A guided meditation can dramatically help you improve sleep and reduce anxiety and stress.The benefits of better sleep for the human brain have been firmly confirmed by research. When you sleep properly, the brain can manage and relieve stress, reduce anxiety, and increase energy through the day.
One bad night’s sleep can accumulate amyloid plaques in the brain. These are associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Today scientists are revealing the benefits of guided meditation to assist healthy sleep patterns.
One of the biggest challenges of applying mindfulness is to know which technique works for you.
In this article we’ll outline a simple guided meditation for better sleep and how to start today.
The Importance of Healthy Sleep
While we know how important it is, we tend to undervalue sleep. Today you may often cut our well-deserved resting time(often in the pursuit of productivity). We barely get enough of it, and you may always have poor quality sleep. Research is now showing us that it’s not medically possible to make up for lost sleep.
Today poor sleep is related to medical conditions such as:
- High blood pressure
- Stroke
- Heart attack
- Obesity and weight gain
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Alzheimer’s disease
- Dementia
- Auto-immune conditions
- Gut and digestive diseases
Thus, it’s important that we ensure we get enough high quality sleep every night. The ideal number of hours of sleep for a typical adult is anywhere from 6 to 8. Depending on your own body, you’ll need to make sure you’re getting an ideal amount.
While there are many methods available to enhance the quality of your sleep, one tried and tested method is through meditation.
And while the idea of just staying still in silence may not immediately register with you as an effective way to get more sleeping hours, researchers have found that meditation can actually help in improving sleep quality, particularly in older adults.
Science Behind Guided Meditation for Sleep
One study examined examined the impact of mindfulness and guided meditation on middle-aged and older adults for better sleep.
- What it looked at: 49 participants from the middle-aged and late-adult age groups who had trouble sleeping. They were divided into two groups: one that was enrolled in a course on sleep education that taught them effective sleeping techniques, and one that was tasked to participate in a “mindfulness awareness program” that employed, among other techniques, meditation to help them focus on the thoughts, emotions, and memories in their heads instead of all the distractions around them.
- Results: regular two-hour meetings over the course of a few weeks, the group that meditated exhibited lower levels of depression, insomnia, and fatigue compared to those who were in the sleep education class.
How to start meditating today
What makes it challenging to apply sleep meditation techniques is changing your sleeping routine.
Many people confusion to the first-time practitioner who only wants to perform the right techniques to improve the quality of his or her sleep.
The best way to find out which meditation technique best suits you is to try them yourself.
Fortunately, guided meditation for sleep is a good way to know if your practice is working or not.
Simply put, this type of meditation hinges on the instructions given to you by your guide: from the basic procedures to breathing exercises to what you need to visualize for a more effective meditation.
Your guide also makes sure that you’re following the right form, and that you’re concentrating on meditating and not letting yourself get distracted by other thoughts.
Changing your Sleep Routine to Meditate
It’s one thing to make plans to meditate; to realize that you might need to devote a bit more time and focus towards getting the necessary number of hours of sleep per night. With everyone’s busy lifestyle these days, however, actually sticking to a meditation routine becomes an entirely different (and more complicated) story.
More often than not, we end up setting aside meditation and other health-boosting physical activities in favor of getting more work done. The biggest challenge, then, is to manually adjust your schedule so that you’ll have enough time to incorporate meditation into it. With sufficient repetition and practice, you’ll find that meditation can become part of your daily activities seamlessly.
Now, with regards to what time you should be meditating, it all depends on your schedule and your circadian rhythm — the 24-hour cycle your body follows for all its physical, mental, and behavioral changes.
The circadian rhythm is a product of your body’s biological clock. Basically, this determines your chronotype, or the type of person you are, based on what time your body tells you to fall asleep. Night owls (the people who stay up at night) produce more melatonin (the hormone commonly associated with drowsiness and sleep) in the morning than in the evening. Meanwhile, the rest of the world goes to sleep upon nightfall because of heightened melatonin production during the night.
Fortunately, being either an early bird or a night owl isn’t a permanent thing. With consistent training and guidance, it’s actually possible for you to improve your sleep cycle over the course of your regular meditations. (The operative word here, of course, is “regular.”)
Ideally, guided meditation for sleep is done right after all the activities for the day are done and right before you climb into bed. This is regardless of whether you’re an early bird or a night owl. Either way, you’ll be all relaxed and calm by the time you’re done, which should make falling asleep a breeze for you.
The question is: Where and how does one find a guide for sleep meditation?
4 Guided Meditation Techniques for Sleep
Now you’re ready to get started. Here are some simple guided meditation techniques that many people practice.
Read each and pick the one that feels like it would work best with you. If it doesn’t, save the article and come back to try another one.
1. Guided Meditation with Breathing Exercises: By controlling the pace of your breathing, you can actually train your body to know when it’s time to fall asleep. Breathe deeply into each part of your body. Picture that part of your body blowing up like a balloon.
- Start controlled breathing. Count your breaths — 1 as you inhale, 2 as you exhale, 3 as you inhale, and so on, until you reach 10.
