This question I hear often — it is as if out of sudden you lose your ability to fall asleep and sleep well. However, finding a solution isn’t easy because nothing significant has happened in your life.

I've been there too. What kept waking me up was a chronic back pain, but while I knew why I couldn't sleep, I didn't know what caused my back issue or how to get back into sleep.

Doctors couldn't help either — I followed treatments, did exercises and got pain-killers — with no lasting results.

As I’m curious at heart, I’m always looking for new and better ways to do things, and so I started to study how the nervous system learns and organizes movements. Finally, I was able to find out how to fix my back, and also, I discovered how certain gentle movements could make me feel calm, and fall asleep more easily — easier than ever before. This Inspired me to developed the Moving into Sleep Method, and start to teach people to overcome sleep disorders and insomnia.

Why it Seems as if You Start Losing Your Ability to Sleep as You Age?

When you cannot fall asleep, the core problem is in the neurophysical system, which is unable to perform its sleep-function. In an optimal situation:

• You wake up at certain time
• You start feeling sleepy at certain time
• You fall asleep with ease at certain time

This is how you imagine your sleep-ability would always be. But as you age, many factors start creating negative neurological stress.

What causes negative stress, can be an endless list, including everything from physical to emotional challenges, cultural, sociological, work-related, environmental issues and so on.

What makes the situation even more complicated is that the negative stress load is often a result of multiple factors. Therefore, it can take much time to find out, understand, and fix the issues, before you can notice your sleep improving. For me it took years before I could understand what caused my back pain, which was a slightly twisted posture I had developed in my childhood and teen-years when I studied violin, often 8 hours every day. The twist was minimal, yet enough to cause major issues years later. Luckily, I was able to find a solution, and learn to understand how the system works, so that I now can help others.

To solve the situation, I would advice to do to things:

2 Ways to Get Your Sleep Back

My Top 5 Tips to Promote Sleep Quality

1. Diet – choose quality food, made with care from quality ingredients, to promote digestive and metabolic health.
2. Be active - do moderate exercises, at least 30 minutes walking, to promote physical health.
3. Be creative - develop skills, and learn new ones, to promote brain health.
4. Calm down – learn how to calm down your body and mind, to promote harmony in the neurophysical system.
5. Be orderly - do daily activities (wake up, eat, work, relax, sleep) following a schedule, to promote time-related physiological processes, like digestion and sleep.

Doing Sleep-inducing Movements to boost Your Sleep-drive

While the above tips help you in promoting sleep quality, it might take long before you see improvements, and it is tonight that you want to get sleep.

This is when you can do sleep-inducing movements. The idea is to do specific gentle movements that evoke calming processes in the brain and literally move you into sleep.

This is how I induce sleep every time I need sleep, and so do many others who have learned my method through my books, my workshops and online courses.

Thanks for reading,

Oliver

“Better sleep is  a gentle movement away”