Insomnia: Self Hypnosis for Sleep

Mrs Ericson’s Induction
A simple self-hypnosis exercise for sleep

• Begin by making yourself comfortable and finding something to focus on. For example, one corner of a door frame, a light switch etc. Then, maintaining your focus on that spot try and notice four things about that object or spot and mentally feed them back to yourself as follows (note; you must use the full wording as below).
Mentally say to yourself; “Right now I can see the light switch is white, right now I can see the shadow at the edge of the switch, right now I can see the switch is a square shape, right now I can see the switch is in the off position.…”.
That was four things.

• Next try and notice all the things you can hear. Make four statements to yourself about that. For example:
“Right now I hear… the sound of the air-conditioner”, “right now I hear.. the sound of the clock ticking”, “right now I hear…voices in the next room”, “right now I hear…cars passing by outside”.
Again, you must use the phrase “right now I notice…” before each item. Again, you must find four things. If you cannot find four things, you are allowed to repeat, but try to find four.

• Next try and notice all the things you can feel physically. One at a time, repeat mentally to yourself, “right now I notice (details)” e.g. the feeling of my hand on my lap etc. Repeat this process four times using the phraseology described above.

• Next go back to the start and repeat the whole process, starting with the visual stimuli you focused on originally, but this time you only have to find three things (e.g. “Right now I notice… (x 3 things you notice about the spot you are focusing on)”; and then hearing, “Right now I can hear..(x 3 things you can hear)” and things you can feel “Right now I notice (x 3 things you can feel)

• Then repeat the process again, but this time you only have to find two things. Then repeat the process again, looking for one thing. Note; you will probably run out of different things to see, hear or feel, in which case you are allowed to repeat something you used earlier. But try to find something different – you may be surprised at how much more you can notice that at first seems obvious.