Insomnia is a debilitating and often misunderstood condition. First, you simply don't sleep or fall asleep takes an incredibly long time so you don't get the minimum number of hours of sleep per night. This leaves you with concentration problems during the day and often a bad mood. Surely these are things that prevent you from doing your job well, and they are problems that make maintaining relationships difficult.
Precisely to make sure you sleep better than you do now, in this article I will discuss how mindfulness can reduce insomnia.
Mindfulness for sleep problems
As more and more people suffer from insomnia, a solution to this problem is increasingly being sought. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of mindfulness on insomnia is also being researched.
Currently, insomnia is mainly treated with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) which involves teaching sleep hygiene and behaviors that promote sleep.
This includes no more drinks with caffeine starting at noon. Dimming the lights a few hours before bedtime and avoiding looking into a luminous screen, such as the television, tablet, laptop or smartphone, and making sure your bedroom is completely dark.
Back in 2007, it was investigated whether adding mindfulness to cognitive behavioral therapy with sleep hygiene helps reduce insomnia and improve daytime functioning. This study(1, 2) showed that by applying mindfulness in addition to sleep hygiene, those with insomnia were able to improve their sleep rhythms and had fewer sleep problems at night.
They also had less agitation before bedtime due to mindfulness. If you have insomnia, you may recognize that you develop a kind of anxiety before bed that causes you to become active just when you actually need to go to sleep. This was reduced by mindfulness, and subjects also suffered less from non-constructive thoughts about going to sleep. Thoughts such as "I won't fall asleep anyway" had less effect and occurred less frequently for the subjects by adding mindfulness to their sleep routine.
In addition, there was also found to be a positive correlation between how often subjects performed mindfulness exercises and how well they slept. This means that the more mindfulness you use the more you sleep.
The effectiveness of mindfulness can lie in its relaxing effect. For example, mindfulness also works well against stress and psychological anxiety. In addition, mindfulness also helps reduce muscle tension so that physical relaxation is also promoted.
Mindfulness sleep exercises
Now, of course, you'd like to know what mindfulness exercises the participants had to perform. In mindfulness, it is important to let things go. One of the exercises was also to let go of having to stay in bed to sleep.
If participants had not fallen asleep after 15 to 20 minutes, they were instructed to get out of bed and perform an exercise to calm themselves or feel more comfortable. This was necessary to release the thought or belief that you need to stay in bed to fall asleep. In addition, in mindfulness it is important to accept things as they are by getting out of bed you also accept more quickly that you will not fall asleep immediately and lastly, in mindfulness it is important not to try too hard. By giving yourself the opportunity to get out of bed again you also break through the super-hard-doing-your-best-to-sleep.
Participants also reported that accepting that they are not sleeping and understanding that you cannot force sleep were some of the most instructive moments in their treatment.
Let "must lie" go
Therefore, the first exercise I give you is also to let go of things that need to go to sleep. When you find that you have been forcing yourself to stay in bed for 20 minutes go out of bed for a while to apply mindfulness meditation. This can even be a mindfulness yoga exercise to completely relax again and to live in the here and now and not the "later when I finally sleep." Then you get back into bed relaxed.
Use mindfulness during the day
The study also required participants to perform mindfulness exercises during the day, such as mindfulness walking, mindfulness eating. Participants had to do mindfulness meditation for at least 30 minutes a day (added together) 5 days a week. This can be as little as 15 minutes of mindfulness walking and 15 minutes of mindfulness eating, for example. Add to that a body scan and then the minimum of mindfulness during the day should be achieved.
Performing mindfulness during the day has the function of reducing worries about the upcoming night or previous night, so that you can better enjoy the day instead of having your mind already preoccupied with the night. This can also reduce mounting stress, making you less concerned with calming yourself down at night before bed.
Use mindfulness yoga with poses for sleep
Mindfulness yoga is a way to strengthen the contact between your body and brain. In addition, it stretches your muscles and can help promote relaxation. Mindfulness yoga is not about performing the pose perfectly. It's mostly about relaxing.
The Staff
The staff is a pose you can simply perform in bed. You lie on your back with arms along your body and your palms down. Then you do your legs straight up, if you find this difficult you can also do this exercise against a wall. You hold this pose for 30 to 60 seconds while you continue to relax.
Knee to Chest
Once you have done the staff, you can move fluidly from there to this exercise where you bring your knees to your chest and your feet toward the buttocks. You can also fold your arms around your legs. Now you are actually lying in a kind of fetal position that can feel very secure. You also hold this pose for about 30 to 60 seconds and mainly try to relax. It's not about making yourself as small as possible, it's about feeling comfortable.
Forward Bend
Now turn around and sit on the bed with your legs extended. Then bend your upper body forward and try to touch your toes. If you come up to your knees that's okay too. The point is not to perform the pose perfectly, the point is to feel a small stretch and relax properly. You can feel this stretch in your hamstrings and in your back. If your body indicates that it is painful you should listen to this and you can perform the pose less advanced.
You hold this pose for 30 to 60 seconds.
Child pose
In the child pose, you get down on your knees. You try to keep your buttocks above or at your feet while extending your hands and arms in front of you. As a result, your face comes up against or near your mattress. You feel this stretch in your lower back and at your shoulders and arms. Because this is mindfulness yoga, it doesn't matter if you don't perform the pose perfectly. You should be mostly aware of your breathing and feel the pose in your body without forcing your body to perform the pose perfectly. You also hold this pose for 30 to 60 seconds.
Use seated meditation
Have you turned off your television and put away your laptop? That's the perfect time for seated mindfulness meditation. You sit down and plant your tail bone on the chair then feel your spine building up on top of the base of your tail bone. Rest your hands on your lap.
You may feel your chin move forward a bit; this is perfectly normal and may be allowed. You can close your eyes or keep them partially open.
Then shift your focus to your breathing. Thoughts and emotions may pass by. That's okay. For example, you can name the subject of your thoughts and the emotion you feel with them. For example, if you are thinking about a conversation at work and are irritated about it, you name the subject "work" and the emotion "irritation," then shift your attention back to your breathing.
You can perform this exercise for as long as you want. Generally, a seated mindfulness meditation lasts between 5 and 10 minutes. You'll also find that the more often you do it, the less distracted you are by thoughts and the more you calm down.
In addition to all these exercises and mindfulness during the day or at work, you can also perform a body scan to promote relaxation and improve sleep.
Want to learn more about how influencing your body and thoughts can improve your life? Come one to the free online master class on hypnosis.
Or come to a seminar or check out the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' training programs.
Also pin this handy infographic:
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