How Meditation Improves Sleep

You can use meditation to improve sleep patterns and even help to eliminate insomnia by positively influencing your body chemistry, organs, and mental health. With regular meditation practice, you can sleep easier and feel more rested from your sleep.

Meditation is a technique that gives you many benefits. It has been shown to improve your mental and physical health in different ways, from having better memory function to lowering blood pressure. Did you know meditation can help you improve your sleep at night?

Today you will learn how mediation can positively affect your sleep and allow you to get more out of your night’s rest. You will be able to see why meditation improves sleep, and what types of meditation strategies will give you the best results for sleeping better.

Relaxation Response and How It Affects Sleep

The relaxation response is entirely different from the more well-known stress response. Both the relaxation response and the stress response are activated in the nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for the relaxation response, while the sympathetic nervous system is used for the stress response. The sympathetic nervous system is used to keep you awake and alert but can overreact to stress. The parasympathetic nervous system is what relaxes your body and allows you to go to sleep.

This is important because meditation activates your relaxation response through your parasympathetic nervous system. When you meditate, your body becomes relaxed and at ease which is exactly what the relaxation response is. You can teach your body and mind to be in a state closer to the relaxation response than to the stress response through meditation. When you strengthen your ability to activate your relaxation response, it will become easier for your body to transition to sleep when you need to.

There are even other great benefits you receive from your relaxation response, such as:

  • Improves insulin resistance
  • Reduces inflammation 
  • Reduces oxidative stress

Meditation is a practice that improves your sleep health significantly by influencing areas of your body that are used for sleeping. The nervous system isn’t the only part of your body that meditation can change for the better.

What Sleep Benefits Are Behind Meditation

There are a few reasons why the consistent practice of meditation can help you sleep better at night. The results of meditating for better sleep are worth the effort, especially for those who experience insomnia regularly. 

Meditation has been shown to help you:

  • Fall asleep when you want
  • Sleep uninterrupted 
  • Wake up when you intend to
  • Feel more rested throughout the day

For all these great reasons, all you have to do is take a little time out of your day to relax. Really quite a bargain. The question is, how does meditation allow this to happen. There are quite a few answers to this question.

Meditation And Your Body

Meditation affects quite a few brain chemicals and hormones, as well as some organs in your body related to sleep. When these brain chemicals or body hormones are changed through meditation, you are able to fall asleep faster and have more restful sleep as well. 

One excellent way meditation affects body chemistry is by reducing cortisol. Cortisol is the hormone that is most associated with stress. When you are able to lower this hormone, you experience less stress. With less stress, you are able to sleep better, as stress is the main issue for those with insomnia.

The practice of meditation also increases natural sleep by producing more melatonin. Melatonin is a chemical in your brain that sends signals associated with healthy sleep patterns. Meditation does this by helping create more serotonin in your brain, which is the precursor for melatonin. Therefore the more serotonin produced through meditation, the more melatonin your brain has access to.

Meditation has also been shown to access parts of your brain that are responsible for sleep. One main area in the brain associated with rest is the hypothalamus. This part of the brain is accountable for both sleep and waking. Meditation allows the hypothalamus to relax and activate its sleep response instead of the wake response. 

Your heart rate is also positively affected by meditation. Meditation is known to slow down your heart rate, which allows your body to relax. A high heart rate can keep you from falling asleep. Through its effect on the heart, meditation also lowers your blood pressure which can generally keep you awake when it is high.

Mental Health Affects Sleep

Many people in the world experience mental illness of one kind or another. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and many other mental illnesses have insomnia as one of the side effects of their disease. Many of these illnesses come with other symptoms that may not allow them to sleep properly. 

These illnesses can cause episodes of dysfunctional thoughts and behaviors that don’t allow sleep to come quickly. With anxiety, you can have overwhelming panic attacks, increased heart rate, and racing thoughts. Depression can cause rumination, which is similar to overthinking, where you cannot control your thoughts. Most mental illnesses affect your control over your thoughts and sometimes even actions, and none of this is conducive to sleeping.

Meditation can help those with mental illness have better control over their thoughts when practiced regularly. Through meditation, many with these diseases are able to take better control of their symptoms and episodes, which allows them to have a better sleep night of sleep.

Types of Meditation to Help You Go To Sleep

Two main types of meditation benefit sleep the most, although all forms of mediation can aid sleep in their own ways. Mindfulness meditation and guided meditation are the best to use when it comes to going to sleep or relaxing your body before going to bed.

Mindfulness meditation is when you focus on your body in the moment. You focus on breathing and work to relax every single part of the body as you do.

Guided meditation is best to use when going to bed at night. You can listen to audio of someone guiding you through your meditation. This keeps the mind focused on the task well and has excellent results for sleep health. Guided meditations can vary greatly, but there are many that are aimed specifically at aiding sleep or helping you to fall asleep. Many use this method who prefer a structured meditation that they can follow instead of creating their own system.

Final Thoughts

Insomnia is not something anyone wants to live with. It can cause you even more stress and allow you even less energy. Thankfully, meditation can almost eliminate insomnia in certain people, especially when regularly practiced. Meditation works with the body to lower stress hormones, increase brain chemicals needed for sleep and lower heart rate and blood pressure. This practice can also decrease the symptoms of mental illness and invoke your body’s relaxation response. The best types of meditation for sleep are guided meditation and mindfulness meditation. These both allow your body to relax as much as possible and prime your internal self for rest. The only way to get the most sleep health benefits out of meditation is to practice on a regular basis. Even if you only meditate once a day before bed, you will see improvements. Consistent meditation practice will give you consistent results.