Guided sleep meditation is a technique for assisting you to relax your body and let go of worried thoughts before going to bed. This technique, like other types of meditation, requires shifting your focus from your thoughts to sensations in your body. Regular guided sleep meditation practise has been demonstrated to promote sleep, suggesting that this approach is a useful tool to assist lessen difficulty falling and staying asleep.
According to the American Sleep Association, around 30% of individuals suffer short-term insomnia, while approximately 10% have persistent difficulties falling and/or staying asleep. 1 Furthermore, almost one-third of individuals report receiving less than 7 hours of sleep every night on average. Given that adults require 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night to operate optimally, and teens require even more (8 to 10 hours), it’s no surprise that approaches for enhancing sleep are becoming more popular. Better sleep can help to reduce stress and boost the immune system. However, attaining restorative sleep might be difficult if you are dealing with worry and anxiety—it can just be difficult to calm your thoughts. Many sleep-related disorders originate with your nighttime thought processes. This is when guided sleep meditation might come in handy.
In a nutshell, guided sleep meditation is meditating before to sleep, generally while lying in bed. While it is possible to practise sleep meditation on your own, guided practise generally entails listening to an audio recording that guides you through the steps of the guided sleep meditation. The purpose of guided sleep meditation is to lessen the influence of worried thoughts and physical strain on your sleep. You will notice gains in your ability to fall and remain asleep once you learn how to shift your mind and relax your body.
Guided Sleep Meditation Benefits
Meditation allows you to be present in the moment. When you rest your head on your pillow at night, you’re likely to start thinking about the thoughts you suppressed during the day. It can be difficult to manage rogue thoughts that might lead to worry and sadness when there are no outside distractions. Guided sleep meditation enables you to let go of racing thoughts and relax your mind. As a result, your parasympathetic nervous system is activated, which helps to reduce your heart rate and moderate your breathing rate. All of these changes prepare you for sleep; you may even fall asleep in the middle of your meditation session.
Because obtaining adequate sleep at night is tied to how you feel throughout the day, you should experience daytime advantages of conducting guided sleep practise. The finest guided sleep meditations will have you following along with an audio guide, which you may listen to using headphones or a tiny speaker alongside your bed. The objective is to not have to think too hard about what you’re doing. Rather, you let the voice on the tape lead you. You should find it simpler to enter the meditation and follow the suggestions as time goes on. So, don’t quit up too soon if you can’t quiet down or relax when conducting the meditation at first.
Best Guided Sleep Meditation Steps
If you want to do a guided meditation, look for an audio recording, such as the ones supplied by UCLA.
During a normal guided sleep meditation, you will be directed away from your concerned thoughts. Also toward your body via a “body scan.” This approach is shifting your focus away from your thoughts. Toward recognising the feelings in your body without attempting to modify them. During the meditation, you will walk through your body. From your head to your toes, experiencing feelings such as heaviness, tension, tingling, temperature, and stiffness. You will be advise to slowly relax and remove tension by breathing into each body area as you travel through it. You will also be instructed to allow your anxious thoughts (or any thoughts) pass through you as if they were clouds in the sky or leaves drifting down a river. Your body will begin to soften and relax as you do this, and you will begin to breathe more deeply.
Aside from the body scan, guided sleep meditation may include the following:
- Gratitude: In a gratitude meditation, you would practise being thankful and offering loving compassion to oneself.
- Breathing exercise: For example, you may be instruct to count while you breathe in and out, allowing your body to settle down and signalling that it is time to sleep.
- Visualization: You would visualise a tranquil setting. It would assist you reach a trance-like condition similar to what is created during the hypnosis procedure.
- You’re retracing your steps. Reviewing your day in detail, activity by action, may be a terrific technique to divert your attention just enough to allow you to fall off. Spend 20-25 seconds on each of the day’s activities. No matter how minor, beginning with waking up in the morning and continuing through showering and eating breakfast. This is an excellent method to start winding down before a breathing or imagery meditation.
