I cured my insomnia through self-hypnosis.

2008

Right off the bat, let's start with full disclosure. I had insomnia, and I cured it. This blog serves two purposes: to tell you about my problem, and to show you my solution. Ultimately I am going to refer you to the person who helped me cure my insomnia. I was positively impacted, I subsequently became an affiliate of the practitioner who cured me, and I want to share my experience. That's it. If you are suffering from insomnia, or know someone who is, you should read this. If you're suffering from anything - period - or you are looking for a life change, you should probably read this too.

If you want to read the entire story, continue on. If you want to get right to the point, Alan B. Densky, CH, cured my insomnia.

For two straight months this year, I could not sleep through the night. Every night around 3:30 or 4:30 am I would awaken for no reason at all. I would flounder in bed for anywhere from a half hour, an hour, sometimes longer, until I fell asleep, then to awaken at 7:30 to start my day. That little patch of sleep from 7:30am backward was in no way restful, if it materialized at all. Essentially, it was like sleeping for about 4.5 hours a night every day for 2 months, which is something others can do easily, but not me. It represented about half of the sleep I need on any given night.

I started to notice the 3:30-4:30 wakeup pattern after about two weeks. Initially, I attributed the problem to an issue with my sleep cycle, because I thought I had messed it up. Ordinarily I wake up around 7:30-8:00, but one day in the beginning of February, I had to wake up at 4:30am and make a long drive. So about two weeks later, I figured that my body was just thrown off by the experience. But I did find it odd that my sleep cycle hadn't recovered. This wasn't the first time that I had ever woken up much earlier than normal to go do something. Why was this time somehow different? I had no idea.

I continued on doing the things I normally do. But I was tired. Very tired. I was working out as I usually did, but even very basic workouts were sometimes far more challenging than they should have been. I could sense that lack of sleep was catching up with me. I would walk around the mall on a Saturday and feel completely drained. The fatigue was incredible. I rarely drank caffeine, but found myself searching drink coolers for energy drinks instead instead of water or juice. I drank Red Bull constantly, and it would pick me up for about 15 minutes and leave me no better off than I was before I drank it. I searched it out everywhere I went, and started buying it to keep at home.

More weeks of insomnia. It was now becoming very, very bad. The waking up was coming earlier now, sometimes at 3:00am. I would get up and go to the bathroom. Go back to bed and lay there. Try to fall asleep. Go in the other room. Go downstairs and lay on the couch. Watch movies. When I found myself watching movies at 4am on a weekday, I knew things were getting out of hand. I no longer had any control over my life. I was a complete disaster on the inside, and people could see it. My co-workers would tell me, every day, how tired I looked. I looked horribly tired. And I felt it. My stress level was piling up, and I was starting to develop a short fuse with people. Then, no fuse at all. I would just snap. I would freak out at home and just yell at the top of my lungs. It was completely insane. I was unraveling.

I tried to improve my sleep environment. Keeping the cats out of the room. Closing windows to block out noise. I even researched the hell out of an air purifier and bought one to run at night as a white noise machine. They were all equally fruitless. Although I did have cleaner air.

I saw my doctor. I was beginning to believe that mounting stress was contributing to my insomnia, and I asked about sleep medications. My thought at the time was that something like Lunesta or Ambien would help me get the rest I needed to deal with stress, and that hopefully that would balance out my sleep cycle and all would be right with the world. So I dove in and gave Lunesta a try for about a week.

On Lunesta, I would still wake up in the middle of the night, but only briefly, and that experience was very hazy. But my stress level, I could tell, was still there; it hadn't budged, and I could tell that stress was near the core of my real problem. I was still flipping out at home and yelling; just completely losing my mind over issues I was having with my relatives and my job. I knew enough to go right back to my doctor.

My doctor then took Lunesta out of the equation and put Klonopin and Prozac in the mix. This experience was one of the worst of my life. I became more depressed than I have ever been in my entire life. My sleep pattern had not changed, and moreover, I felt completely hung over every single day. Every single day.

I started to feel trapped by medication now. The constant fear of addiction to these medications - the fear of impending dependency - ran through my mind every day. What the hell was happening to me. One day I took stock of where I started, and where I was at. I began with insomnia, and now, 7, 8 weeks later I had insomnia and a whole hell of a lot of other problems. I got scared. I did what I thought needed to be done, and for me, that was getting off the medication. Which I did. And it was, as expected, frightening. I had definitely developed a dependency on one of the sleep medications. And I was becoming more vividly awake than ever before in the middle of the night.

Fantastic.

Guess what. When you start Googling "Insomnia" at 4 in the morning, you're an insomniac.

I know you're waiting to find out how it gets better. So far, basically, things suck.

One morning at around 3 or 4 am I will never forget. I was laying there, just thinking to myself that if I only knew how to program my brain - if I could tell it how to respond when I woke up in the middle of the night - maybe that could be the solution to my problem. Every time I woke up I could sense my brain searching for some way to put my body back to sleep. I felt like it just didn't know how. But I felt like there had to be a way to teach it. Like you teach yourself how to do anything. This made so much sense to me. Self-hypnosis popped into my head. Just like that. I had no other bullets to shoot at this point and that seemed like a damn good one to try. I may have been tired as hell, but I was inspired. And that was something I hadn't been in months.

