Evolve > Mindfulness >Here’s How Meditation for Sleep Helps You Sleep Faster & Better
Meditation for better quality sleep and falling asleep faster is a common objective for those who start to meditate.
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How does meditation for sleep work?
Meditation for sleep is a deliberate meditation practice, either guided or unguided to help rest your mind while your body prepares to fall asleep. The idea is to switch off your mind from everything that happened during the day and focus on sleeping better.
Some of the benefits of sleep meditation are:
- Helps close off your thoughts
- Reduces your heart and breathing rate
- Helps release melatonin
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Reduces tension and negativity
1. Helps close off your thoughts
A big reason why you’re unable to fall asleep is that there are many thoughts running through your mind. When you meditate or practice mindfulness, you stay in the present and pay attention to the moment you’re in. Meditation gets rid of today’s stresses and tomorrow’s worries. Your mind and subconscious begins to rest, leading to better quality sleep.
2. Regulates your heart and breathing rate
Meditation, particularly breathing exercises, involves actively working on your breath. Sleep meditation helps you slow down and regulate your breathing. This in turn slows down your heart rate and allows your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) to start functioning. The PNS is responsible for regulating your digestion and also helping your body rest and recover. This allows you to wake up feeling rejuvenated.
3. Helps release melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone that creates a better quality of sleep. When you are stressed, your body tends to release a hormone called cortisol and stop the production of melatonin. However, meditation helps dial down that stress and your body can release more melatonin, This leads to a night of deeper and more restful sleep.
4. Reduces tension and negativity
A key benefit of meditation is the reduction of anxiety. It keeps you in the moment and alleviates any negative thoughts from entering your mind. This gives you peace and a more stable state. When you have any negative thoughts, it is difficult for your brain to switch off. Meditation for sleeping ensures you stay tension-free at that moment, allowing yourself to fall asleep faster and sleep better.
How to Perform Sleep Meditation?
When you need to sleep, you can try a variety of meditation techniques.
- Mindfulness Meditation: Mindfulness meditation asks you to focus on your experience and surroundings, for example, your breathing.
- Visualization Meditation: The visualization meditation technique involves immersing yourself in a situation by visualizing a relaxing scenario. Colour breathing, compassion meditation, muscle relaxation, guided imagery & goal visualization are some of the basic visualization techniques. It is also known as imagery meditation whereby you visualize yourself in various environments and engage your senses through imagery. Visualization meditation stands out among the other forms of meditation primarily because of its uniqueness in the imaginative power of the mind that it seeks to employ. Giant literary figures and poets like Coleridge assigned a lot of importance to this power of human beings to imagine almost anything at any moment they would wish to. Among a lot of other benefits, the process of visualization meditation enables you, most importantly to sleep better, improve focus and lower stress levels to a considerable extent.
- Zen meditation. A Buddhist meditation technique is also called seated meditation. It involves sitting on a chair or on the floor, while you face the ground. To practice it, you focus on your breath and stay fully focused on the nature and rhythm of your breath, counting every inhale and exhale. As you breathe, you allow thoughts to come and go and experience the moment. If your mind starts to wander, you bring your attention back to your breath.
- Guided meditation: Guided sleep meditations are known to switch off your mind and body, allowing you to relax and feel balanced. Moreover, since it is guided, you need not do anything but listen. It will lull you into a deep sleep rather than have you tossing and turning at night. Guided sleep meditations include sleep stories or different guided audios with proven techniques to help you sleep at night. You can use apps like Evolve which has joyful guided audios which are used by experts to help you fall asleep faster, switch off the day and sleep with a smile!
Final Word:
There are various lifestyle tips and tricks to help you sleep better. Meditation is one of them, and is quite effective and leads to improved sleep. Once you start practicing it regularly there will be many long-term health benefits for you. Moreover, your sleep cycle and the quality of your sleep will improve.
You can start with guided mediation using various apps like Evolve and then move on to other forms of meditation. Evolve has a selection of guided sleep audios designed to help you sleep better and balance your mind and body. The Evolve app is now live globally on Android & Apple, click here to try for free!
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