Sleep is a Huge Gift: Suzy's Enormous Transformation

"Suzy" (not her real name), a 40ish personal chef, came to see me a while ago about some serious sleeplessness issues. Her problem led me to an interesting journey that married recent research at Walter Reed Hospital with some ideas popularized by my friend John Grinder, one of the co-founders of NLP.

And Suzy? Well, read on...

After years of prescription sleep meds, Suzy had reached a point where they either didn't work, or made her feel drowsy the next day. When your entire job is about working with heat and sharp objects... yeah, I could see the problem.

Suzy had developed what I call sleep anxiety syndrome, a condition that includes:

How about something that safely and naturally addresses all four of these conditions, with no side effects?

You are thinking, "I must be dreaming." Suzy certainly wished she was. But I thought the answer to the above question was so valuable, so wonderful, so... remarkable - that I started a company just to promote and provide such a product:

Think about how nice and relaxed you are after having a warm soothing bath - drying off and slipping into a soft, warm, comfortable bed and getting a great night's sleep.

Well, this was exactly my advice for Suzy.

But it wasn't my only recommendation. This had been going on for a while, and she had been using chemical medications for some time. To help her system adjust and create quick progress, I recommended a combination of natural supplement blends, dedicated capsules, and topicals that gave her a mix of useful substances:

That set, in combination with a pure Magnesum Chloride bath, was the magic formula that helped Suzy to finally get the deep, quality sleep she needed. She not only began sleeping better, but her body was less taxed. So she began waking up more refreshed, reinvigorated, energized, and uplifted.

After 1 month, all Suzy needed was the transdermal magnesium bath.

I've thought about Suzy's outcome, and it led me down some interesting paths. How is it that a month later, she needed only the baths?

On the one hand, once her body wasn't being stressed as much, and once a more balanced set of relaxation-related processes was at work, it makes sense that she wouldn't be so far off-center. That makes the body easier to calm down. Simple. Logical.

My friend Joe Katzman, who designed this website and our marketing strategy, thought there might be more to it. He pointed me to recent research by Dr. Christopher Spevak at Walter Reed hospital in Bethseda, MD, involving severely wounded veterans.

Dr. Spevak's work at Walter Reed suggests that it's possible to "anchor" relief - in their case, via addictive prescription pain-killers - to other stimuli. At Walter Reed, they used a combination of personally-evocative scents and visualization. Once anchored over time, the stimulus began to serve as a partial substitute for the pain-killers. Some badly-wounded military veterans have even been taken off of painkillers altogether.

Which brings us to "Suzy." Many of the supplements she used would be taken just before bed. Which means they'd be taken around the same time as the magnesium bath. 

Once primed by the association, and by the use of supplements that facilitate the body's own natural processes, Suzy's body may have turned the bath into an "anchor" to do what it needed to do. It helps that magnesium's is itself a key precursor element for bodily processes associated with physical relaxation, blood flow, and the production of key neurotransmitters. That makes it a natural mental and physical fit for associated problems - and a transdermal magnesium bath in pure Magnesium Chloride is a much more intense and mentally associative experience than just taking a capsule or a powder.

All of this would come as zero surprise to my friend John Grinder, the co-creator of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He helped invent the whole anchoring concept, as a more versatile formalization of techniques that reach back to B.F. Skinner and Milton Erickson. But it hasn't seen much mainstream clinical application, until recently.

I think we'll be seeing more of this in my own practice.