Esther Crain, Men’s Journal: Not being able to fall and stay asleep at night is frustrating, and there’s no shortage of remedies promising to score you the rest you crave, from sleep meds to eye masks and smartphone apps. But the real key to beating insomnia might be as simple as taking up a new trend in meditation. A recent study from JAMA Internal Medicine found that mindful meditation — the practice of being nonjudgmentally aware of the various thoughts streaming into your brain at any given time — successfully helped adult …
insomnia
Could meditating backfire as a cure for insomnia?
When I find myself awake in the middle of the night, perhaps after a trip to the bathroom or a weird dream, I often practice some kind of meditation to quiet my over-active mind. I’ll usually pay attention to my breathing, or do a body scan, and most times this will help me calm down and nod off.
But could meditating in the middle of the night create its own problems? Someone asked me whether this practice could either lead to us developing the habit of falling asleep during meditation, or keep us awake because mindfulness is so associated with alert attention that we can’t fall asleep.
I don’t think the first is much of a danger; we’re not likely to end up training ourselves to fall asleep in meditation. What happens when we can’t sleep is that intrusive mental activity inhibits the normal physiological mechanism that causes sleep. By being more mindful of the body, we let go of that mental activity, stop inhibiting sleep, and nod off. But in normal meditation (unless you’re already very tired) the physiological mechanism leading to sleep isn’t active, and so you’re not likely to drop off.
Not only can the second problem happen, but it’s something I’ve experienced many times. Meditation isn’t just about relaxation, but involves the arising of counter-balancing “active” qualities like curiosity, interest, and physical arousal. While calmness and relaxation are more likely to predominate when we meditate in order to get to sleep, sometimes alertness will prevail, so that we find ourselves in a “perked up” state that isn’t conducive to nodding off. But if that happens, I think it’s just a signal that we need to take another approach.
I find that visualizing soothing but boring imagery works rather well. For example I’ll imagine rain pattering on the leaves of a tree, on a particularly gray and dismal day. This counteracts the thought patterns and the emotional arousal that prevent sleep from happening, but it makes for a dull experience, and so I don’t get excited about it. I sometimes suspect that I fall asleep just so that I can dream about something more interesting! This isn’t classic meditation, obviously, but it’s a good way of applying the principles of meditation in order to bring about a desired result — in this case a good night’s sleep.
One way that middle-of-the-night meditation has backfired on me has been when I’ve woken from an anxious dream, and taken my attention to the feeling of anxiety. Normally what I’d do is to give the anxiety some compassionate attention, and to sooth myself by being aware of the breathing down in the belly. But recently I’ve found that if I try being mindful in the middle of the night, my experience of the body changes radically. The body’s solidity and sense of form dissolves away, and I’m left with an experience of a translucent cloud of sensations hovering in space. The first couple of times this happened there was a “What the heck?” reaction that led to me remaining awake, seemingly for hours, just observing this phenomenon. But now that I’m used to this happening, I quite quickly get back to sleep again. Perhaps a general lesson is that if using meditation to overcome insomnia doesn’t work at first, keep going. It may be something that you need to persist with.
Can’t sleep? This might be why
iAfrica.com: In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine explored the pathway that leads to short-term insomnia disorder after stressful events.
According to the study, dangerous coping mechanisms that could lead to insomnia include disengaging without confronting the stressor, turning to drugs and alcohol, and using media as a means of distraction.
“Our study is among the first to show that it’s not the number of stressors, but your reaction to them that determines the likelihood of experiencing insomnia,” says lead author Vivek Pillai, PhD, research fellow at the Sleep Disorders & Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital in …
Mindfulness as an effective treatment for insomnia
Do you often lie in bed unable to fall asleep? Do you regularly wake up in the middle of the night or too early in the morning? If so, you are not alone. About one out of every 10 adults has chronic insomnia.
Insomnia causes daytime problems like feeling fatigued or being unable to concentrate. Insomnia is associated with accidents, low productivity and serious health problems. It is also an important risk factor for depression. The most common treatment for chronic insomnia is sleeping pills. People regularly take these pills for years, despite troublesome side effects, and without addressing the underlying problems that cause or perpetuate their insomnia.
A study by Cynthia Gross, PhD, indicates that mindfulness training may be an effective treatment for chronic insomnia, providing sleep benefits comparable to medication, but without the side effects.
