Awakening to Your Sleep Reality

image from Pinterest– link HERE

A great percentage of your life is spent sleeping. This feels like a waste of precious time to some people. To others it is a escape  from an otherwise unbearable existence. 

We try to find ways to avoid sleep, in order to get things done that we deem more important. Or we self medicate ourselves by sleeping, and think of it as an escape from being in reality. But sleep is a reality all its own, that it intertwined with our waking reality.

 The sleep states are a natural part of our existence. There are different stages of sleep that each serve important functions.

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The subconscious awakens and exists in a different way during sleep, than it does when you are awake. The processes that the subconscious parts of the brain need to do, are an important part of your maintaining your emotional, mental, and spiritual balance.

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Sleep deprivation will cause deterioration in your mental state, your emotional state, memory, and cognitive functions. It effects your ability to have a clear continuity from one day to the next. Over time, sleep deprivation can cause a breakdown of your mental state, resulting in mental illness.

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Sleep can be affected by various things. If you are unable to sleep straight through for 8 or 9 hours, then it is critical to your mental health that you make up the missing sleep hours at another time of the day.

This is not laziness. You are not being unproductive when you are sleeping. Lack of proper sleep will cause decreased productivity and poor efficiency. You will have memory problems, especially related to spatial and time memory.

The sleep states are a part of our reality. Your subconscious brain exists just as much as your conscious brain does.

Your core beliefs, your memories, your perceptions of reality, and your emotions are all functions of your subconscious brain.

Your conscious awake state cannot exist separately from your subconscious reality.

Sleep is critical to make sure all these realities, and the different parts of your brain are working both together…and independently… in a way that best supports you.

image from Pinterest – link HERE

Spirituality… higher consciousness …and your perceptions about the nature of your reality…are all intertwined with what happens in the brain while you sleep.

Your mental and emotional health are dependent upon your getting proper sleep.  This is also true about  your immune system and your physical health.

Your spiritual health has to do with believing in, and perceiving something beyond the reality of the five senses.

Spirituality gives you a greater perspective about your existence.

Being able to perceive your higher consciousness… and spiritual realities… is also intertwined with your brain being able to experience the sleep states. Your spiritual health is dependent upon letting your conscious brain  rest, so the other senses can awaken.

You are not wasting time by sleeping. You are allowing an important part of your reality to exist. You are increasing your brain’s ability to function well during your waking hours.

We are more than drones or robots. We need more to our existence than just survival. …something more to living than just paying the bills.

Treat your body’s need to sleep with thoughtfulness.  The sleep states are the interconnecting path between realities and levels of consciousness.

What happens when you are awake affects your dreams, and what happens in your dreams affects your consciousness.   🌷

Sleep well tonight,

Annie 💕

 

 

The Little Brain in your Heart Has Potential Healing Power

The heart is 50  times more powerful electrically than the brain is. The magnetic fields given off by the heart are much more powerful than those of the brain. This alludes to the heart being able to send communication out of the body and to another person’s magnetic fields. Your heart can communicate love  and compassion

The Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California  has research which shows that the there is a “little heart” in your brain which has “brain-like attributes”  Triple Helix Online

This has opened up a field of study of Heart Intelligence. The field of   “neurocardiology ”  is the study of how the heart and the brain communicate with each other. There is evidence that there is two-way communication between the little brain in the heart and the big brain.

John and Beatrice Lacey were the first researchers to investigate the communication connection between the heart and the brain.  This early research was done in the 1970s. This was the first evidence that there is actually two-way communication between the heart and the brain.

On January 7 of this month, there was new research released by the Neurologist Dr. Andrew Amour.

Neurologist Dr. Andrew Amour from Montreal in Canada discovered a sophisticated collection of neurons in the heart organised into a small but complex nervous system  .bodymindsoulspirit | January 7, 2015 |

The heart has it’s own nervous system. This little nervous system contains  at least  40,000 neurons.  These  ” sensory neurites”   are responsible for two way communication between the heart and the brain. If the heart feels an emotion, it sends the signal to the brain, which in turn sends the sensation into the body.

