Sleep With Meditation
Sleep Problems - Mindfulness Meditation, Medications and Mental Health
Theory and General Application as Related to Sleep Problems and in Anxiety-Unipolar Depression
To sleep or not to sleep, that is the question! No!!! Wrong question-Right question is no question but just “To Be!”
A. These are general principles and the approach can be applied to many similar problems having similar causes.
B. One reason you can’t sleep is that you can’t experience, mindfully pay attention or just be with the original stimulus that will allow you to sleep long enough, because you mind is overly involved with some other stimulus such as a thought, feeling, or physical sensation. You are in a sense distracted from falling asleep by an overly active mind.
C. Sleeping like a baby occurs because the “baby like mind “ has not put layers of thoughts, feeling and physical sensation in place to interfere with that sleep stimulus. The baby senses the undistorted stimulus and sleeps.
D. Peal back the layers of stuff interfering and there is a chance if you can get back to that original sleep stimulus like a baby does and you could sleep like a baby.
E. To sleep the body needs to relaxed and still, the mind needs to calm, clear and focused ,to be with that sleep stimulus, but the layers of thought, feeling and physical sensations won’t allow that.
F. Mindfulness meditation can help this problem with its two parts, the concentrative or meditative part will result in an relaxed , still body, and a calm focused clear mind, and the insight awareness or mindfulness part will help peal away the layers of thoughts, feelings and physical sensations ,” the clutter “,that is interfering.
G. The two parts work together with the mindfulness part being the more important, valuable, harder to learn and apply, but give results that last. The concentrative part is easier to learn and apply, with short term help only.
H. Dividing this into two part is artificial for the sake of learning , for in reality they are connected and highly dependent on each other, and you can’t learn or apply one without the other.
I. The short term fix is best learned by experience and practice , beginning with Mindfulness Breathing Awareness , then learning meditation dealing with distractions. To this add mindfulness breathing whenever possible throughout the day, even if for one to three minutes. Lastly trying it before you go to sleep, and expect nothing.
J. The long term results require some understanding of what mindfulness is, its characteristics, it attitudes, functions, principal and its psychology. The goal of mindfulness is to use it everywhere, anywhere and all the time.
K. Tonight you cant sleep, just one thought keeping you up, preventing you from paying attention and being with the sleep stimulus long enough so you can’t fall asleep and stay asleep and feeling rested. Nothing done previously makes the thought interfering with sleep go away, nor what you done to make sleep easier helps.
L. Mindfulness would say it is because of what you done to the sleep process and your thought process, actually the whole complex of sleep vs. not sleep, have both actually made matters worse. You already without knowing it added more and more layers of stuff to both the problem thought, trying to avoid it, ignore it, fight with it or understand it, and the same to the wish to sleep by doing perhaps opposite things.
M. You have attached too much stuff to both, and the whole problem “to sleep or not to sleep”, making matters worse. The stuff you attached increases the power of the interfering unwanted thought to pull you towards it, thus preventing sleep, and decreases the power of the sleep stimulus to pull you in, and allow sleep.
N. According to mindfulness psychology the problem is as follows. You started with one problem, the thing keeping you awake, say a negative thought that needs to be dealt with. The sleep stimulus itself isn’t a problem until you make it one, and then , you create a new problem connecting sleep to the original problem. Now you have three problems that are compounded by the following mechanism. You are overly attached to the desire to fall asleep, and equally over attached to the desire of avoidance of anything that mind prevent you from falling asleep. The mind sensing the pleasure vs. pain conflict starts changing and distorting things on both side of the equation and the actual equation itself,[the reality of sleep and / vs. the reality of the problem] taking you farther and farther away from both realities from the first moment of the conflict , to the present. It does this by adding and subtracting thoughts feeling, memories , wishes, plans, sensation, whatever, continuing to pull you away from you goal of sleep, and from dealing with the problem you are avoiding. This occurred by un mindful experience and can only be reversed by mindfulness.
O. What do you do? You need a new approach, a mindful approach, you got nothing too loose, you tried other things without success. The mindful approach would have you just experience the problem for what it is, in the here and now, before you added and subtracted things, like more thoughts, more fears , worries and other feelings, you added memories, and outcomes, putting you in past or future but not where you should be in the present. If you could mindfully be aware of this problem, with sufficient intensity and duration, the stuff you attached at both ends, the sleep wish end, and the thought interfering end ,will be pealed away, and you can approach sleep like a baby. How do you do this?
P. Mindfulness Meditation’s two parts, working together will help. First you learn how to do mindful meditative breathing over and over, until you can get into a very alert, relaxed, calm, mentally still and clear, focused mental state, then secondly you apply mindful experience to everything that comes up, including you sleep problem.
Q. The second part is is crucial and cant be stressed enough, to apply mindfulness first and always to everything you do, and specifically to your breathing and meditative practice, before, during and after every step.
R. Sleeping is one of those natural things that you cant interfere with too much or it just wont happen, you have to let it happen, something like breathing, or like our bowel habits, it is just one of those things that you have to let be, for it too work the best. The more our minds add to it, the more it fouls up the works.
S. Meditation is like this too, you cant make it happen, you cant expect anything, you cant be result oriented, you have let it happen, you can observe it, set some conditions to make it more likely to happen than not, but the bottom line is you just have to let it be, what it is and experience it. The less results you expect the more you’ll get.
