Sleeplessness can be a very detrimental issue for many people. It is a cyclical process – getting settled down, under the covers and as you close your eyes, your thoughts start to race.

You check the clock, hour after hour, and before you know it you have to get up again to start your day. The next night, after feeling tired for most of the day, we find suddenly that same process beginning again.

There are many reasons we might not get enough sleep to start with. We may have physical ailments which manifest themselves when we’re ready to sleep. The less sleep we get, the more likely it is that these ailments will get worse.

A common cause of sleeplessness is worry. We find ourselves rehearsing and fretting over our working life. As with physical ailments, the stress of sleeplessness can worsen our productivity and create more stress in the process.

Meditation is an excellent way to renegotiate these issues. Here are a few reasons why meditation can help you sleep.

Concentrate On Your Body

When it comes to physical ailments which bar your way to sleep, it’s important to understand completely what your body is doing. Mindfulness meditation can help you explore your body’s various sensation.

It is important to start in a comfortable place, free from distraction or bright lighting. Concentrate first on your breathing, ensuring regular, controlled breathes as you think about the different parts of your body.

If you’re not sure where you particular ailment stems from, you can perform a ‘body audit’, focusing on each part of your body in turn. You can think about tightening or relaxing each muscle as you travel from your toes upwards. This will help you identify stress points that you can focus on deeper as you relax.

Let Go                      

One of the biggest barriers to good sleep is a fretful mind. Over the course of a day, we can pick up any number of unresolved issues, whether it’s at work or in our personal lives. As we fall asleep uncomfortable or embarrassing events suddenly occur to us and we can sometimes spend a long time considering them.

Part of what makes us human is the need for resolution. But of course, lying in bed waiting for sleep is not the place for resolution.

Meditation can help us to put these issues to one side. We cannot simply dismiss problems, but we can come to the understanding that they can wait.

“Once you’ve entered a state of relaxation, you may find these issues floating through your mind. But the detachment that comes with mediation can allow us to let them go, floating off out of our conscious minds,” says Jon Dunn, a Lifestyle writer at Writinity and Researchpapersuk.

Self Reflection

Sometimes it is difficult to simply waft away the issues that impress themselves upon our lives. There are times, for everyone, we feel large amounts of stress, whether it’s a job interview the next day or a big family event coming up. While we cannot resolve these issues, we can utilize our meditation time to approach these issues in a new light.

If you find you cannot completely let go of a problem, meditation can give you the tools to analyze. Ensuring you’ve spent time focusing on your body and having found a comfortable state, you can allow yourself to reach out and take hold of the outstanding issue. In a calm, objective manner you can look at your issues with a longer lens.

“Thoughts and challenges become more tactile and less emotive, allowing us to deal with them in a spirit of curiosity. Having explored your worries with a clearer perspective, you’ll feel much easier about putting it onto a metaphorical shelf and settling down to sleep” comments Ben Strunk, a Health blogger at Draftbeyond.

Switching Off

Most importantly, meditation can enable us to switch off. Having used meditation to access our objective brains and relaxing our body, we can set about ‘turning off the lights’. Going back to our ‘body audit’, we can take time in noticing our muscles relax, our sensations dim and our mind drift about our body.

Much like a hypnotist counting down, the longer we concentrate on our the sensations we feel in each part of us, the greater the chances our conscious mind accepts sleep. We notice our limbs get heavier and our muscles loosen. We’ve made conscious decision to accept unconsciousness.

In the new year, make a resolution to Improve Your Sleep AND Improve Your Life with Alaska Sleep Clinic.  Call us today for your free sleep assessment.

 SLEEP APNEA QUIZ Take Our Insomnia Quiz

About the author: Charles Phan is a Marketing graduate who writes on business strategy for Last Minute Writing. As an experienced writer, he also produces content and proofread for Gum Essays and Lucky Assignments.