The “little brain” in the heart is the heart’s own intrinsic nervous system—a network of neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins, and support cells that are very similar to those that exist in the brain, but act independently of the brain [2]. This information processing system can control the brain, the hormonal system, and other pathways. By using this system, the heart seems to have its own logic that functions separately from the autonomic nervous system  Srividya Murthy

The Institute of HeartMath has studied the heart rhythms and the variation in the rhythms of the heart. It has been demonstrated that our emotions are reflected in the changing rhythms of our heart.

When we are feeling positive emotions there is a harmony within the nervous system and the heart has a regular rhythm. When we are upset the heart rhythm becomes irregular and this has an effect on the nervous system, creating a lack of flow and harmony.

The heart usually communicates with the brain through nerve fibers that run through the vagus nerve and the spinal column. When a heart has been transplanted, these connections do not immediately form again, but the heart may still able to function because of the existence of its own intrinsic nervous system  Srividya Murthy

Electro magnetic Heart fields seem to be able to interact with the electromagnetic fields of another person.The heart is responsible for communicating emotions to another person that they can feel. You can feel a sensation in your body when someone who is in love with you, stands near you. They are sending emotions to you via the electrical and magnetic energy fields of the heart, as well as the brain.

There is proof of electromagnetic fields that can extend at least 6 feet from your body. That means that someone within that field range will be able to feel emotions from you. You can literally send out your emotions into another person’s sensory system.

I wonder how far we have the potential to send energy fields. There have been experiments of groups of people sending out love energies in a concentrated effort . They have resulted in less crime and violence in the area that the group was told to focus on.

There are possibilities of using energy sending techniques for therapy. Anxiety can be reduced by an altering of the nervous system in your body. There is possibility that a person can regulate your nervous system with their own nervous system.

There is potential for help for addiction, depression and post traumatic stress disorder. These are all conditions in which people suffer from a malfunctioning  nervous system.

There is a lot of interesting and exciting potential with this new research.

As always, I a sending my positive energy to all of you now 🙂

Anxiety and Fear of Authority

It is 2am and I know I need to sleep. I have appointments tomorrow with authority type bureaucracy type people and that always causes severe anxiety and a feeling of threat.

Past traumas have caused my brain to send of alarms of dealing with these types of people and organizations.

I am sure that some of you have the same feeling of threat of authorities. I think that some of us just were not meant to survive in a world of bureaucracy and power people.

There could be a couple of explanations for this for people who have this same fear cycle. I want to validate the people that feel this way and to think through it with you so we can find healing.

I feel that the first step to healing is validation. The next step to healing is understanding the triggers, cycles and reactions of these brain patterns. Then we can find ways to interfere with the automatic patterns.

There is most likely some past trauma with authority that makes people feel threatened. It may be government or civil authority or it may be household authorities.

It is the feeling that someone is in control of our situations and we have no say in the outcome. It is also the feeling that the outcome will be bad.

Some people may have a fear of a lack of control. It is a feeling that our lives, our comfort and our safety are in the hands of other people.

There are ways to feel more empowered but it is easier said than done to simply turn off that fear center of the brain. Some triggers are very imbedded into our brains.

The thing that has helped me lately is the idea that forks in the road are an illusion. When we look back at life there are less true ” forks” in the road than we perceived at the time.

We are all walking on our path. It has turns and curves. It goes this way and that way. The number of life or death “forks” in the road are less than we think.

We fall into this perception that a given situation is going to have tremendous impact on the rest of our lives. Some of the time it is more of a major inconvenience that causes severe anxiety. But whichever way it turns out, there will not be a dramatic impact on the rest of our lives.

The other thing we do is that we run the scenario of the upcoming situation in our minds.

We run through the conversations, the questions, the answers and the doom at the end. Often times when we get there, the entire scenario is different than we expected it to be.

It does not mean that it will go well but it may not go as badly as we expect it to.

Still, there is a fear of the unknown. There is a fear of the anxiety itself. We imagine how we will feel in the situation

. We imagine going into a severe anxiety attack right in the middle of the office. We will appear as someone they will not want to deal with.

The fear of the pain of the anxiety is a big part of the mental torment.

We also feel frustrated and angry that people do not seem to care about us. They will not be understanding or compassionate.

I have mentioned in previous posts that people with social anxiety have a fear of other people that have a lack of compassion and understanding.

Other people seem to have no problem separating the people who have compassion from the people who do not. There are roles that people play in our lives.

Our friends and family are supposed to care about us. People providing professional services that we pay for , are not obligated to have compassion for us.

