Sleep Meditation (How to / Benefits)


When I changed my work habits moving into the college, my sleep patterns got wrecked! I was not able to sleep throughout the night, it was difficult to fall asleep, and the worst of all, I would wake up feeling a heavy head and it would last till late noon. This was dampening my energy throughout the day and also making me tired early in the day! So, I started with the sleep meditation course of Headspace. And the sleep started getting better at a drastic rate!

So what is sleep meditation?


Sleep MeditationSleep meditation is a type of meditation that you do lying down on the bed, or just before going to sleep. There are mainly two types of sleeping meditations, which are based on visualisation and focus. In visualisation, you visualise about a happy place until you doze of and start dreaming about it. In concentration meditation, you slowly count down from 10000 to 1 and focus only on the numbers.These meditations help your brain to forget the day's happenings and ease yourself into sleep. They also cure insomnia and other sleep related problems. Read further to how to perform these meditation and its benefits in detail.


Who can do sleep meditation?

People who witness these situations in life should do sleep meditation:

1. Insomnia
People suffering from insomnia would benefit the most from this exercise. 

2. Lack of sleep due to schedule. (less than 6 hours of sleep)
If you feel better throughout the day but sleep less than 6 hours everyday, then firstly you need to change it to more than 6 hours a day! Sleep meditation would help you to take quality sleep every night, and you need it the most as you lack quantity!

3. Not getting enough deep sleep even though sleeping for long hours. 
If you are using sleep tracking devices like fitness bands, it will show you the amount of deep sleep at night. If the amount of deep sleep is less than 20 to 25% of the total time of sleep, than sleep meditation is better for you.

If you do not fall into any of the above categories, than sleep meditation is the best for you! ;)
Because it is not mandatory to have certain kind of problem to meditate!



What are the types of sleep meditation? 

There are mainly 2 types of sleep meditations.


1. Sleeping meditation

This meditation is done when you are lying on the bed and ready to doze off!
There are two types of sleeping meditations:


A. Visualisation meditation:


In visualisation meditation, you start by taking deep breaths, and then divert your attention to a visualisation. 

There are many types of visualizations that you can do. For example, you are walking amongst the trees in a dense forest, birds are chirping, you can see the sun hiding behind the trees...

You can also use apps like Headspace or calm as they provide really good visualisation meditations specially targeted to sleep.

The important thing about visualization sleep meditation is that you need to visualise a place where you would relax, and observe every minute detail of that place. Imagine that you are in there. And preferably think of nights or sunsets, rather than a sunny day! 

Some examples are:
  • Sitting or sleeping beside a river. 
  • Walking in a forest or amongst trees.
  • Sleeping or sitting on a beach at night. 
  • Sitting beside a campfire at night. 
  • Sleeping on the grass lawns and watching the night sky, and many more...

The motive of these visualisations is to divert your attention from the current environment and let you mind feel relaxed in an environment that you enjoy!

B. concentration meditation/ counting down:


While you sleep, start with a few deep breaths and continue concentrating on your breath. 

After you feel relaxed, start counting down from 1000 in your head. (Do it in the language you prefer.) 

Don't count your breaths. Forget your breaths and just focus on numbers. Count as slowly as you can, but not too slow! And before you even reach 5000, you will be fast asleep! 

2. Meditation before sleep.
Meditating before an hour of sleep also clears your mind for the day's thoughts and helps you to sleep better.

You can do any of the 5 meditation techniques that I talked about in this article.

I would prefer you do visualization meditation or Vipassana Meditation. Vipassana meditation will allow you to feel your body and forget about your day! It really helps for me. Here is the article about how to do Vipassana Meditation.

These are the types of Sleep meditations and if you can do both, you would see your quality of sleep increases drastically!


What can you do along with sleep meditation to improve your sleep?

If you want to increase the sleep quality, but cannot manage to do meditations regularly, there are other things that you can implement to increase your sleep quality.

  • Let yourself loose. Forget that you are not able to sleep! You will become more and more anxious if you will keep on looking at your watch and think that you are not able to sleep!
  • Keep your clock away!
  • Sleeping in cool environment. Studies show that cool environment help you fall asleep faster and sleep better. 
  • Pitch black room. Having a pitch black environment also helps you sleep better. So avoid night lamps of dim lights in your room.
  • Sleeping naked!. This may sound hilarious to some people, but studies show that people who sleep naked have a better quality sleep on average compared to people who don't!
  • Detoxicating yourself from screens. This is one of the most important things you can do to drastically increase your sleep quality. 
  • Just step away from all the screens after you have your dinner, or at least before 2 hours of sleep. Mobile phones, laptops, and TV screens strain your eyes which result to bad quality sleep! NEVER use mobile devices at night with lights off! This will damage your eyes and you can even go blind after the age of 50 - 55 years. 

If you can follow all these tips along with any one of the two sleeping meditation techniques, you will never have a problem of sleepless nights, and lazy days!

What are the benefits of sleep meditation?

There are so many benefits of sleep meditation, and most of them we covered in previous topics. Lets jot them down here:

Benefits for nights:

  • You will cure Insomnia without sleeping pills!
  • You will start taking more deep sleep and feel better even if you sleep for only 6 hours. 

Benefits on days.

  • You will never find yourself feeling sleepy, as all the required sleep for your brain is covered in those beautiful night sleeps.
  • However, if you are accustomed to sleep during the day,  I would recommend sleeping for about 20 minutes at noon, because according to your circadian rhythm (mind's clock), your metabolism and energy is lowest during the noon, and so that is the best time to take a power nap!


How to get better results?

Consistency:

Being consistent in any kind of meditation technique is a must! Even id the sleeping meditation does not take time to show results, you need to be consistent at it. 

Consistency will change your sleeping patterns, and you will start sleeping better even if you skip sleeping meditation for a day!

Stop guided meditations:

Thought guided meditations provide a really powerful anchor for your mind, and take you deep into beautiful places, I would recommend to visualise you own best place instead following someone else. 

This would allow your mind to make its own choices, and weave its own storyline. It will soon start to go deeper into that story line and before you even realise, you will be fast asleep and  already started dreaming!

How to motivate yourself to do sleep meditation?

For some people, it would be easy to see the results in a few days, but others may take some time. It is difficult to keep meditating without seeing results! You can apply this tricks to motivate yourself to meditate:

Sleep tracking for motivation:

If you are not able to see results, you sleep tracker will see them! Start comparing your sleep score and deep sleep percentage overtime, and even if you do not see prominent results in your day to day life, you will definitely see smaller advantages in your sleep diagnostics. But I would suggest using good quality fitness bands that track your sleep more accurately!

Journaling

Journaling is probably the best way to motivate yourself. 

Start noting down how easily you fell asleep, or how difficult it was to sleep. 

Not down the dreams, and quality of your sleep, and also how you felt during the entire day. Also, if you can, rate the quality of sleep from 1 to 10 looking at all the above mentioned criteria.

By doing this, even if you are not seeing the results, you will observe that over time, the quality of sleep will increase and you will be able to compare your entries and see the results!



Let me know in the comments, how sleeping meditation has helped you over time!

Recommend sleeping meditation to your friends by sharing this article with them and also on social media! Subscribe to my blog to get updates whenever I upload a new blog post! Keep meditating, be consistent, and keep exploring yourself through meditation!
- A Mere Meditator



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