How Sleep Meditation Can Calm Your Nighttime Anxiety

The majority of us have had sleep problems at some point. Relentless thoughts might produce stress and irritation, wasting our essential rest time. 

Are you ready to gently adjust your typical mentality around sleep so you can alleviate nighttime anxiety and recuperate from your hectic day as nature intended?

In this essay, we will obtain a compassionate knowledge of why your mind may have formed a reflex for thinking when it’s intended to be resting. You can learn how to replace that with a relaxation reflex that will enable you to benefit from peaceful sleep meditations.

How Sleep Meditation Can Help Your Nighttime Anxiety

It’s apparent that you’re not reading this post because you enjoy unending nights of tranquil and easy sleep. You may have used all the strategies for excellent sleep, such as 

– Having a regular sleep schedule 
– Having a cozy, dark, and slightly cold bedroom 
– Avoiding caffeine, alcohol, sugar, exercise, and blue light exposure in the evening

Despite all this, you have problems getting to sleep or remaining asleep, and you awake feeling fatigued. You can’t switch off the continual round of busy thoughts that create your nighttime worry. 

Your mind can transition from the sympathetic nervous system, which is essential for daily living, to the parasympathetic nervous system, which facilitates sleep, with the aid of sleep meditation. A beneficial first step in this direction is building a daily mindfulness meditation practice.

Of course, there are medical issues that cause persistent insomnia, so seek expert care if your sleep difficulty is ongoing.

1. When Your Day is Balanced

You go asleep exhausted after a day of a very demanding job schedule or major problems. 

Your sympathetic nervous system has been switched on all day. It is essential in the action-packed environment of your daily waking life. Increases in adrenaline secretion, pulse and breathing rates, muscle contraction, and pupil dilation are among its beneficial physiological effects. 

It's time to go to bed. Your parasympathetic nervous system takes over to counterbalance all that high awareness and activity by bringing your body to a condition of calm and slumber. Your muscles relax and your heart and breathing rates drop.

2. What Sleep Disturbance Looks Like

When these two autonomic nerve systems are out of balance, here’s what happens: 

Your mind begins to think nonstop as soon as your head touches the pillow, almost instinctively. It can be:

– Rehashing the day’s experiences 
– Regrets or indignation about anything that happened 
– Listing what needs to happen tomorrow 
– Imagining potential future situations and how you will respond to them 
– Panic or sadness at world events 
– Various sorts of worry

Accompanying these anxious thoughts comes a surge of stress hormones and chemicals, such as adrenaline and cortisol, that race through your body, intensifying the sense of stress even more.

3. Understanding Your Nighttime Anxiety

According to study, stress is a leading cause of irregular sleep patterns that promote short-term and chronic insomnia. 

Yes, as you predicted, your thoughts are giving you worry, preventing you from recuperating through sleep. Your sympathetic nervous system is locked into your thinking, preparing you to either fight or run. You're lying flat on your back and battling off the tigers of your day, but it's all in your head!

4. Why Can’t I Just Switch It Off?

You may have gone through intense feelings like pain or fear at a previous point in your life. Your immature nervous system might have gone into the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reactions if there were no role models for handling or calming these. 

In an effort to try to make sense of your surroundings, you will have heavily relied on planning, pondering, ruminating, internalizing, and replaying occurrences. 

These thinking tactics were all attempts to control and get on top of your emotions instead of letting them to pass through you. They were the child’s best attempts to ease the overload of an underdeveloped neurological system.

The Incidental Sleep Benefits of a Regular Mindfulness Meditation Practice

Now that you understand why your mind may be stuck into action mode, it’s time to find new ways of switching that off and activating the relaxation response that helps you to drift off into sleep. This is when you learn to substitute a reflex for relaxation for the reflex for thinking.

1. Making the Relaxation Response Automatic

In the 1970s, Dr. Herbert Benson coined the phrase “the relaxation response,” a simple and fitting description of the parasympathetic nervous system. He describes it as a deep physiological shift in the body that’s the opposite of the stress response. 

He recommends practicing mindfulness during the day, ideally for 20 minutes, to create a reflex to more easily bring forth a sense of relaxation. 

That way, it’s easier to evoke the relaxation response at night when you can’t sleep. In time, this reflex for relaxation will replace your reflex for thinking as a protection against anxiety. The key to this is replicated in the practice of mindfulness meditation. Let's investigate this.

2. Mindfulness Meditation – The Evidence Is In

As any teacher of mindfulness meditation courses will tell you, there are always people who claim a dramatic improvement in their sleeping habits as one of the benefits of meditation. 

Research indicates that individuals with poor sleep quality who participate in mindfulness programs experience less despair, exhaustion, and insomnia than those who only get sleep instruction.

You see, the concepts you learn when you practice mindfulness meditation also apply to sleep. Instead of being controlled by thoughts, it enables the parasympathetic nervous system to become active, non-striving, letting go, and observing thoughts. 

In mindfulness meditation, you connect with your body in the present moment. Usually, through the breath, you scan your body for tension and deliberately release that, and you observe thoughts as they emerge without getting entangled in them.

How a Guided Sleep Meditation Can Calm Your Nighttime Anxiety

You can reap the same advantages from a guided sleep meditation every night even if your regular mindfulness meditation practice hasn't given you a new relaxation response. 

Studies of sleep meditation give indications of increases in sleep quality, improvements in rumination and emotional control, decrease of sleep issues in people with fibromyalgia, and comparable results compared with sleep medicine.

1. What Is Sleep Meditation?

A guided sleep meditation will replicate the natural surrender into the rest and healing phase that you’ve been so wanting. You’re in for a treat. Here’s what that looks like: 

You lie down with your headphones on or your earbuds in and listen to a guided meditation, with someone’s kind and comforting tone of voice leading you into a peaceful state. The frequencies of the background music will be specifically selected to induce alpha waves and eventually theta waves of sleep in your brain. 

Typically, the guided sleep meditation will:

– Include a visualization to aid your mind into the yielding, drifting state 
– Recognize and take note of the busy-thinking mind's activities. 
– Replace that with something else 
– Bring focus back to the here and now, usually through the breath or body awareness 
– Remind yourself to be aware of your ideas without letting them control you.

Similar to mindfulness meditation, you have an option when haphazard thoughts cross your mind at night. You can jump on every train of thought and follow it to its full conclusion, or you can simply notice, “oh, there’s another thought seeking my attention” and watch it go by.

2. How to Choose a Sleep Meditation

Listen to any of the hundreds of free sleep meditations on apps or Youtube. Find one where the person’s accent, tone of voice, music choice, and length feel comforting to you. 

A search on Youtube for “guided sleep meditations” offers a huge choice of possibilities for you to explore. From the hundreds of titles, here is a sample:

– A water sound-assisted spoken sleep meditation 
– Fall asleep in 12 minutes 
– Let go of anxiousness before sleeping 
– Clear the clutter of your head 
– A sleep talk-down 
– The Glass Elevator meditation.

Enjoy experimenting with any that you find appealing, but then pick one and do it every night for at least a few weeks. In this manner, the relaxation reflex will kick in as soon as it begins. Hopefully, you won't hear anything after the first few minutes.

Final Thoughts

You may reset your mental habits and fully benefit from the numerous amazing sleep meditations available if you have a loving awareness of your anxiousness at night. In order to help you rest and heal as nature intended, you can replace your usual reaction of rapidly turning to the busy thinking mind with a reflex for relaxation.

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