The Power of Meditation in Improving Sleep and Reducing Insomnia
If you’re someone who struggles to sleep because of racing thoughts, then meditation may be really helpful for you.
Meditation is very well known nowadays as an effective method to improve sleep and reduce insomnia. One of the key benefits of meditation is that it helps to reduce stress and anxiety, which are common causes of sleepless nights. By practising meditation, you learn to let go of these unhelpful mental states and enter a state of ease and relaxation, making it easier for you to fall asleep, and stay asleep.
How are stress and anxiety affecting my sleep?
Mental states like stress, worry, and anxiety can often be what’s hiding behind insomnia, making it difficult to sleep. We tend to blame the external world for our stress and worry, but Buddhism teaches that it is our internal responses to external events that produce the experience of stress and anxiety. By working with our mind, we can reduce the impact that external events have on our wellbeing and our sleep.
A common experience when we’re stressed or anxious is racing thoughts and worries, which make it difficult to switch off, relax and let go of the day’s events. Additionally, stress and anxiety can feed into the body, causing physical experiences like muscle tension, pain and an increased heart rate, keeping the body active and stopping you from drifting off.
Meditation helps you to reduce this excess stress and strain by soothing the body and calming the mind. It helps you to slow down your racing thoughts and worries and detach from them, allowing you to more easily let go of the day’s events and bring yourself some focus and calm.
Looking at scientific research, we see that meditation helps regulate the body’s stress response, which is associated with the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. When the HPA axis is overactive, we see a corresponding increase in the experience of chronic stress and anxiety, leading to insomnia. Meditation has been found to decrease the activity of the HPA axis, resulting in a decrease in stress and anxiety levels, which in turn can improve sleep.
Meditation allows you to connect with an inner space of peace, calm and tranquillity that can be accessed whenever you wish. By being able to access this inner space, you can learn to fall asleep faster, sleep more soundly, and wake up feeling more refreshed.
What type of meditation can help me with my sleep?
One of the most effective types of meditation for improving sleep is shamatha meditation. This type of meditation involves focusing your attention on a single object, and bringing your attention back each time you get distracted. This is most easily done for sleep by spending time before bed focusing on your breath or the sensations in your body.
Firstly, spend time getting prepared for your bedtime meditation practice. It’s important that you make your sleeping space a comfortable, quiet and dark place. It can help to spend some time away from technology and screens for a while, and rest your body comfortably in stillness, lying on your back.
Here’s a guided audio meditation that you can use right now to help you drift off to sleep. It lasts for around 20 minutes and gradually gets quieter so that you can ease into your sleep.
As you listen to the meditation, try your best to focus on the words and let go of any other thoughts or distractions that may be getting in the way. Letting go means simply that – letting go, or releasing – it doesn’t mean resisting or throwing thoughts away, simply letting them go. Remember, meditation is a practice, and it takes time and patience to see results. Be consistent with your practice and give yourself time to develop a habit. With regular meditation and association, you may find that you’re able to fall asleep more easily and stay asleep for longer.
May you have many restful and peaceful nights ahead.