- Breathe into your feet. Blowing them up like a balloon: Repeat x 10
- Breathe into your knees: Repeat x10
- Breathe into your loins: Repeat x 10
- Breathe into your belly: Repeat x 10
- Breathe into your ribs, expanding them outwards. Repeat x 10
- Breathe into your chest. Repeat x 10
- Expand your entire body. Repeat x 10
2. Body Awareness Guided Meditation: learn to be attuned with the different parts of your body, actively “switch off” one or all of them at will, starting from your toes upwards.
- Switch of your toes
- Switch off your feet
- Switch off your knees
- Switch off your loins
- Switch off your stomach
- Switch off your lungs
- Switch off your heart
- Switch off your voice
- Switch off your brain
3. Visualising Guided Meditation: You can also “hypnotize” yourself by visualizing scenarios that can help you fall asleep.
Picture yourself sitting on a boat that is resting atop of a big whale. The whale is sleeping, and breathing deeply and slowing. Feel the watery and slow under the boat and the tide of the boat slowing breathing in and out. Thin
4. Guided counting meditation: You’ve seen this technique in pop culture, often involving sheep leaping over a fence. You can achieve something similar by counting slowly from 100 to 1, and then 1 to 100, and then back again until you fall asleep. Counting an event like a sheep is a good way to distract the mind.
5. Guided reflective meditation: Many mindfulness techniques aim at clearing events from the day from your head. Here’s a reflective technique to stop over analysing your day.
- Set a time 20 minutes before bed to think about your day, sit quietly, breathing deeply.
- Retrace your steps from the moment you woke up to the moment you got ready for sleep
- Spending up to 25 seconds on each event.
- Don’t think too much, simply acknowledge that these events happened
- When you’re finished, put the events into a box in your mind. Throw the box away and feel ready to start a new day.
In each of these guided meditations, repeat until you fall asleep.
How to find a Guided Meditation for Better Sleep
To develop your meditation practice, there are lots of guided meditation options available online.
If you don’t have access to a meditation class next to you, you can easily find meditation resources online.
- For starters, research yoga studios near your area, or guided meditation instructors you can hire to help you out. Joining yoga classes is especially effective if you really don’t know where to begin and don’t want to invest in a personal guide. The web also offers tons of meditation websites with free guides and videos that you can use.
- If you’re into listening to podcasts and other online music streaming services, you can easily find guided meditation resources there to suit your needs. Podcasts are particularly helpful, as listening to instructions is understandably more conducive to meditation than watching a video. Alternatively, you can listen one of the countless guided meditation recordings you can find on your streaming music service of choice.
- Lastly, you can download an app on your smartphone to help you meditate. Interestingly, science supports this course of action. According to the results of a 2018 study in Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, smartphone apps can provide benefits for one’s mental well-being. However, as one might expect, the most popular apps aren’t necessarily the best or most effective ones. It’s still generally on a case by case basis; you might have to shop around for apps to see which ones are the best for you.
Some Helpful Tips on Getting the Most Out of Guided Meditation
Here are some quick pointers to ensure that you’re maximizing the effects of your guided meditation.
- Don’t be distracted by your electronic devices. This may seem like a no-brainer at this point, but it bears repeating. Unless you’re using your device to listen to or watch a meditation guide, put it away. At the very least, put it on Silent or Airplane mode so that you won’t get distracted by outside calls or messages for the duration of the time you’ll be meditating.
- Find a comfortable spot to meditate. All the advanced meditative techniques in the world certainly won’t help you if you’re too busy filling your mind with thoughts of how itchy, irritated, or unpleasant you feel because you’re uncomfortable with your chosen meditation area.
- Make sure that you’re breathing in and breathing out properly. Practice these if you must.
- Manage your expectations. Meditation isn’t an instant cure-all; you need consistency and patience to be able to do it for an extended period of time before it shows any significant effects of what you’re doing.
- Having the right mood music playing in the background also helps put your mind and body at greater ease. Alternatively, you can put on a set of headphones and enjoy all the music in solitude, blocking out any disturbances the rest of the world can throw at you.
- Meditation can become initially uncomfortable, due to the fact that you’re not really used to just staying put and rendering your mind essentially empty during those fleeting moments. The key is to remember not to get lost in your own thoughts, and instead maintain presence of mind to sense the changes going on in your immediate surroundings.
- Don’t be inconsistent. Once you’ve made a promise to yourself that you will set aside a certain number of hours per day for your meditation, stick to it. You’ll see clear results — and sleep much more soundly — sooner than you think.
Conclusion
Guided meditation can do wonders for your sleep cycle. It’s all a matter of finding the right technique to suit your needs, the time to actually meditate, and the willpower to do it consistently and regularly until you notice the changes in your circadian rhythm.
Do you have trouble getting enough sleep or falling asleep at night?
Have you started looking for the guided meditation technique that will work for you?
Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.
Sources:
- https://www.mindful.org/a-body-scan-meditation-to-help-you-sleep/
- https://www.verywellmind.com/guided-meditation-getting-started-4174283
- https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/mindfulness-meditation-helps-fight-insomnia-improves-sleep-201502187726
- https://www.flipscience.ph/health/sleeping-in-weekends/
- https://www.headspace.com/meditation/sleep
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