Treating Insomnia with Craniosacral Therapy

Do you wake up from a night’s sleep and still feel tired? Is falling asleep becoming harder and harder?  Not being able to fall asleep or the inability to fall into a quality and deep sleep is a common problem and major reason systems in the body break down.   Quality sleep is required for promoting growth and repair, removing waste from the brain, strengthening memory, helping us solve problems and learning.  Every tissue of our body is affected by sleep and the lack of it affects your hormones, stress level, appetite, immune system and more.  Our bodies need quality sleep to recover from our day and without the nightly physiological recuperation that comes with sleep, we compile dysfunctions to the breaking point and are even vulnerable to chronic diseases.   

Insomnia disrupts the brain’s rejuvenation time (sleep) and mirrors the same sensory activity within the brain that occurs during the central nervous system’s fight-or-flight response, also known as the acute stress response.  These terms refer to the automatic physiological reaction of the central nervous system upon sensing stress.  When the body goes into its stress response, stimulated adrenal glands trigger a release of  biochemicals elevating the heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar levels, and more.  These biochemical surges repeatedly crash like waves striking hundreds of times an hour within our physiology, throwing the central nervous system off-kilter.   Thus with insomnia, the shock the body undergoes in absorbing the waves of both increased blood pressure and heightened blood sugar levels, night after night, can produce significant damage to blood vessels and the heart.  

Furthermore, the continuously elevated brain activity during sleep that accompanies insomnia not only displaces brain rejuvenation time but can also increase cortisol levels with a cascading effect of keeping blood sugar levels high and affecting insulin levels. When insulin is not sufficiently secreted from the body, it redirects itself spilling into fat cells resulting in weight gain and vulnerability to Diabetes. This is only one of the numerous adverse health scenarios that emerge from insomnia.  Unfortunately today it’s common for non life-threatening stressors, such as work pressure, traffic jams, and family difficulties to shift our central nervous system into a fight-or-flight or stress response and thereby set the stage for insomnia. 

Since insomnia emerges from an imbalanced central nervous system operating in stress response mode and triggering brain activity during sleep, people have been turning to a natural and holistic manual treatment called craniosacral therapy for relief.  The wisdom in relying on craniosacral therapy to resolve insomnia is rooted in its effectiveness to counter the fight-or-flight or stress response and elicit a relaxation response within the body. Craniosacral therapy effectively treats insomnia at its foundation, calming the central nervous system away from being imbalanced and in high alert, and shifting it to align with the body’s need to maintain a certain state of equilibrium or what’s called homeostasis. 

The body needs to be in a state of homeostasis to experience the full benefit of physiological recuperation that comes with sleep.   Sleep-wake homeostasis is straightforward in operation: the longer we’ve been awake, the stronger our body’s need to sleep becomes, and the more likely we are to fall asleep; and visa versa in that the longer we’ve slept, the greater pressure to continue sleeping dissipates, and the more likely we are of waking up.  Our body’s have naturally produced sleep-regulating substances, the best known being a biochemical found in human cells called Adenosine.  During our waking hours Adenosine builds up in the body’s cerebrospinal fluid, increasing the need to sleep as it accumulates.  Releasing this pressure can only come through the act of sleeping, during which time Adenosine levels decline until the morning when you wake, at which time the cycle repeats.

Craniosacral therapy helps achieve sleep-wake homeostasis based on the concept that the cerebrospinal fluid in the brain and central nervous system fluctuates in pressure causing a subtle rhythmic motion of the cranial bones. This rhythm is known as the cranial rhythm and is palpated by hand to assess the movement, any variances or restrictions in flow of the cerebrospinal fluid throughout the body.  

By enhancing the flow and balance of cerebrospinal fluid, craniosacral therapy aims to calm the central nervous system and reset its need to maintain a state of equilibrium.  The craniosacral system is hydraulic in function, pumping cerebral fluids that nurture the body’s central nervous system. Properly targeted therapeutic mobilizations can relieve flow restrictions and tensions in the central nervous system, shift the body away from the fight-or-flight or stress response and elicit a physiological relaxation response.  

Craniosacral therapy mobilizations involve applying finger-pressure (similar to depressing an avocado checking for ripeness) to delicately manipulate tissues, membranes and cerebrospinal fluid within the skull specifically for the  body to shift to homeostasis. By stretching specific membranes ever so slightly, the cerebrospinal fluid gently flushes the craniosacral system, ‘washing away’ any imbalances and moving the central nervous system from the adrenal fight-or-flight stress response to a relaxed state where homeostasis can emerge and thrive.  

Craniosacral therapy is particularly suited to resolve insomnia mindful that within the brain is a complex bundle of nerves responsible for regulating the body’s sleep-wake transitions called the reticular activating system. The reticular activating system controls our fight-or-flight responses and our sleep-wake states. It’s also the nexus between our conscious brain and our subconscious one; filtering and separating the important from the unnecessary.   Chronic stress and other factors can disrupt the delicate balance of the reticular activating system, putting it in overdrive.  This in turn can cause it to alter the brian’s electrical voltage of brain waves and the speed by which neurons (nerve cells) fire, thereby making the body more alert, cognizant and awake or or less alert, cognizant, and awake. In some circumstances where the reticular activating system is in a heightened state of alert, it cam get ‘stuck’  and remain constantly on “ready” or high alert.  Since the reticular activating system relies on adequate cerebrospinal fluid circulation and oxygenation to function efficiently, craniosacral therapy is a treatment that directly optimizes its function because nourishing and oxygenating brain tissues is at the very core of treatment.   

The inner workings of the central nervous system, of which the brain is part of, are nothing short of miraculous.  Sleep-wake homeostasis is the central nervous system’s way of restoring and rejuvenating itself and the entire body. But when the balance of this natural process is off-kilter, a sleep deficit and insomnia are the results.  If you feel like you’re having difficulty “turning off your brain” in trying to get a good night of quality sleep, consider how craniosacral therapy might just put your insomnia to rest.