Does Being Mindful Help Me Sleep Better?
Meditation is becoming ever more popular around the world. Specifically in the US, mindfulness is becoming one of the most popular forms of mediation. But, can practicing Mindfulness and regularly meditating help you you sleep better?
My Mindfulness Story.
I’ve been practicing Mindfulness inconsistently for about 4 years now. And for me, the hardest part has been figuring out how to practice in a way that is helpful to me. Throughout the years, I feel I’ve done the actions of sitting and meditating and being present around my thoughts, but I didn’t really notice the benefits. This might sound negative, but I think it was important for me to learn what WASN’T working, so when I improved I would understand it better.
With this in mind, over the last year, I’ve been finding more resources that actually help me achieve what I want to achieve with my practice. If you’re familiar with me, you may know I also have a site related to streaming. So Twitch streaming and gaming is very on topic for me. Luckily, there has been a new guide in the world that mixes Psychology and Gaming named HealthyGamer_gg. He live-streams frequently as well as runs a YouTube Channel with past content.
Once I became regularly watching his content and found ways to relate his coaching with my own life, this is when my Mindfulness journey started really taking shape and improving my life.
While the journey is never-ending, I feel my relationship with the journey has reached a happy pit stop and I can’t wait to see what else it brings for me!
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness, and heck Meditation for that matter, is hard to define. There are a lot of components to it. But for the sake of simplicity, lets make it easy.
Mindfulness is a state of mind where you allow your attention to shift towards what is happening around you, rather than in your mind. It’s to become aware of your surrounding, and let them pass without dwelling or ruminating on those facts.
One way I described it to a friend, it is like letting yourself have ADHD and become distracted with what happens around you, but working on honing your skills to know when you should allow yourself to become distracted, and when to keep on track with a given task. Now, that might be a stretch of how to put it, so let me provide an example of how I put it into practice.
Near my apartment I have access to a trail around a nature preservation. There is a lot of deer, armadillo, bugs, birds, squirrels, and way more that I can’t even see. The best part, its very accessible and I can just walk a few feet to get to the entrance.
I try my best to walk ~2.5 miles worth of that trail every day. While I do it for exercise, receiving sweet sweet Vitamin D, and the occasional run. Within the last 2 months, I tried to shift how I utilize this walk to benefit me.
Before, I used to use my walk/running time to think about creative ways to make money, or to do better at my job. It’s still useful for that, but I would have thoughts about that on every single walk/run. This is a stress inducing mindset on a walk that is intended to reduce my stress. I found pretty quickly that this wasn’t working for me. So I took out my headphones, started practicing mindfulness, and now its become a great way for me to manage my own stress levels.
Now comes the part where I ACTUALLY give you an example.
On the trail I begin by taking deep breaths while I walk. Breath in for about 5 seconds, and breath out for about 5. I’ll repeat this until I become distracted with something around me. Whether it be the sound of a bird whistling, a deer eating grass, or a bug chirping at me. It never fails, I hear something and then I get a smile on my face and then I start paying attentions to the sounds I hear.
I’ll listen for that bug at first, but then I try to widen my sense of sound and see if there are other sounds I can hear. Generally I’ll hear the wind rustle the grass, a nearby apartment’s Air Conditioner running, cars in the distance, maybe a biker’s chain rotating while they’re coming near me. Overall, I just try to listen and acknowledge all the sound I can. Occasionally I’ll even find myself seeing something move and wonder why I can’t hear it, so I’ll focus and then that sound will come into attention. Like today, I was walking by a nearly electrical facility which usually have a bass-y buzz to it. I didn’t hear it normally, so I tried to focus on it specifically, and then the sound came through!
I’ll do this until I start to notice no new sounds, or if another physical sense becomes noticed. For example, if I notice the wind against my hands. I’ll start to intentionally feel the wind on my face. Or my feet hit the ground, or even my pants rub against my leg as I move. Maybe the keys in my pocket are bouncing against my leg, or the way I’m walking is making my knee a little sore. These are all things that I used to just ignore because I was so focused on some arbitrary thing that had nothing to do with what was actually around me before.
These are just 2 senses I’ve described, but I hope you get the picture. I’ve even recently tried to focus on the smells I smell out in nature. And I feel like I’m becoming way less nose-blind since then.
Who practices Mindfulness?
Lots of people actually. If you look at this graph below. You can see how Meditation and Mindfulness have grown in popularity on Google since 2004.
Now don’t let these metrics deceive you into believing its not popular because the value is low. This “interest over time” is not a count of the number of queries ran each day on Google. Rather, it is a proprietary number to describe how it compares to Meditation and an over-arching topic.
But with the growing popularity of products like Headspace and Calm. We can see that across the world, people are taking mental health way more seriously.
There is also a big community on Reddit for Mediation, as well as for Mindfulness, if that is you cup of tea.
How Can it Help Me Sleep?
Mindfulness has a number of benefits when you practice it well. Now, I’m no scientist, so this will be mostly my opinion with a sprinkle of other sources.
Practicing Mindfulness can help reduce your stress though. It allows you to observe your thoughts, and choose how to react to them, rather than just reacting as soon as it happens. It also allows you to evaluate your perspective on issues that are plaguing your minds.
Cortisol, which is regarded as the Stress hormone, has been shown to be reduced with regular practice. It can also improve your mood and overall serotonin hormone as well.
So when people say Meditation and Mindfulness can improve your sleep, it’s not that Meditation itself causes better sleep. But it causes a chain reaction of improvements to your neurological wiring. That reaction will truly provide positive benefits in your life, one of them being your sleep patterns.
So does it work?
Speaking from my own experience, YES! Now, I don’t have the best sleep. I’m overweight, I snore, I don’t exercise as good as I should, I frequently overheat while I sleep. All of these things I’m trying to change.
Though when it comes to me falling asleep, I can now get to sleep more easily than I used to 6 months ago. Back then I might lay in bed with racing thoughts for a few hours. Now, I may not pass out as soon as my head hits the pillow. But, I definitely fall asleep in less than an hour! This is a huge improvement for me. And has allowed me to feel more rested in the morning with better sleep and a more routine sleep schedule.
But staying asleep has always been hard for me. I seem to go in waves where sometimes I can sleep through the whole night. But, often I wake up during the night. Again referring back to 6 months ago, I would frequently wake up and be up for almost an hour. I’d have to get up and do something to distract myself before I could fall back asleep. I became so worried about needing to get back to sleep, that the worry would just keep me up more.
With regular Meditation, I still can’t guarantee I sleep through the night. When I wake up, I am much more skilled at just acknowledging to myself that I’m awake. Then I just let myself pass out when the time is right. I’ve now gotten to a point where I can’t even remember the last time I had trouble falling back asleep.
Now, I’m confident Meditation is helping me sleep better. But, I do want to say I’m making other changes in my life that could be impacting my sleep as well. Most of which I probably wouldn’t even be doing if I hadn’t started focusing on my Mindfulness practices.
Here is a list of changes I’ve been making to improve myself that could be affecting my sleep too. Perhaps, it will help you shape how this practice can help you too.
- Eating at a caloric deficit (or trying to)
- Reducing my caffeine intake
- Drinking more water
- Regular / daily walking
- More consistent intense excercise
- SSRIs
- Mindfulness practice
- Regular sleep schedule
- Trying to change my perspective on things that stressed me before.
Thanks for reading!
-Tyler C