Sleep Meditation
Using meditation to improve sleep
You are forgiven for thinking that meditation and sleep don't have anything to do with one another. After all, we often tend to compartmentalize our world into the worldy stuff and the spiritual stuff. For many people the two don't mix. For some, only the worldy truly exists. However, meditation can be a very helpful tool to improve sleep.
What is meditation?
The word meditation means "to consider" or "to think over". Generally speaking, meditation is an act of bringing the mind into awareness of something, of focusing the mind on something concrete or abstract. It can be an act of thinking a difficult question over. More often though, it is associated with focussing the mind on an object in order to shut off our 'monkey mind', that is, the mind chatter that we all experience and that can be especially irritating when we are trying to go to sleep. Meditation doesn't really have to be a 'spiritual' dicipline. In fact, we can meditate to gain better insight into any situation, to get more clarity of mind or to be more present in our daily lives. It helps us improve our everyday mindfulness.
Meditation is a great way to reduce stress. It helps people interact in a stressful situation with a better critical mind/emotional mind balance. Studies show that people who meditate frequently better handle their emotions, with the ability to consciously intervene before our emotional brain takes charge. Reduced stress means improved sleep.
Deep meditation and brainwaves
Regular mediation can help with sleep problems in different ways. Besides improving our ability to cope with life in general, when we enter deep meditation our brainwaves change from quick alpha waves to slower beta and theta waves. During very deep meditation the brain waves are of the same type as during deep sleep, the very slow delta type.
A person who meditates frequently and successfully will easier enter states where the mind has slowed down from fast alpha waves to slow theta or even delta waves.
In practical terms this means that a person who meditate regularly is more capable to 'switch off' the busy thinking mind when going to bed at night. This can have huge benefits to anyone struggling with sleep problems.
Meditation exercise to calm the mind
Here is a very simple meditation that can go a long way to calm the mind:
- Sit down in a quiet place, either on a chair or crosslegged on the ground. Keep your back straight. If you are sitting on a chair you may benefit from sitting on the edge of the chair to keep your posture straight. If you are sitting on the ground, having a pillow to sit on may help you feel more comfortable and relaxed.
- Take a few deep breaths, making sure you breathe from the belly and not from the chest.
- Observe your mind. Whenever you notice a thought about something say quietly 'detach' and let that thought go.
- Keep doing this over and over. As soon as a thought comes up say 'detach' and let go of that thought. If you are distracted by a sound, say 'detach'. If you are preoccupied with your breathing, say 'detach', and so on. Don't get to caught up in looking for things to detach from. Try to let your mind relax. If it drifts off and start to think about something, that's fine. Just detach when you catch yourself thinking.
- Detach as well from any unusual feelings, thoughts, experiences or states of mind that you experience.
This little meditation exercise can be done at any time but preferrably early in the morning or in the evening. Try to do it for 5 to 10 minutes at first and then gradually increse.
Don't get attached to anything you might experience during your meditations, whether this is an unusual sense of peace, or anything else. Approach every meditation sitting as if it was the first time you sat down to meditate.