Mindfulness is hypothesized to improve sleep by calming the body and stopping mind-racing. Approaches to improve sleep through mindfulness include establishing a mindful pre-sleep routine, not spending time awake in bed (e.g. getting up and doing yoga or something enjoyable if unable to sleep), and switching attention from wakefulness by focusing on the breath or practicing a meditation technique. In this way, mindfulness is hypothesized to facilitate disengagement from the concerns of the day, and enable sleep. Although studies by our group and others have frequently shown mindfulness training improves sleep quality, the impact of MBSR training on patients with insomnia had not been tested.
Gross conducted a small clinical trial to investigate MBSR’s potential as a treatment for chronic insomnia. The purpose of the study was to determine if mindfulness training would enable adults with chronic insomnia to obtain clinically meaningful improvements in sleep, comparable to the sleep benefits they might have obtained using an FDA-approved sedative.
Thirty adults with primary chronic insomnia were randomized into two groups: MBSR or pharmacotherapy. Mindfulness training was provided in the standard format of 8 weekly two-and-half hour classes plus a retreat. The pharmacotherapy group was prescribed 3mg of eszopiclone (LUNESTATM) nightly for 8 weeks, followed by 3 months of use as needed. A 10-minute sleep hygiene presentation (i.e. do not watch television in bed, keep the bedroom dark at night, etc… ) was given to all participants by staff at the start of study, and staff contacted everyone weekly so they could report any side effects.
Sleep was measured three ways. First, sleep patterns were objectively measured by actigraphy, a wristwatch-like device that measures movement. Second, participants kept daily entries in a log book called a sleep diary. Third, participants completed questionnaires containing widely used, validated sleep scales. Sleep measures were obtained before the interventions, and at two and five month follow-ups.
By the end of the 8-week program, MBSR participants significantly reduced the time it took them to fall asleep (-8.9 minutes), as measured by actigraphy. Based on sleep diaries, they fell asleep an average of 22 minutes sooner, and increased their total sleep time by about 34 minutes a night by 5 month follow-up. All standardized sleep scales showed large, statistically significant improvements from before MBSR to all follow-ups. No significant differences were found between the sleep outcomes of the MBSR and pharmacotherapy groups, although our sample size was not sufficient to establish that treatment effects were equal.
To evaluate clinical importance, rates of recovery from insomnia were examined. Before treatment, all participants met criteria for insomnia and poor sleep on the Insomnia Severity Index and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. By month five, half of the patients randomized to MBSR met stringent criteria for recovery from insomnia. Moreover, none reported adverse events and treatment satisfaction scores were high (averaged 8.8 on a 1 to 10 scale).
Although patients in the pharmacotherapy group obtained similar benefits to sleep outcomes, their treatment satisfactions scores were not high (average 6.1), most continued using sleeping pills to the end of trial, and several reported adverse events. Although sleep outcomes following MBSR compared favorably with conventional pharmacotherapy, the fact that only half of the patients in this study met criteria for recovery at follow-up suggests that there is still room for improvement in insomnia treatments.
Adapted from materials from The University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality & Healing.
Mindful ways to get a good night’s sleep
Getting a good night’s sleep is vital to feeling energetic and making the most of our days. Some nights, even though we are very tired it is difficult to get to sleep because there is so much going on in our minds. When this happens, we feel stressed and that makes it even more difficult to get some rest.
Here is a list of techniques you may want to use to clear your mind before bed:
1. Write a list of what you need to do the next day. Having the list helps to let go of worrying that you will forget to do something.
2. Practice yoga. Practicing yoga takes concentration so it takes your mind off all the thinking that stops you from being able to go to sleep. Concentrating on the yoga asanas helps to quiet the mind and lying in savasana helps the body to relax.
3. Take a warm bath to relax muscles so that falling asleep occurs easily.
4. Read, but not in bed. Part of the reason we have trouble sleeping is because we work, check our cell phones, work on our computers and read in bed. In order to fall asleep easily, it is important to use bed for sleeping and sex and that is all. That way, when we go to bed, we associate bed with sleeping.
5. Listen to soothing music.
6. If you go to bed and cannot keep your mind from thinking too much, get out of bed and do something (read, write a letter, fix a broken appliance) until you are very tired and then go back to bed.
7. If you are worried or concerned about something or someone, remember that worrying does not help the situation and think about all the times you worried and what you were worried about never happened.
8. Write down what has happened during the day that was troubling and what was positive – it helps to clear your thoughts about the day.