It would be nice if all people had understanding and compassion for each other. But the reality is that there are few people who act with compassion during  most of their daily interactions.

The thought that everyone “should” have compassion for us is unrealistic. It is a nice idea but it will never happen.

Maybe this is the confusion for us. We want people to listen to us and to treat us like individuals.

We want to be more than just a number.

But the world is made up of people that do their job with no regard for other people’s individual situation, condition, or their lives. It seems like a frightening thing when people can make decisions for our families and our lives without really getting to know us.

The insurance company approves or disapproves a treatment for a person who really needs it without knowing anything about them. The government assesses taxes on a person who it could destroy without having any compassion.

A teacher calls social services on a mother based on a conversation she overheard between two children that was taken out of context. A landlord adds on an enormous late fee to a late rent payment without finding out the situation.

It goes on and on. People do not have compassion and do not take time to hear us. It can be frightening and hurtful.

So here we are. we have to deal with authorities in order to live. For people that are triggered by authority confrontations this can be devastating. Any interaction feels like imminent doom. Often it does not tuen out badly but sometimes it does.

We end up working against ourselves because we go into the office in severe anxiety. The anxiety diminishes our capacity to handle the situation as well as other people would.

Our rational side of the brain is overridden by the fear side.

We dream of a world of peace and love. A world were everyone cares about other people. A world where the individual situation is taken into account.

I am going to sleep now , hopefully to dream of the flowers and rainbows world. So silly.

Together maybe we can think of some tools to cope. I will post anything I find that works. I have compassion for all of you.

Namaste,
Annie

When Someone with Mental Illness Reaches Out to You / Scenario 2 – Post Traumatic Stress

This is my second scenario and a Do’s and Don’t list for helping someone with mental suffering.
To read my introduction to this series and Scenario 1 , please see older posts at this blog.

Scenario 2 –

Sarah calls you and is in Post Traumatic Stress. Something at work triggered her. She tells you she is in a state of terrible fear. She feels like her job is in danger. She feels like there is an imminent threat to her financial stability. Then she tells you that feels like she will die soon. The walls of her house are closing in on her. She feels like an animal trapped in a cage ready to be eaten.
She cries and says she wants to kill herself. She would rather kill herself than be eaten.

Don’t Say – You are being really dramatic and unrealistic.
(Sarah is not being a drama queen. In the post traumatic stress state, her perception of immediate danger is very real. The amygdala part of the brain goes into hyper alert state and tells the person to choose fight or flight. When someone is in post traumatic stress, fight or flight state, they tend to have an overwhelming urge to run. They want to run but there is no where to run to. This is a terrifying place to be.)

Don’t Say – You are acting like a child. You need to grow up and act like an adult.
(It is not uncommon for someone to regress into a child state during a ptsd attack.It is the brain’s way of protecting itself. The person has no control over it.

Even if you were to force them out of the regression too early, it would be dangerous for their mind. There is always the possibility of a person’s brain becoming disorganized permanently)

Don’t Say – Did you take your meds today?
( Unless they specifically asked you to be in charge of whether or not they take their medication, this comment is condescending. What meds they have taken today is not the point. It is not what they are asking you for help with

They are asking for help with their fear. Bringing up the meds feels like an accusation and like you are saying it is their fault for not taking their meds properly. It takes the focus off of what they are saying to you. They need to be heard, not have you change the subject.)

Don’t Say – Just think positive thoughts.

(If they were able to think positive thoughts they would. The fear part of the brain is sending intrusive terrifying thoughts to their mind. They want it to stop.)

Do Say – You are in a post traumatic stress state. I understand that you feel very threatened. You are not in any immediate danger. Your brain is sending signals to make you feel that way.

Do Say – You are in a state of post traumatic stress.
Is there anything I can do to help you to reduce the level of fear and anxiety ?

Do Say – Something has triggered you to flashback to your original trauma

You feel like your danger level is the same as that situation. That was a horrible thing that happened to you. But your current situation is not the same. It feels that way because it has a similarity to the original trauma.

Do Say – I know you feel afraid and threatened

You had a terrible trauma and something has triggered you to feel the same way you did then. You are safe right now. You are not in danger. Your feelings are an attack of your brain on you. You are safe. Nothing terrible is going to happen. You are safe now.

Do Say – You are safe. I am here for you. You are safe.