More and more people have trouble falling asleep and/or sleeping through which are caused by negative thoughts, stressful situations and worrying. Meditating before bedtime can remedy this!
What is meditation?
Meditation is a way to get out of your head and detach from your thoughts. In fact, by meditating, you signal to your brain that it can relax, and then your body will naturally follow. And you can probably imagine that a relaxed brain and body fall asleep much easier than a brain and body running at full speed.
The effectiveness of meditation comes from the effect it has on your brain. Meditation activates your parasympathetic nervous system. It also stimulates the increase of specific brainwaves and slows down your breathing and heart rate. Finally, meditation affects the production of calming neurotransmitters and hormones such as GABA, serotonin and melatonin (also known as your sleep hormone).
4 meditation exercises to promote your sleep
Meditating can be done in many different ways. In this article, we share some techniques known for their positive effect on sleep and relaxation.
1. Guided meditation
A guided meditation can help you get into the right state of mind. In a guided meditation, you meditate on texts spoken by someone else. These texts can range from a breathing exercise to saying affirmations, for example.
Guided meditations can be found on YouTube, Spotify and various apps.
2. Meditating with binaural beats
With binaural beats, you can stimulate brain waves such as alpha and beta waves. Alpha waves often occur during daydreaming and relaxation, while beta waves are usually measured just before falling asleep or waking up. By listening to these binaural beats, which can be found on YouTube and Spotify, among others, you create peace and quiet in your mind that will help you fall asleep better.
3. Body scan meditation
Would you like to fall asleep, but your head keeps rattling with shopping lists and tasks for the next day? Then a body scan is a very nice exercise to come completely in the here and now and become aware of your body.
During a body scan, you make a scan of your entire body with your mind, as if you were going very slowly from your crown to your toes with a scanner. By focusing on each place the scanner passes in your body, you discover where tensions and pains are located. What sensations are you experiencing? Perhaps you feel tingling in your fingers or a pinched feeling in your stomach? Often these tensions are physical manifestations of mental stress, which the body scan helps you release so that you can fall asleep more easily.
4. Gratitude Meditation
Being grateful is one of the best things you can do. For example, you can write down 3 things you are grateful for every day, or you can do a gratitude meditation to become aware of the beautiful things in your life on a daily basis.
Each day before you go to sleep, name in your mind several things (at least 3) for which you are grateful that day. These may also be very small things. By ending your day on a positive note, over time you will find that you fall asleep more and more relaxed.