9. Write in a gratitude journal, a list of things you are thankful for. Going to sleep in a positive frame of mind will bring sleep sooner and make dreams sweeter.
10. Visualize yourself on a beach, in the warm sun, listening to the waves of the ocean.
It is helpful to have a list of techniques that help to clear your mind before going to bed, so when you are in bed and cannot fall asleep, you know what to do rather than tossing and turning and feeling stressed because you cannot sleep.
I hope some of these techniques will work for you and you will sleep peacefully, have sweet dreams and wake up refreshed.
First-time meditators: how to achieve that perfect state of “ohm”
The other day, I was conversing with a friend, telling her about how I’ve been having a difficult time sleeping as of late. I’ll maybe sleep four hours a night — and this is coming from someone who typically requires a solid eight. The stressors of life have been, unfortunately, taking their toll.
“Have you tried meditating?” she asked.
In response, I shook my head “no.” I mean, really. How could my coffee-chugging, gum-snapping, neurotic-driven self quite possibly clear my thoughts for 30 seconds, let alone the length of a meditation session?
Instructor and Program Manager Jennifer Stevenson of the Art of Living Foundation explains that there are two types of stress: physical, when your body is overworked, and mental, which stems from the array of negative emotions experienced on a daily basis.
“We get angry about the past and anxious about the future,” she said. “Meditation gives you a tool to bring your mind to the present moment and break…
Meditation can help you sleep
One of the questions I am asked most often is “Can meditation help me sleep?”
Many people think meditating in the morning is best- and it is a great way to start your day, however meditating before bed is also a great way to end your day and can help you make the transition from your day of activity to a night of sleeping peacefully.
Have you ever had the experience of being very tired, going to bed and then tossing and turning because thoughts keep coming to mind and you cannot sleep? It is very frustrating to be tired but unable to fall asleep, especially when you have another busy day to look forward to tomorrow.
Meditating before bedtime can help you rest so that you can fall asleep.
Meditation will turn down the volume of thoughts in your mind. Sitting on your meditation cushion, or in a chair, or even lying down in bed, and focusing on your breathing will help to clear your mind of the myriad of thoughts, worries and planning that often stops us from relaxing and falling asleep.
Give it a try right now – focus on your breathing – you can count your breaths from one to ten and then start over again – or focus on the quality of your breath. Is your breathing calm and regular? is it short and shallow?
You can also just focus your attention on the breath and as you do, your breathing will help your body to relax and before you know it you will be sleeping.
Our busy days often affect our inability to rest and go to sleep peacefully. When that happens, try meditating before bed time to help you fall asleep and get a good night’s rest.
Finding comfort in my own skin
After tossing and turning through some sleepless nights, Sunada discovered a few things about the discomfort at the root of her insomnia. Realizing that it’s always there on some level, it’s given her something real to work with, day and night.
I turn to look at my bedside clock. 3:18 am. Here I am again, wide awake, staring at the ceiling. Darn it.
This has been happening a lot lately. So I thought, how about trying something different? Why not use that time to meditate? You know, lie in bed, completely present with my body and mind, and being with how it all just IS? You’d think this would be ideal conditions. No distractions. The phone won’t ring. The computer’s turned off. It’s warm and comfy. There’s nothing I have to do. Just rest quietly.
Funny thing though. My mind doesn’t think so. Watching it, it’s so clear. The real problem isn’t that I’m awake in the middle of the night. It’s that I don’t want to be here, and I keep fighting it. I seem to think that somehow — maybe that NEXT shift of position, whatever it is, will be the perfect one that lulls me off to sleep. And of course it isn’t. I’m doing everything it can to avoid facing the fact that I’m awake. The bottom line, really, is that in this quiet comfy place, I’m uncomfortable being in my own skin.
As I lay there, I remembered a story about the Buddha. A king asked the Buddha which one of the two of them was happier. The king had magnificent palaces, a powerful army, beautiful women … everything he could possibly want. Surely he was the happier of the two. Then the Buddha asked him, “Could you sit perfectly still for an hour and be completely happy?” The king thought he could. Then the Buddha asked, “Could you sit for a whole day and be happy? Or seven days? The king had to admit he’d find that difficult. The Buddha then said, ‘Now, I — without moving my body, without uttering a word — can dwell sensitive to unalloyed pleasure for seven days and nights. So what do you think: That being the case, who dwells in greater pleasure: the King or me?’”
