Sleep is essential for our physical and mental health, yet many of us struggle to get enough restful sleep. Fortunately, meditation can help us relax and improve our sleep quality. In this article, we'll explore the different types of sleep meditation and how to use them to get a better night's rest. Mindfulness meditation is a practice that involves focusing on the present moment.
It is achieved by increasing your awareness of your consciousness, breath and body. Guided meditation is when someone else guides you through each step of meditation. You may be told to breathe or relax your body in a certain way, or they can cause you to view images or sounds. This technique is also known as guided imagery.
In body scan meditation, you focus on every part of your body. The goal is to increase awareness of your physical sensations, including tension and pain. The act of concentrating promotes relaxation, which can help you sleep. Studies have found that meditation can help reduce cortisol, which is the hormone associated with stress.
Meditation increases natural melatonin levels to help you sleep more restful. Do you have trouble sleeping at night or do you suffer from insomnia? According to the National Sleep Foundation, 30 to 40 percent of adults have difficulty sleeping and 10 to 15 percent suffer from chronic insomnia. This is where a guided sleep meditation can help. Psychological problems, mainly depression, are common causes of insomnia. Depression causes changes in mood, which can affect hormonal balance and therefore lead to difficulty sleeping. Studies have also shown that insomnia can make depression worse.
Stress and anxiety are also common causes of insomnia. We often reflect on the past and worry about the future. At times, we can feel stressed and overwhelmed by our responsibilities. And sometimes, it's just our overstimulated mind that keeps us awake. Guided sleep meditations are audio recordings that help you relax and fall asleep.
Some last less than an hour, while others last several hours. Most have guiding words at first, which eventually fade away, leaving you with soft and relaxing music that helps you fall asleep. Rooted in the background music are two tones of slightly different frequencies, one in each ear. The brain, instead of processing both tones, processes half the difference between the two frequencies. For example, if you receive a tone of 300 hertz in one ear and a tone of 280 hertz in the other ear, the brain will process a tone of 10 hertz. Meditation helps you rest in the present moment.
When you put your head on your pillow at night, you're likely to start focusing on the thoughts that held you back during the day. Without external distractions, it can be difficult to control runaway thoughts that can cause anxiety and depression. Meditation could also improve sleep directly, even in people who do not experience increased stress or pain. All these changes prepare you for sleep; you may even fall asleep in the middle of meditation practice. The course trains the mind for long-term sustainable change; individual meditation is a specific exercise to send you to sleep. Visualizations are particularly useful for sleep meditation, as they help you focus on calming and relaxing images while letting out anxious or fearful images.
The best guided sleep meditations will mean that you follow along with an audio guide that you can play on headphones or on a small speaker next to your bed. The Insight Timer library also contains guided sleep meditations specifically for children, including stories and music. It may take a little testing and practice to find the right method, but meditation has the potential to improve sleep quality. While they are all meant to help you sleep better, they have slightly different goals and mechanisms to help you sleep. Some people work strange hours that make it difficult to maintain a normal sleep pattern or get enough sleep. Sleep falls into a unique category as good quality zzz require much more than just meditation in bed. As the voice fades after a while, you can start this meditation and let it sound while you fall asleep. Another study of older adults found that meditation improved sleep as well as mood and stress in general; the benefits are still shown six months later.
Let's take a look at the specific meditation techniques that tend to work well for sleep and how to do each of them. While guided sleep meditations have music and a voice to guide you, the sounds are slow and relaxing, helping to slow down your mind. A guided meditation typical of sleep will cause you to redirect your attention from your worried thoughts to your body through what is called a body scan.
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