocking the brainwave frequencies to end insomnia for good can be challenging. Meditation is a popular practice, yet it can be difficult for some people. Moreover, when done incorrectly, meditation can become another source of stress and frustration. Fortunately, at Synctuition, we have just the perfect audio meditation technology to help you fall asleep easily and without any type of effort.
Developed by over a thousand experts, Synctuition uses a combination of binaural beats and 3D sounds at just the right frequencies to immediately bring the listener to a pleasant meditative state. You will be transported to a relaxing, lucid dream to your own imagination while listening to one of Synctuition’s audios. This dream feels like a personalized movie playing in your mind as the powerful Synctuition audio stimulates your brain.
Treating yourself to a 25-minute Synctuition journey— the equivalent of 4 hours of deep meditation — as part of your preparation for sleep each night means that you give yourself a positive mental shower. Ultimately, the perfect way of getting rid of feelings of anxiety, helping your mind to relax, and unwind before bed. And the best thing? It is a truly natural, non-invasive way to say goodbye to insomnia and sleep better.
Ready for a better rest? Start today
Insomnia affects millions of people all around the world and can have terrible consequences for our physical and mental health. Good sleeping habits are the key to a healthy and longer life, not to mention it allows us to function efficiently on a daily basis. If you want to enjoy the many benefits of healing sleep and begin to feel much better, the best thing you can do is to try out sound meditation and begin your journey of personal recovery. Synctuition’s groundbreaking audio technology gives you the push you need by helping you sleep better and improve the quality of your life.
