Meditation, and how it helps you sleep better
Of the eleven tips I put out yesterday to help you sleep better, meditation was the first thing I mentioned.
Meditation is so good, for so many reasons. Books (many, many books) have been written about the health benefits, which include physical benefits like stabilized blood sugar levels, and mental health benefits such as lower stress.
Image by Colton Sturgeon
One of the chief benefits of meditation is better sleep, which is both a huge benefit to your physical and mental health. That’s because your body essentially reboots as you sleep: internal cleaning crews run around doing things like repairing your heart and blood vessels, cleaning up issues in your nervous system, rebalancing the many hormones and chemicals inside your body, and more.
I have been a sporadic meditator for the past decade. Sometimes I do it every day, and sometimes I go for weeks without it. I find that when I meditate consistently, my stress levels are lower, any anxiety I have is lessened, and I tend to get to sleep faster and stay asleep better. I aim for 15 minutes a day, and sometimes do more than one session in a day.
Fun fact: The more stressed you are, the more you need to meditate. Also, the more stressed you are, the less likely you are to take time to do it. Because the chemicals driving the stress make you think you have to run and run and run.
Unless you are being pursued by a bear or something, that’s just not true. But those fight-or-flight chemicals are assholes sometimes, and they will make you believe that you have to stay in motion, even if it’s not productive.
Taking time to tune in, turn on, and drop out through meditation for a few minutes will actually help you to lower your heart rate, deepen your breathing, and reduce overall stress levels. If you do it daily, you will find that the benefits start to accumulate and last longer between meditation sessions.
The good news is that as little as five minutes a day can help you. And that it doesn’t matter what type of meditation you choose: mindfulness, focus on the breath, using a mantra, doing a guided meditation or visualization. Any or all of them help.
Whether you focus on your breath or you focus on a mantra, meditation allows you to take a break from the rest of your life. That’s because you direct your attention to a particular thing (breath or mantra) and then when your mind begins to wander—and it will—you pull the focus back to the thing you’re paying attention to. Please don’t fret when your mind wanders: that is what your brain is designed to do. Don’t scold yourself or give up, just redirect your focus to whatever you are paying attention to (breath, mantra, a voice in a guided meditation).
If you are interested in a guided meditation, where you listen to an audio of someone who guides you through the process, I offer one here on my site. It’s a “Future You” visualization, which guides you through a forest and into a space where you see what your home will look like five years from now and how it will be furnished.
In this “Future You” visualization, you also meet your future self: it’s the “you” that you envision five years from now, and she might seem just like you are now, or be a bit different. The visualization includes journaling pages to help you capture your thoughts and ideas once you’re done. If you haven’t already gotten it, I hope you will get it for yourself today using the button below.
P.S. — I circled back and compiled all of these posts into an e-book, in case you prefer reading from paper. It is beautiful and beautifully formatted and is 30 pages of goodness just for you. Available for $10 (on sale at half price) and ready for immediate download. Buy it here.