T. We will use breathing as an anchor, our tool to help keep us in the here and now, and to develop higher and higher levels of concentration, relaxation & awareness, but we will be pulled off focus, by things called distractions.
U. These distractions are the very ones that are keeping you from sleeping, and as you deal with them in meditative practice and throughout the day you will get better with them when they interfere with sleep.
V. The functions, characteristics, and attitudes of mindfulness which you will learn and apply can eventually reduce and eliminate the distraction and the things interfering with you sleep. Adopting these for negative anxiety and depressive thinking goes a long way. These must be used consistently first and always in practice to be effective .
1) A present moment awareness, here and now, not the past or future, only the immediate present
2) Unconditional acceptance or what is present at the start adding or subtracting nothing
3) Equanimity is a balanced motivation not swayed by attractions, aversions or neutrality
4) Letting go of attachments to attractions, aversions and assumptions of neutrality
5) Non judgmental view , compassionate ,patient, kind , tolerant , no criticism-no comparisons- no decisions
6) Non-conceptual awareness, just experience its intensity-duration no thoughts, feeling, memories
7) Awareness of present as an ever changing temporary process, wave like, not separate, isolated thing like
8) Non-egotistic alertness to all in the present here and now without adding I, me or mine
9) Participatory observation, not detached, being both the observer and the non intellectual “experience-er”
10) Non-striving, no expectation of results or change, in a trusting, patient manner, doing, “just enough”
11) Beginner’s mind as if each moment is seen for the first time, unique, new, as it really is
12) Aware that all is connected and dependent on everything, in and out of conditioned space-time reality
Q. Mindfulness has three primary functions can help us with the stresses of daily living , by reminding us to:
1) Stay in the present doing and dealing with what we should be, rather than ignore it for the past or future
2) Respond to things based on how they really are not based on positive, negative or neutral emotions
3) Realize than no matter how complicated, intense, good or bad something appears, it is a temporary matter, that will pass and can be dealt with it if we can see its parts and how it is connected to other things
R. Practice Program: If you want to practice now go to: Sleep and Meditation
1) Part 1. Do mindfulness breathing awareness for at least one to three minutes throughout the day for at least two reasons, a. to get the general dose related effects helping anxiety, depression, stabilizing emotions, increasing relaxation, concentration, general mental calmness and increased awareness. b. to have the mind better prepared to deal with any problem, mental health or otherwise, and specifically for sleep , anxiety, depression related issues , more likely to have new insights that can be applied.
2) Part 2. Do your normal analytical thinking about your problem, but precede it with a preparatory period of mindfulness breathing, to prime the mind to better be able to deal with the problem. The longer your preparation period, the more primed your mind will be, and the better and more effectively will it problem solve. Continue the mindful breathing during and after you are done problem solving.
3) Part 3. Do mindfulness breathing long enough to sustain a mindfulness meditative state. When beginning this is best done by formal sitting meditative practice, though with practice the meditative state can be achieved quickly enough to be used in almost any situation. Here while in a formal meditative state one allows the problem to spontaneously arise as a distraction, and then is dealt with as such. Repeated mindful dealings will do two things, a. new experiential insights will occur that can be applied outside the meditation, b. little by little the existential glue and the layers of reality distortion held together by this glue that are increasing your problem, and decreasing the likelihood of achieving your goal will be burned off, and the layers pealed away, with problem relief, reduction and elimination, with enough time and practice. Results tend to be non linear like when learning to dance, play a sport, or play an instrument.
4) Part 4. Do analytic thinking, prepared by mindfulness breathing, as in part 2., to create a mental state or experience based on the problem your are dealing with, that becomes a new object of meditation.
a) First do mindfulness breathing for as long as it takes as in part 1, preparing the mind for the next steps
b) Now while continuing to do mindful breathing, do your usual analytic logical thinking to think about the problem in every way possible , adding your usual thoughts, feeling, memories, wishes, fantasies, bodily sensations, and whatever else come up, no hold barred here. As you do this a mental state will develop with associated sensations or experience that you may or may not be able to name, which is a good thing, because the more non conceptual it is, the better. Now the this new experience or sensations associated with the mental state you create when it reaches a certain level of intensity can become a new object of meditation, to focus on just like you did with the breathing and breath.
c) While still holding the new mental state in your mind, you focus on it over and over, still using your breath in the background to help. The new sensation now in your primary object of focus or meditation, and the goal is not to think about it, but to be mindfully aware of it, and when distracted , deal with the distraction but return back to the new sensation over and over, again using the breath as your back up focus. So the sequence may be like this, focus on the problems sensation over and over, if loosing focus, focus on breathing to increase awareness and focus, then return back to problem, distracted by something, deal with distraction, back to the problems sensation, using breath to help focus, problem, breath, distracted, problem, insights occur, and the layers will slowly melt away, with decrease in problem and anxiety
d) Go back to analytic thinking with less anxiety, new insights and some of the problem layers eliminated.
G. Key to Success: There are two essential processes that must be consistently applied in all of the steps or parts, mindfulness itself and mindful breathing, both with a mindful attitude. These two things applied to any problem in or out of the a meditative session or meditative state multiple times throughout the day will lessen the impact of any problem and eventually may help eliminate it, if done with a mindful attitude.
1) Apply mindfulness as a process first and always, 2) Use mindful breathing as an anchor and reminder for mindfulness, 3) Maintain a mindful attitude towards self and the problems, this in itself is highly therapeutic .