- Preparing for Bed. Set yourself up for success in the hours leading up to night. Put away your devices at least an hour before going to bed. When you go into bed, guide yourself through the exercises you may have learnt from a sleep meditation practise (or, if you need help, turn your phone or gadget face-down to cover the bright screen – you can even use headphones).
Research Meditation to sleep
A 2015 research published in JAMA found that mindfulness meditation was more helpful than a sleep. Hygiene intervention for improving sleep in 49 older persons. 2 The mindful awareness practise (MAP) intervention was utilise for six weeks, for two hours each week. It was also discover that the impacts on sleep spilled over into daily difficulties, such as wearinss and sadness. Despite the fact that this is a tiny preliminary study. It implies that guided sleep meditation may be more helpful than sleep. Hygiene techniques alone (e.g., going to bed at a certain time each night, not using electronics before bed).
Sleep is distinct in that excellent quality Zzzs need far more than a simple meditation in bed. Restful sleep is primarily dependent on a relaxed mind, thus the preparation may start with your thinking… throughout the day. Our sleep problems are frequently based in our thought processes. Headspace’s 30-day Sleep course, for example (accessible only to Headspace subscribers), isn’t meant to put you to sleep right away; rather, it’s meant to modify your relationship with sleep. You may progressively establish an atmosphere favourable to a good night’s sleep. By gradually training the mind in a certain way – day by day, for a month. The 30-day Sleep course is advise to be utilise during the day. In conjunction with the single sleep meditation at bedtime. The training prepares the mind for long-term, sustainable transformation; the solo meditation is a specialised practise design to put you to sleep.
Aura Mobile Application
Aura is a mobile app that promises to “change your well-being, sleep, and life.” It intends to do this through the use of breathwork, psychology, poetry, gratitude journaling, life counselling, tales, music, and, of course, meditation. It has a 4.7-star rating on Apple’s App Store and over 5 million users, and it personalises the user’s experience with a bespoke quiz upon sign-up. You may also select the accent in which you want to hear your sleep meditation. Aura offers a seven-day free trial before charging $59.99 per year.
Meditation teaches us to be less in our heads and more present in the moment. The temptation of the mind to become engrossed in ideas is arguably highest at night, when we abruptly halt and remain motionless. Meditation for sleep is a specialised, guided experience that provides a natural sleep aid on its own, enabling us to let go of the day—all that has happened and everything that has been said—in order to rest the mind while also relaxing the body.
Sleep Hygiene
In addition to guided sleep meditation, try the following easy sleep hygiene practises:
- Keep your room at a lower temperature for better sleep.
- Extraneous than white noise, keep other sounds to a minimum in your bedroom.
- Every day, drink 6 to 8 glasses of water.
- Get frequent exercise, such as walking or yoga.
- Wear breathable cotton pyjamas that are comfy.
- Before going to bed, keep a gratitude notebook.
- Limit your usage of blue-light emitting gadgets, such as mobile phones and laptops, in the last hour before bed.
- Put yourself to bed at the same time every night and push yourself to rise at the same time every morning.
- Purchase a customised light that simulates sunshine to assist you in waking up at a specific time.
- If you need to sleep at unusual hours, use dark shades to make your room dark.
Verywell’s Message
If you suffer from insomnia, guided sleep meditation might be beneficial. In addition to practising meditation, make sure your sleep hygiene is in order to get a good night’s sleep. If you still have nighttime anxiety, standard treatments such as cognitive-behavioral therapy or medication may be beneficial.
Quality of rest, rather than amount of hours, is more important in achieving a good night’s sleep. Sleep meditations aid in the creation of the inner circumstances required for a really restful night’s sleep. Because when we quiet the mind, we rest the body, and it is this restfulness that allows us to wind down and drift off. Meditation lowers the heart rate by activating the parasympathetic nervous system and promotes slower breathing, boosting the likelihood of a good night’s sleep.
