If you are using your phone or another device to listen to a guided meditation session, you can reduce distractions by turning off notifications, turning down the brightness on your screen, and setting the volume to an appropriate level. Practicing healthy sleep hygiene habits and utilizing techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia can help you get the most out of meditation for insomnia. When meditating before bedtime, this may include changing into loose pajamas, turning off the lights, and getting into bed. To lay the groundwork for your meditation session, start by preparing a calm environment and finding a comfortable position. These results suggest that the greatest benefits are derived from consistent meditation over a long period of time. Similarly, a study on the benefits of meditation for insomnia in breast cancer patients found that these benefits disappeared after 12 months. While factors such as the minutes spent meditating and the quality of meditation are difficult to quantify, the benefits of meditation have been found to be enhanced in long-term practitioners. Studies on the relaxation response have found that it produces immediate psychological and physical effects, suggesting that daily practice is optimal in order to see effects on that night’s sleep. Meditation is a skill, and those who practice it more often tend to see more meaningful benefits. How Often Should You Meditate for Insomnia? Studies on people experienced in meditation have found that they display improvements in slow-wave sleep and REM sleep, as well as fewer nighttime awakenings. The exact interplay between meditation and sleep is still being investigated, but it appears that meditation provokes lasting changes in the brain that may affect sleep. Over the long term, the relaxation response reduces stress-related inflammation and oxidative stress and improves insulin resistance. These researchers theorized that mindfulness may improve sleep quality by supplying patients with the mental resources to calm down the nervous system in preparation for sleep.Īt a biological level, meditation slows the heart rate and breathing and lowers levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. Studies on people with fibromyalgia have found that mindfulness helps patients manage anger, worry, anxiety, and depression. The state of acceptance and awareness invoked by meditation helps reduce psychological distress and improve rumination and emotion regulation. Over the long term, we perpetuate this tension as we start to associate bedtime with worries about not being able to fall asleep.
When we are stressed, depressed, or anxious, our brain stays “wired” and we find it more difficult to fall asleep. Whereas falling asleep involves a gradual reduction in arousal, insomnia is often defined as a state of hyper-arousal. This reaction is often described as the relaxation response, or the opposite of the stress response. Mindfulness and meditation help bring about a relaxed state of mind that is conducive to falling asleep. How Do Meditation and Mindfulness Affect Sleep? Like other sleep treatments, a main goal of meditation is to take the pressure off to fall asleep. In the long term, these improvements may be comparable to effects seen from sleep medication or other established methods for insomnia treatment. Mindfulness meditation, in particular, appears to improve sleep quality and reduce daytime disturbance in people with chronic insomnia and older adults. Research suggests that various types of meditation can help improve insomnia, and may even improve sleep quality for those without existing sleep problems. Given that sleep meditation for insomnia is relatively affordable, low-risk, and easy to implement, it is an attractive option for people who have difficulty accessing other types of therapy or medication. Researchers are increasingly interested in the potential of meditation as a treatment for insomnia. and is currently practiced by almost one in six American adults.
With a long history dating back thousands of years, meditation is now starting to gain popularity in the U.S. Meditation encompasses a variety of mind and body techniques used to promote a state of relaxation.
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