The power of rituals

After last week’s newsletter about hypnotherapy, many of you got in touch to tell me about your bedtime routines. It turns out there are lots of ways to ensure that your brain drifts off with positive thoughts rather than wracked with anxiety.

Some of you read a chapter of a favourite novel or inspiring self-help book before going to sleep. Some of you love affirmations, and focus on them with a meditative intensity. Those of you who are into manifesting found that looking at your vision board before bed helped those images embed into the brain.

It’s interesting that many of you intuitively know what neuroscience is increasingly telling us: that the pre-sleep stage of consciousness - known as hypnagogia - is extremely powerful. And those who use it for manifesting are actually onto something, according to neuroscientist Tara Swart.

She describes what’s known as ‘the Tetris effect’ in psychology. …