The kind of happiness the Buddha was speaking of doesn’t depend on having perfect conditions or feeling pleasure. And here I was, with great conditions and physical comfort, and STILL I was yammering to myself. Pretty pitiful, I thought.
I’m realizing now that this state of being “uncomfortable in my own skin” is something that’s there pretty much all the time. It’s what leads me to distract myself – run around being “busy”, surf the internet mindlessly, putter and waste time. When meditating, it’s that monkey mind that’s so fascinated by the next shiny thing over there. I resist going more deeply into being present, I think, because I don’t want to feel this underlying discomfort. I suppose I could call it anxiety, restlessness, craving for sense experience. Maybe it’s the existential fear that I’m told we all have – fear that if I stop doing things, I’ll somehow disappear. It’s a fear of death. In any case, there’s a real discomfort I feel — a very subtle but real bodily sensation. Especially on those quiet sleepless nights.
The Buddha’s remedy for any craving or aversion is, of course, mindfulness. So I’ve been shining the light of my awareness on this as much as I can.
When lying awake at night, I turn inward, and bring my awareness to that discomfort itself. I give it my loving attention. Like holding a child having a tantrum. It takes some effort, yes. I try to release my grip on it.
First, relax my body. I do a body scan and consciously let go of all the places I’m holding – a leg, a hip, a shoulder. I imagine sinking deeper into the mattress, giving my body weight over to it completely. I notice how entire areas of my body, like my hips and back, had been holding on tight. It feels good to let them go. I also do the same with my mind. Relaxing places where I feel it gripping tightly to a thought, an idea. Open up, soften, let go, surrender.
And as I do this, there are times when I slowly pass through that wall of discomfort and settle into something different. Where I sort of become my awareness itself. It’s like I’m at a deeper core of myself where I float, separate from my unhappiness and watch it from a distance. When I’m there I feel more anchored by my sensibilities, self-respect, and natural intelligence. I can watch those restless feelings pass through my experience as fleeting bursts of energy. And not take their bait so much. For brief moments, I feel more spacious, expansive, and at ease. Bigger than those tantrums that I was caught up in just a few moments earlier.
Being there doesn’t necessarily get to me sleep right away – I’ve had nights where I’d lie awake like this for two hours or more. But I’m at least keeping myself from indulging so much in the fretting and fighting with myself. And yes, eventually, I do fall asleep. And often the next day, I find I don’t feel so sleep-deprived because I actually rested, even though I didn’t sleep through the night.
I’m grateful for my insomnia for showing me this “uncomfortable in my skin” feeling. It’s given me something real to work with. I see it clearly. It’s sharpened my awareness of how it’s there all the time, throughout the day. It’s given me opportunities to practice staying mindful of it, while waiting in line at the grocery store, eating, driving, just about any time. And not letting it rule me. Working with it, I keep aspiring toward the kind of presence that could sit perfectly content through it all, maybe even for seven days and nights, just like the Buddha.
Mummy, can we meditate now? How relaxation exercises can help your child to sleep
Like most parents of small children, I was having major problems at bedtime. Things had gone from bad to worse: each night, my four-year-old refused to go to bed, and once she got there, was repeatedly getting up. The whole process could last as long as two hours, leaving us both frustrated and exhausted.
I tried everything: reading longer bedtime stories in an attempt to calm her down; a frog that played classical music. I tried extra trips to the park, trying to tire her out even more in the hope that she would collapse into bed at night. Nothing seemed to work. Until last Christmas, when I slipped a CD of guided meditations (Enchanted Meditations for Kids
) into her stocking, along with a bit of wishful thinking.
The CD promised to “help kids sleep more soundly and feel more confident and secure in their home and school life”. I was dubious that a mere CD could help, but was willing to try anything. What does meditation consist of for a small child? The CD consisted of pairs of tracks: the first was a short relaxation, where listeners are told to tighten muscles in different parts of their body and then let go, followed by guided imagery where Elise could imagine herself swimming in the sea with dolphins, or living in her own fairy castle.
At first, I tried playing the CD during the day, but she was too busy playing to take notice of it. So I made it part of the bedtime routine: after the stories I would turn the light off, put the CD on, and leave the room. Elise seemed to enjoy it – when she got up the next morning, she announced she had been making new friends with the mermaids in the night. And five months later, our evenings are much calmer.
