Insomnia Help: Quieting the Mind at Night
Are you like me? Do you often wake up in the middle of the night and have a hard time shutting your mind off so you can go back to sleep? Insomnia can impact so many aspects of our health. When you can’t sleep, your biological clock gets disrupted and it can impact your weight, your stress levels, and your body’s ability to rejuvenate itself and heal from day-to-day stress.
Until recently, I have had a problem waking up in the middle of the night for one reason or another and not being able to go back to sleep. My mind chatter would ramp up for 2-3 hours. It seemed I’d finally get back to sleep and just when I reached REM state, my alarm would wake me up. I’d rise from my bed feeling exhausted and already looking forward to a nap.
The Power of Meditation to Quiet Mind Chatter
Per the suggestion of a friend, I took up doing a 1-hour meditation each day. It’s a basic meditation that requires no sound or special recordings. You just focus on feeling the breath in one spot of your nose that you select. If your mind wanders, no big deal, just notice and bring your focus back to your nose.
After about a week of meditating daily, I started meditating at night … I figured if I was awake, I’d meditate. I meditated several nights during that second week, but didn’t actually fall asleep much faster. But, amazingly, I did feel well-rested.
Another interesting thing happened. I no longer felt stress about waking up in the middle of the night. If I woke up and my mind started going, no big deal, I’d just meditate.
Now I don’t have to do a full meditation to go to sleep. I just do the same process of clearing my mind by focusing on the feeling of my breath in my nose. My mind clears, and I go back to sleep rather quickly.
This breathing technique is handy at any time of day to clear my mind chatter. These long meditations basically trained me to quiet my brain and release the angst about waking up at night. I realize now that the stress I felt about waking up in the night only served to exacerbated the insomnia.
Added Benefits of Meditation
I’m also noticing how much this mind chatter throughout the day is total nonsense. It’s either unnecessary narration of life, or it’s making up stuff about what could happen in the future. I’m beginning to see how so many misunderstandings between people are caused primarily because of mind chatter interpretation of what someone else said or did. None of it’s real.
When I clear these rambling or hyper-analyzing thoughts and surrender to what is actually so, in the moment, I have so much more peace of mind. That peace of mind spills into the world around me.
I’m starting to see how if more of us could find inner peace, we’d have a lot more outer peace.
For more ideas for clearing your mind chatter, you might be interested in my “Clear Mind Clutter and Liberate Your Light” Course
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