Imagine a perfect night’s sleep — one where you fall asleep easily and peacefully, and wake up completely refreshed and feeling confident in your ability to take on any challenge the day wants to throw at you.
How often do you get sleep like that?
Getting to a place where you answer that question with “most of the time” or “every night” is easier than you might think. All it takes from you is the desire to live a healthy life and the willingness and devotion to practice a simple technique to achieve that goal.
First, it’s important to understand how sleep really affects your life. It’s even more important to see that, in the end, how well you manage your life will greatly affect how well you sleep. We’re going to discuss this in detail and then show you how using meditation and binaural beats for sleep can change your body’s ingrained habit of having terrible sleep.
Great Sleep Is Critical for Living a Healthy Life
Falling asleep peacefully and staying asleep throughout the night is nourishing for every part of you. It recharges and rejuvenates your mind, body, and spirit. Without that recharge, you’re like a battery running on low.
Imagine trying to watch a movie on your phone with every app open and 5% battery life left. It would be a frustrating and miserable experience that wouldn’t last too long. That’s what it’s like trying to run your life without restful sleep.
Your body and your mind simply can’t perform well if you can’t sleep well. If your body and mind aren’t performing well, then every aspect of your life will suffer. From relationships and emotional health to physical well-being and spiritual satisfaction, sleep problems will seep into every area of your life and wreak havoc.
It’s not easy to fall asleep
It seems like it should be natural, especially when you’re exhausted and tired. Yet, falling asleep might be an incredibly frustrating experience for you. There are a number of reasons this could be the case:
- You have an imbalance of melatonin (the sleep hormone in your brain).
- You had too much caffeine and sugar throughout the day.
- You are stressed, anxious, depressed, or unhappy.
- Your body and mind are imbalanced because of health issues.
When your mind, body, and spirit are balanced, you can fall asleep easily and rest peacefully through the night. Restful sleep happens because you are flowing through the natural rhythm and cycle of life.
You can think of each day as a wave of energy. When you ride with the wave, everything feels right. When some part of you fights against the wave, however, you feel overcome by it and you may even feel like you’re drowning. Rather than feeling like you’re simply flowing with life, you feel like you’re being controlled by it and it exhausts you.
How does this affect your sleep?
The way you manage your life is directly related to how well you sleep. As we discussed before, there are a number of reasons you might have a problem sleeping. In any case, some part of your life is out of balance. You’re not flowing with life as it happens around you. You are crashing up against the wave.
By getting in tune with the natural cycles of life and the natural cycles of your energy, you will be able to flow with them. Rather than feeling completely exhausted by what life has thrown your way, you’ll be able to accept it and even embrace it. Peaceful sleep happens in that place.
Using Meditation to Help You Fall Asleep
Meditation is a powerful tool that helps you get in touch with that natural energy cycle. By practicing awareness, you actually become a calmer person and you let go of the need to control. Life will always happen around you, and using meditation to flow with life instead of against it can have powerful effects on your sleep.
There are two ways you can use meditation for sleep.
1. You can start practicing meditation every day
You can begin by focusing on your breath and learning to become aware of your body and your reactions. Awareness alone is a powerful tool in changing your reactions. Simply put, you cannot change what you are not aware of.
2. You can use meditation to calm your mind and your spirit as you drift off to sleep
Using a guided meditation that teaches you how to relax the tension in your body and free your mind from negative thoughts would be the most beneficial type of meditation for you as you fall asleep.
Binaural Beats Meditation
You can increase the benefits of meditation and amp up your meditation practice for sleep by also using binaural beats for sleep. Without getting too technical, binaural beats are the beats that your brain makes up when it is presented with two different tones in each ear.
This imaginary beat can stimulate certain brain waves, which is important for sleep because your brain needs to go through different cycles of brainwaves to achieve a restful night of sleep. By using binaural beats for sleep, you can actually train your brain to get back on its natural cycle of sleep. Binaural beats can eliminate your sleeping problems by peacefully motivating your brain to sync up with natural energy cycles.
By placing headphones on and turning on a binaural beats track designed to induce sleep, you can practice your awareness meditations and feel your body naturally descend into a restful sleep. Once your brain responds to the binaural beats, it will continue through natural sleep cycles of awake to deep sleep.
TIP: Set your alarm for an interval where you’re not in the deepest stage of sleep and you’ll wake up feeling rejuvenated.
Give Yourself the Joy of a Great Night’s Sleep
A restful night’s sleep is one of the greatest things you can do for your mind, body, and spirit. Follow the suggestions below to get your body back in balance and flowing with its natural energy:
- Make sure you are eating a healthy diet. Avoid too much caffeine and sugar. Eat nutrient-rich foods and protein for dinner. Your body uses protein while you sleep to recover from the day and restore your energy levels.
- Don’t watch TV or look at your computer or phone screen before going to bed. Your body’s sleep hormone, melatonin, responds to light. It naturally kicks in when the sunsets. Looking into bright screens can confuse this hormone and disturb your natural sleep cycles.
- Start a daily meditation practice. Begin a meditation practice that focuses on awareness. By becoming aware of your natural responses, reactions, and energy levels, you can begin to make positive changes.
- Use relaxing meditations as you fall asleep. Learn how to use meditation to relax the tension in your muscles and calm your thoughts. This can help you clear your mind and body of stress before falling asleep.
- Use binaural beats to naturally change your brainwaves. Lull yourself into a peaceful sleep by adding binaural beats to your meditation practice at night. Listen to binaural beats as you meditate to enhance the effects of your meditation. Or, use binaural beats as you sleep to train your brain to maintain a natural cycle of sleeping brainwaves.