It started with the disappearance of the bedtime wrangling, but there have been other benefits, too. Elise is less frustrated with things when they don’t go her way or when she gets something wrong, which before would have been a source of tension and much shouting and screaming on her part. She will sit for noticeably longer drawing or doing jigsaws, where before she would have got annoyed and given up. I have even taken the CD on holiday and she has settled down to sleep in a strange bed without any problem.
Knowing that the fidget-capacity of small children is high, I was pleased to discover that for very young children meditation proper does not necessarily mean sitting still with their eyes closed, as an adult would. If using a mantra, as in Transcendental Meditation (TM), they can say their ‘word of wisdom’ with their eyes open, even as they walk to school or play with Lego.
At five years of age they ‘do their word’ for five minutes twice a day and thereafter add one minute for each year of their age. “The difference is in the childrens’ intellectual grasp of the whole concept, and the simplicity with which it is taught. The nature of the meditation is the same – the mind wants to be still, it just needs the right conditions ” says Colin Beckley of the Meditation Trust.
Being a small child these days is a pretty stressful business. According to Dr Alison Murfett, a chartered psychologist at the Maple Psychology clinic in London, childhood stress is often related to family life such as sibling rivalry, arguments at home or a disorganised environment, loss or bereavement, or school life (bullying, friendships and performance issues – children as young as six are taking SATs). Is meditation the answer?
Much of the scientific research on meditation has been on TM (which uses repetition of a special word or mantra), and the actress Goldie Hawn even wants to introduce TM into British schools.
Derek Cassells, headteacher at the Maharishi School in Lancashire (the only school in the UK to teach “consciousness-based education”) says the children there are happier, have more self-confidence, have better relationships with their peers and their teachers, and are more alert. In schools where meditation is on the curriculum, it is claimed there are no problems like bullying or drugs.
Research found that after one year of practising TM, children showed significant improvements in maths and reading. A study from the University of Michigan found that in year-six students, regular meditation had a significant positive effect on self-esteem and emotional competence. Beckley says meditation can help young children to experience life on a “quieter screen”. “These days, there is so much sensory stimulation, we need a silent foundation, otherwise our house will topple down. Over-stimulation leads to the body storing stress, and being in a state of constant mild anxiety and restlessness. A quieter backdrop to our experience leads to increased learning.” Never mind the lost art of conversation, Beckley argues that “families have lost the ability to be quiet with each other”.
At the Maharishi School, Cassells teaches the principles of the “science of creative intelligence” alongside the practical aspects of meditation. These principles, “such as ‘the nature of life is to grow’ and ‘order is present everywhere’, allow children to see beneath the surface of life, so that they apply the principles outside them and within their own lives”. Other schools are taking up the idea of introducing meditation to children.
So as Elise drops off listening to her guided visualisations, I enjoy the silence and remember the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.”
Simple steps to calmer children
Make sure that you and your children enjoy some quiet time together each day, away from the noise and distraction of TV, computers, games consoles and mobile phones.
Limit the amount of time your children spend watching television (and Colin Beckley of the Meditation Trust would argue that those under the age of three should not watch any at all).
Watch the breath: lie down and put a small teddy on the child’s tummy so that they can be aware of the movement of the abdomen as they breathe in and out.
Sign up, along with your child, for meditation classes given by a trained instructor.
Try foot massage: according to the Ayurveda system of traditional Indian medicine, massaging the feet of babies and small children can relax them, help them to become more aware of their bodies, and promote bonding.
[Michelle Teasdale, The Independent]3 Mini Meditations To Help You Through Your Day (Or Night)
HUFFINGTON POST: What stops you from sleeping through the night? Is it when things are not going your way or they look topsy-turvy and you just want to scream; when your life appears chaotic and you are not sure if you are coming or going; or when it feels like everything is piled on your shoulders?
Life should be an exciting and outrageous adventure. Isn’t it a wonder how a spider weaves a web or a bee makes a hive? Did you ever notice the small, everyday miracles, like the fact that you can breathe in and out? But how many of us get to experience this miracle? Sometimes life just feels too awful. We want to feel good, we want to be happy, in fact happiness is our birthright. But so often there are just too many difficulties to deal with. And although we may know that meditation chills us out, if we are feeling stressed or irritable then it just doesn’t seem so appealing.
So here are three mini-meditations, moments to just stop and breathe and remember why you are here. A moment to check yourself out, to look within, and to find what is really meaningful to you. You can get it together even when you think it is all falling apart.