Jun
19
How my meditation practice helps me sleep at night
Do you ever lie awake at night, unable to sleep because of all the thoughts rushing around your head? It used to be a constant problem for me. And as the thoughts went round and round in my head, I often found myself becoming anxious about not being able to sleep or about something that was due to happen the following day, which in turn made it even harder to sleep. Eventually, I’d fall asleep from sheer exhaustion, but wake feeling still tired in the morning. Or, sometime, be woken shortly after falling asleep by my baby daughter, and then have to go through the whole ordeal of trying to get to sleep again.
Since I started practising meditation, less than a year ago, I’ve found that by using the method of focussing on the breath, as in tranquillity meditation, I can get myself into the right state to fall asleep very quickly and without the “full head” problem I was experiencing before. In fact, I can fall asleep so fast using this method that I was at first concerned that I would start to associate focussing on my breath with sleep, and start falling asleep when I was actually meditating. Fortunately, this hasn’t happened.
This isn’t the only thing that meditation has changed for me, but it is one of them. No doubt I’ll write about the other changes in my life sometime soon. Stay tuned.