Guided sleep meditation is a method for helping you to let go of worrying thoughts and relax your body before bed.
Like other forms of meditation, this practice involves moving your focus away from your thoughts to sensations in your body. Regular practice of guided sleep meditation has been shown to improve sleep, meaning that this method is an important strategy that you can use to help reduce problems falling and staying asleep.
According to the International Sleep Association, around 30 percent of adults have short-term problems with insomnia, and about 10 percent have chronic difficulties with falling and/or staying asleep. What's more, around a third of adults report typically getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night. Given that adults need 7 to 9 hours of sleep to function best, and teenagers need even more (8 to 10 hours), it's not surprising that methods for improving sleep are becoming more well-known.
Better sleep can contribute to lowering stress and an improved immune system. However, achieving restful sleep can be hard if you are battling stress and anxiety—it can be simply hard to quiet your mind. Many issues around sleep begin with your thinking processes at night. This is where guided sleep meditation can help.
In simple terms, guided sleep meditation involves meditating before sleep, typically while you are lying in bed. While you can practice sleep meditation on your own, guided practice usually means that you listen to an audio recording that directs you through the steps of the guided sleep meditation.
The goal of guided sleep meditation is to reduce the impact of worrying thoughts and tension in your body on your sleep. By learning how to shift your focus and relax your body, you will start to notice improvements in your ability to fall and stay asleep.
Benefits
Meditation helps you to rest in the present moment. When you lay your head on the pillow at night, it's likely that you begin to focus on the thoughts you were suppressed during the day. Without any outside distractions, it can be hard to control runaway thoughts that may lead to anxiety and depression.
Guided sleep meditation allows you to let go of the thoughts that are swirling and to rest your mind. In turn, this activates your nervous system which helps to lower your heart rate and slow down your breathing rate. All of these changes prepare you for sleep—you may even find yourself drifting off to sleep in the middle of the meditation practice.
You should also notice daytime benefits of doing guided sleep practice, since getting enough sleep at night is related to how you feel during the day.
The best guided sleep meditations will involve you following along with an audio guide that you can play on headphones or on a small speaker beside your bed. The goal is to not have to think too much about what you are doing—rather, you let yourself be guided by the voice on the recording.
Over time, you should find it easier to jump into the meditation and follow the prompts. So, don't give up too early if you find at first that you can't calm down or relax when doing the meditation.
- You will also get access to our private community group full of likeminded people that help motivate each other on a daily basis.