Sleep Meditation: Tips for better sleep
Sleeping is something most people do a third of the time. At least when it's all going well. Insomnia is an increasingly common problem. The cause is probably due to stress and blue light from screens that affect your hormone balance which in turn affects your sleep. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to get back to truly sleeping one-third of the time so that you can experience two-thirds of your time optimally.
Therefore, in this article, I will discuss the benefits of meditation to improve your sleep.
Meditation offers all kinds of benefits for the body, helping it reset. It influences how your brain functions and, as a result, how you behave when you should be sleeping. Meditation can help regulate your sleep pattern , so you no longer have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep.
Transcendental meditation, for example, is used to improve sleep. This is a seated meditation that also incorporates mantras. Through this form of meditation, you can achieve psychological peace. This is also evident in a lower heart rate, which is a sign of relaxation.
Research conducted in 1997 has already shown that meditating causes your REM sleep to improve ( 1). This is precisely the kind of sleep that causes you to wake up rested.
In 2006, a study was conducted on the effect of mindfulness meditation on people's sleep. This also showed that REM sleep was better than that of people who did not meditate at all.
As you get older, you may also sometimes sleep less. As a result, you may be fatigued faster than when you were younger. By applying meditation, you can delay the moment when you do indeed sleep less, allowing you to sleep a third of the time longer. Thus, through meditation, you maintain longer a sleeping pattern that belongs to younger people as you get older.
In fact, research shows that mindfulness meditation for the elderly helps sleep better than modifications in sleep hygiene and routine before bedtime ( 2).
Meditation against stress before sleep
Stress is a major cause of insomnia. Because you have so many responsibilities, all sorts of thoughts may race through your mind about everything you still need to do to achieve certain goals.
In addition, the stress hormone itself simply keeps you awake because it increases the production of adrenaline.
So it's very important to lower stress when you're sleeping poorly, at least so your body doesn't produce substances that cause you to stay awake.
Meditation helps to regulate cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline and dopamine levels, which means that at least through meditation you don't have too many of these substances in your body that can disrupt your sleep. Through meditation, the levels are normalized so they no longer have a negative impact on normal sleep.
Also, meditation helps with the production of melatonin, a sleep hormone that helps you fall asleep and sleep through. This may explain why older people also benefit from meditation for sleep because the production of melatonin is disrupted by aging.
Meditation against rumination
Another issue many people struggle with when trying to fall asleep is ruminating. You lie down in bed, and suddenly all sorts of events from your life come to mind, and you find yourself reliving them, as it were. You picture the situation as it was back then, along with the emotions you felt at that moment. You might even imagine how you should have handled things differently. This is actually very frustrating and doesn’t help if you want to get a restful, deep sleep.
Meditation can make you stop thinking, or at least be able to disconnect your thoughts from the emotions you are experiencing at the time. That way, events can still come to mind, but at least you don't have to deal with reliving the emotions. That in turn makes sleeping a lot more pleasant.
Bedtime meditation
Sleep meditation, meditation you perform before bedtime can initiate sleep ( 3). This is because meditation affects the same parts of the brain as sleep itself. The reduction of activity in those parts of the brain is already started, so to speak, by you meditating.
You can meditate lying down, but you can also apply yoga meditation in bed before sleeping.
Both forms of meditation are good and proven effective for falling asleep.
Meditation in bed
Before bedtime, you can perform sitting or lying meditation in bed. During meditation, you concentrate on your breathing. With each breath, you feel the air feel your lungs and enter your body through your nose. You feel how as you exhale, your chest makes itself smaller to push the air back out of your body and how warm instead of cold air leaves your body.
While breathing, you can count to keep your attention on the breath. After every tenth breath you start over. This way you avoid breathing as little or as much as possible while meditating. The point is precisely that you don't want anything at all for a moment except to unwind.
If you notice that thoughts do pop into your mind, you can apply mindfulness techniques. This is essentially a form of mindfulness meditation before bedtime. In this case, you don’t need to judge your thoughts or emotions. Nothing is good or bad—it simply is. To ensure that a thought doesn’t take hold, acknowledge the thought and the emotion associated with it, and then refocus on your breathing.
You can also do a mindfulness body scan to strengthen the connection between your body and brain, so that when your body is tired, your brain follows suit, making it easier for you to fall asleep.
In addition, you can also very consciously relax your muscles before bed if you apply reclining meditation. You start with your feet by tightening and relaxing them again, then you do the same with your calf muscles and shin muscles, your thighs, your abdominal and back muscles, your arms, your shoulders, your neck and your facial muscles.
That way, all tension leaves your body.
Sleep meditation with yoga
There are several ways to practice sleep meditation with yoga. That’s why I’ll go over a few poses with you. In yoga, it’s important to let your breath guide your movements and to hold each pose for at least 30 seconds. That’s the time needed to achieve the full benefit of the pose. Usually, 5 deep breaths are equivalent to 30 seconds.
Child Pose
Anyone who already practices yoga can tell you that this pose provides ultimate relaxation. You stand on your hands and knees with your feet as wide as your shoulders or hips. Then you exhale and sit with your buttocks on your feet and your head against your mattress while pushing your hands into the mattress.
This pose stretches your back, shoulders, buttocks and arm muscles. While holding the pose, you continue to breathe calmly. During an exhalation, you sit up straight.
Happy child pose
You lie down and as you exhale bring your knees to your chest. Then you put your feet up and grab your feet with your hands, just like a baby does. You can experiment with putting pressure on your feet or just letting your feet pull on your hands and how that feels while you keep breathing.
Back rotation
After a day's work, you can be tense, and nowhere is that more noticeable than in your back. A back rotation is therefore the perfect pose to wring all the negative energy out of your body for a while. From the happy child pose, you spread your arms as if you were lying in a T. You make sure your knees are above your hips and as you exhale you turn them to the left while looking to the right. This pose relaxes your back; you may hear some cracking. You don't have to force this, if you can't continue you don't continue. You hold this pose for 30 seconds, then on an exhale turn your knees back up and your face up. So you then look straight ahead again. On the next exhale turn your knees to the right and look to the left. Then hold this pose for 30 seconds while you wring all the stress out of your body.
You can finish this sequence of poses by simply lying completely straight with your legs extended and your arms along your body with your palms up. Then you can perform a reclining meditation.
Would you like to learn more about how mental changes can benefit your health? Then come to a seminar or check out the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.
Also pin this handy infographic:
Sources:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fneur.2012.00054/full
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=2279708
http://www.wikihow.com/Meditate-to-Get-to-Sleep