Sleep Patterns

When we sleep, our body’s main purpose it to repair, renew, rebuild, refresh, restore and rejuvenate itself. This is the time that we most effectively and efficiently process our daily stress.

Imbalances in our natural sleep patterns have quickly reached epidemic numbers in today’s western culture. It is rare that I meet someone without sleep “issues” during their initial analysis using The Intention Method in our office. I believe that it is the quality of our slumber that determines proper sleep patterns as opposed to the quantity. For example, I have personally met and analyzed many people that average 8-10 hours of sleep every night yet still have imbalances due to a lack of sufficient deep sleep. The opposite also occurs, as I’ve seen people average 4-6 hours of high quality sleep each night and thus keep their sleep patterns balanced.

The main part of the sleep that we will concern ourselves with using The Intention Method is the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) portion of our deep sleep. Throughout the waking day, our senses are bombarded with physical, emotional and chemical information and experiences that are stored in our short-term memory in the subconscious mind. Ideally, when we go to sleep at night, we will consistently reach a deep REM pattern of slumber. It is in this stage of sleep that all of our short-term memory storage is routed through the limbic portion of the brain and filed away into our long-term memory in the neocortex portion of the brain. While it is always possible to pull useful information from these memories, once all of these experiences are filed away into the long-term memory, they cannot affect us on a day-to-day basis. This is how the body most effectively processes our daily stress.

The majority of our society, however, is not reaching the REM pattern as efficiently as they could. Thus, their daily stressors remain in the short-term memory and the person tends to re-experience this “past” stress subconsciously.

The main point here is that if you do not consistently reach the deeper levels of sleep, you simply cannot process stress correctly. Stress will then accrue day after day. Multiply this daily accumulation by weeks, months, years or, quite commonly, decades and you will see and incredible amount of tension throughout the entire system which will, without a doubt, negatively effect every aspect of your life.