The next day, I sought out resources online, and via Google I came across Alan B. Densky. Up front I didn't know anything about him. He was a hypnotherapist, and he offered a program to cure insomnia using self-hypnosis. Sure looked like a good start. I read the description of his program, and it was exactly what I wanted to hear. Of course it was. Guarded, I looked around his site, and thought maybe this could be legit, possibly not, but likely ok. You never know. But Alan did offer a sample download of his work. I thought - fantastic. If the sample works, we're golden. If it's a joke, we'll move on and lose nothing. So I downloaded his sample relaxation program, loaded it on my iPod, and when I got home from work, I isolated myself in our guest bedroom, got comfortable, and dimmed the lights.

This was the first time I had ever been hypnotized, and it was one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life. Euphoric. I felt as if I were floating above my bed, and the sense of relaxation was so incredible and overwhelming that I laughed hysterically. It was liberating. It was magical. It was empowering. It was everything at once and all of it good. There is no way I can adequately describe what happened to me that day. After the recording was finished, I went right to the phone. I could have ordered the insomnia program online, but I was leaving nothing to chance. I wanted no mistakes. I knew he had the cure and I wanted it as soon as possible. I was on a mission. I have never, ever, been on a mission like this.

I called Alan's company, Neuro-Vision, and Alan answered the phone. A surreal experience. The actual voice from the recording, now in real life. We chatted for a bit, I ordered the CDs with nervous excitement, and within 2 days I was to have an envelope in my mailbox. Still guarded, I thought even if the whole thing turned out to be a scam, I would be out $40. I could deal with that. It felt like a win-win, or at least win-minimal loss.

On Friday the envelope showed up.

I followed the explicit instructions he provided.

And it worked.

I put in the time and took it seriously. Every single day I saw improvement. Within days I was already referring to insomnia as a problem "I used to have". It was an exciting time to say the least. Looking back now, I can't even imagine having difficulty sleeping. When I hit the pillow, I am out within minutes, and I dream every single night - the indicator of restful sleep. Instead of talking to everyone I know about my problem with insomnia - which effectively compounds the problem and cements it into your brain - all I now talk about is this experience of overcoming insomnia and how I can't imagine ever having trouble sleeping ever again.

Alan claims that he falls asleep instantly, and I have no doubt that he does. At times I do as well. With more practice, my goal is to train myself to sleep anywhere at any time I choose. What a weapon, to be able to rest your body on command. That is what I'm aiming for.

It didn't happen overnight. It happened over the course of several weeks of commitment. If you are committed to solving your insomnia, Alan's program will work. If you cut corners, take the program into your own hands, and don't follow his directions, you likely are not going to get the result that the program was created to achieve. Take this one opportunity, even if you are a corner-cutter in every day life (we all do it sometimes), to put every ounce of concentration into this one thing. Give it a chance to work, and know that if you do your part, it will happen. You only need to invest a small amount of time each day. Alan is legit, and he has 30 years of experience. He isn't flashy, and he isn't a con artist. He is genuinely motivated to help people solve problems by using their own brain and proper thinking. That's pretty respectable in this era of pharmaceutical overload, where every condition has a prescription to go with it.

Hypnotherapy fascinates me. Since curing my insomnia, I have sampled the work of other hypnotherapists. At least the ones who offer samples of their work. Many do not, whether for honorable reasons or otherwise. Alan and I click, and I feel like his delivery and intonation are superior. His experience comes through in his voice - the end product. It's all for you to decide in the end.

I say follow the path that I took with Alan B. Densky. Listen to his sample download, and see if it clicks with you. If it does, you have a lot of opportunity for self-improvement. Slaying the insomnia monster is the first step. Everything else will fall into place thereafter. If you want it to.

I hope this has been helpful.

Here you go:

Alan B. Densky and Neuro-Vision

-Chris


© 2008. Reuse of this text in any capacity is explicitly prohibited. This is my story; don't steal it.

See how it all worked out in my long term update.

Long Term Update: 2 years

2010

It has been about two years since I followed Alan B. Densky's insomnia program.  You can read about my battle with insomnia here.

If you're coming here for the first time, or maybe if you're one of the thousands (thanks for reading!) of people who have already visited this site since that time, I thought a followup might be in order, just to see how things have been going.

I think it's important to remember just what insomnia was for me. It was a period - in my case, nearly two months - of interrupted sleep. Every single night, like clockwork. Waking up in the middle of the night for no reason at all, with no ability to return to sleep. And as I wrote, helpless to do anything about it, I suffered, experimenting with medications to no avail, until I came across Alan's CDs.

Bottom line - that kind of chronic insomnia simply has never happened since. Not once.

I mean, have I had nights where I had a tough time sleeping? Of course I have. I'm a human being. I'm a competitive athlete with workplace stresses, family stresses, and the general stresses of life. These things don't just bounce off of you. But my response to them is much better than it ever was before. Less hyper-reaction. More seeing things for what they are, and - right from the words of Alan himself - seeing things in their proper perspective.

On those nights that I do have a tough time falling asleep, or I find myself half-awake from a midnight trip to the john or a bad dream, I employ the techniques from Alan's sessions to get back to sleep. They work. I would be lost without them.

I rarely, if ever, even think about that time in my life when I went through insomnia. It seems like a really long time ago, and it almost seems impossible that I even had it.

If you're looking for an endorsement, I think that's it right there. If a product - in this case, a series of recordings - can put something so awful so far behind you, I think it's fair to say it works.