Falling Asleep During Sessions

You can work with a “sleeping” client with any EEG equipment. Unless you see a significant spike in Theta, the client is not really asleep. Letting a client “sleep” and get the brain into a solid SMR/sleep spindles state for a few sessions is very positive.

However, if in fact one has an unchangeable lifestyle that doesn’t allow one ANY down-time, no wonder he sleeps as soon as he has a chance to sit still for a few minutes!  One of the questions an assessment would focus on is how effectively he is able to shift into neutral throughout the day when there isn’t any specific demand on his brain other than monitoring.  Lots of clients with whom I work wear themselves out because their brains don’t know how to take micro breaks during the day.

Depending on the type of training one is doing, the appearance of being asleep does not stop the brain from receiving feedback signals and learning from them.  But if someone is working with me and sleeps during sessions after the first 5 sessions or so, I suggest that one major goal of the training should be to learn the difference between being still and being asleep.  Sometimes we have to do very short training segments–a minute or two–and pause to talk about what’s happening and how he feels.  Then we can build up the training period from there.