I’ve learned a lot about sleep health while working with my own occasional insomnia. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, insomnia affects 30% of adults, mostly older adults, and mostly women.
An inability to sleep well can make your life miserable. Common effects include fatigue, moodiness, tension, irritability, daytime sleepiness, sleep anxiety, poor memory and concentration, lack of motivation, poor performance at school or work, headaches, upset stomach, and an increased likelihood of making mistakes at work or while driving.
While there are certain physical reasons people have difficulty sleeping, there are many energetic factors as well. It’s important to address both.
6 Energetic Reasons for Poor Sleep
Here are six energetic reasons for poor sleep, plus gemstone recommendations for addressing each issue. See which of these factors you might be able to relate to.
1. Falling asleep can feel impossible when your attention is stuck in your head. Thoughts run through your mind about this or that, what you did or didn’t do yesterday, or what you have to do tomorrow. As your mental to-do lists pile up, it gets harder and harder to quiet your mind and relax enough to drift off into sleep.
Attention is a form of energy. When your attention, or energy, is too much in your head, your thoughts will work overtime. To balance this out, you want to work with a gemstone that naturally supports the downward flow of energy in your body. This redistributes the energy and alleviates the excess in your head. Blue-Green Fluorite (the primary gem in our Living River formula) is noted for its ability to support downward flows and can be helpful for releasing the backlog of energy keeping you awake.
2. Another reason for poor sleep is too much energy trapped in the nervous system. This is often due to physical or emotional pain that has not been adequately dissipated. This energy can also build up if you’re hypersensitive to your surroundings. During the day, the nervous system is stimulated more than it can handle, and the vibrations of that stimulation are still there at nightfall and interfere with sleep.
The energy of Amethyst with its symbiotic stone, White Beryl, is particularly vitalizing for the nervous system. These gems can give the system the nourishment it needs to do its job properly and effectively. This means helping you relax at night. A key principle of our energetic anatomy is that it needs nourishment in order to have the strength to let go of unwanted energy. With the help of Amethyst & White Beryl, the nerves can better maintain themselves with regular flushing of excess.
3. In the process of falling asleep, our attention moves from the physical world to the dream state, which has correlations with the aura. The body and aura are like two sides of a river. A disconnect between them is like a bridge being closed between one side of the river and the other. If you can’t get over the bridge, you’ll have trouble falling asleep.
Aura health is therefore a key to good sleep health. White Flash Moonstone & Emerald and Blue Flash Moonstone & Blue Sapphire are excellent gemstone tools for nourishing, restoring, and vitalizing the aura. Blue Lace Agate & White Beryl is particularly helpful for rebuilding connections between the aura and body.
4. When describing the relationship between Earth and Heaven energies and the importance of being well connected to the earth, I like to give a certain analogy. Think of the cord that you plug into the wall before you can turn on a lamp. The 
plug has two prongs. The prongs are like your legs. Grounding yourself with healing gemstone energies is like plugging your legs into the earth. Then, you are able to turn on your spiritual light. The better grounded you are, the more consciously aware you can be of your spiritual experiences.
When you’re well connected with earth energies before you go to bed, you’ll be more relaxed, your body’s energies will be more balanced, and you’ll be able to drift into sleep more easily. While all healing gemstones have a grounding effect, our Foundation Five necklace set also promotes a profound sense of balance and nourishment.
Each of the five gemstone necklaces in the set supports a different facet of our relationship with earth and nature. By working with them all together, the harmony of nature can be communicated and instilled into our own body. Sleep should come as naturally as night follows day.
5. Emotional upset can also prevent sleep. Hurt feelings stimulate thoughts, which then provide the fuel for more emotional anguish. Indeed, thoughts can stimulate your emotions and get you so riled up that sleep becomes impossible.
Pink and Blue Chalcedony are the earth’s remedy for this. Pink Chalcedony & Pink Spinel calms and soothes the emotions, and Blue Chalcedony with Blue Sapphire and Blue Topaz (our Tranquility formula) calms, soothes, and nourishes the mind. Choose the one that corresponds to the part of you that you think is most in need.
6. Yet another cause for insomnia is a reluctance to let go of the waking state and surrender to the state of dreams. Dreams often reveal hidden truth about our lives at present or what’s to come, how we truly think and feel about things, and what we might be missing. If we’re not ready to see or accept our dream messages, it could cause subconscious resistance to sleep.
Opalite & Golden Beryl is an excellent choice for those who feel this may be the underlying reason for their poor sleep health. These gems are not only calming, but also help organize the causal aspect of our being, where memories are stored and glimpses of the future can be found. Working with these gemstones can comfort you with the feeling that all is as it should be, that you can deal with anything life gives you, and that nothing will be revealed in your dreams that you can’t handle. Wearing these gemstones at bedtime can also improve dream recall, again due to the organization they provide to the causal energies.
Working with Gems for Sleep
To work with any of these gemstones for sleep health, wear them about an hour or two before bed. Then place them beside you under the covers or on top of them when you go to sleep. While some people wear their healing gemstone necklaces to bed, I like to caution against doing so in case the necklace tightens against your neck while you sleep.
Cleanse the gems every morning with a few squirts of Energy Clearing Spray, then wrap them in a spiral in sunlight to rejuvenate until the next evening.
If you feel you have more than one of the above indicators of poor sleep health, it’s okay to work with more than one of these necklaces at the same time, except White Flash Moonstone and Blue Flash Moonstone. If you were these gems together, the White Flash Moonstone will try to corral energy in your supraphysical aura—that layer of aura that immediately surrounds your skin—while the Blue Flash Moonstone will try to even out energy throughout your aura. These two influences conflict, so wear these gemstones at separate times.
For sleep health, work with the Foundation Five as a set, or work just with Agate & Citrine, Mother of Pearl & Blue Chalcedony, or Ruby & Onyx separately.
Give any of these gemstone remedies a try and let us know how it goes in the comments below!
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