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Sleep meditation

Not every sleepless night is the same. Sometimes your mind keeps going round one thing. Sometimes it’s tomorrow’s list. Sometimes your body is more awake than you are. And sometimes the trouble is trying so hard to sleep. A sleep meditation works best when it fits the night you’re having. This guide helps you choose one, and says what the research does and doesn’t show.

What a sleep meditation can do

A sleep meditation can’t make you fall asleep. Nothing can, on demand. Michael Singer puts it simply: you can’t fall asleep at will. What a meditation can do is give your attention somewhere easy to rest. Then the thoughts that keep you up have less to hold on to, and sleep can come by itself. You don’t need to make your mind blank first, and you can fall asleep before the meditation ends.

The research is encouraging, but modest. A 2019 review pooled 18 trials of mindfulness meditation. Compared with classes that took the same time, such as health or sleep-hygiene education, meditation improved sleep quality by a small to moderate amount. Compared with proven sleep treatments, the review found no clear difference. The authors call their findings preliminary.

Which one for tonight

The sleep meditations here run from about 4 minutes to 35. Here they are by length:

In bed

These meditations by length. Each dot opens its meditation.

When your mind keeps going round one thing

A worry, a conversation, a plan for tomorrow. The more you follow it, the more awake you get. It helps to give the mind something else to do, something less gripping than the thought it keeps coming back to. That’s the idea behind the cognitive shuffle, below. Shuffled Asleep names small, ordinary things one at a time, so you can picture each one and let it go. There’s no story to finish.

When tomorrow’s list keeps running

Put the list somewhere. In one sleep-lab study, young adults spent five minutes before bed writing either a to-do list or a list of what they’d already done. Those who wrote the to-do list fell asleep faster. The more specific their list, the faster they fell asleep. If you’re worried you’ll forget something, write it down before you listen. Set Down Tomorrow does the rest in your imagination. You name each thing waiting for tomorrow, and set it down on a table by the door.

When your body is more awake than you are

If you’re restless, tense or wired, start with the body rather than the mind. Night Weight hands your body to the bed, part by part, starting from the feet. You can turn over, change position or skip a part. Quiet Current, to Sleep is for a night when arousal or restlessness keeps you awake. It lets the feeling be, and widens to the whole of you. A body scan works in a similar way: see Body scan meditation.

When trying to sleep is the trouble

Sleep researchers describe a loop. You pay close attention to sleep, you try to make it happen, and the effort itself keeps you awake. Sleep therapy has a practice for this called paradoxical intention. You stop trying to fall asleep, and let yourself rest awake. Allowed to Stay Awake tells you there’s no need to sleep tonight. There’s more on this in Meditation to stay awake.

When the day is still on you

Let It Rain Tonight lets the rain wash the day off, from head to feet, without going back over it. The piano thins away, and the rain carries on after the voice. For something short, Feel to Heal is a four-minute poem, read slowly over sleep music.

The cognitive shuffle

The cognitive shuffle is a way of settling for sleep by picturing unrelated things, one after another. The cognitive scientist Luc Beaudoin developed it, and calls it serial diverse imagining. The pictures have no plot, so there’s less reason to stay with one thought and work it out. It’s different from counting sheep. Counting keeps a sequence going, and you always know what comes next. The shuffle keeps changing the subject.

To try it on your own:

Choose a plain word with several different letters, such as plant.
Think of an ordinary thing that starts with its first letter, P. Picture it for a few seconds, without building a scene around it.
Let it go, and picture another thing that starts with P.
Move on to the next letter when you want to. There’s no number of pictures to reach.
If you get sleepy, let the exercise fade. You don’t need to remember where you stopped.

For plant, that might go:

P: a pear, a pencil, a puddle.
L: a ladder, a lemon, a leaf.
A: an apron, an acorn, an aeroplane.
N: a notebook, a nest, a needle.
T: a towel, a teacup, a tunnel.

The letters only help you find unrelated things. They aren’t a puzzle to finish. If you catch yourself hunting for a clever word, make it easier. Repeat a familiar object, change letters early, or leave the word behind. If a picture brings up a worry or a hard memory, let it go and choose something more ordinary. People vary in how easily they picture things, so if this one doesn’t suit you, that’s fine.

A voice can do the choosing for you. In Shuffled Asleep, the voice names the things and spaces them further and further apart, so all you do is picture them. You can miss one, or lose your place. There’s no place to keep.

The evidence is early. Beaudoin presented his own study in 2016. In it, 154 university students who had trouble with bedtime thoughts tried the shuffle, a problem-solving exercise done earlier in the evening, or both. All three groups slept better and felt less wound up at bedtime than when they started. But every group got something, so the study can’t say how much would have improved without any of them. An earlier study, from 2002, is encouraging too. People with insomnia who used an engaging imagery task fell asleep sooner than those given no instructions. So try it, and keep it if it works for you.

How to listen in bed

Set the volume before you settle, just loud enough to follow.
You don’t need headphones. If you like them, choose soft ones made for sleeping in.
Most of the sleep meditations here end in sleep music, with no voice to wake you.
The player has a sleep timer that fades the track out. Setting it also opens the Night screen, which is true black with nothing moving.
You can miss words, and stop following when sleep comes. Falling asleep partway through is the point.

If you’re still awake

A meditation has no deadline for putting you to sleep. Checking whether it’s working can become one more thing to keep track of. If the recording starts to annoy you, turn it off. If you’re lying awake and getting frustrated, get up and do something quiet for a while. Go back to bed when you feel sleepy. That’s also part of the standard advice for insomnia.

When to see a doctor

A sleep meditation is a way of settling for the night. It isn’t a treatment for insomnia. If trouble sleeping lasts for weeks, keeps coming back, or affects your days, talk to a doctor. For long-lasting insomnia, the American College of Physicians recommends cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) as the first treatment. A meditation can sit alongside it.

In these meditations

Shuffled Asleep, for a mind going round one thing.
Set Down Tomorrow, for tomorrow’s list.
Night Weight, to hand your body to the bed.
Quiet Current, to Sleep, for a body more awake than you are.
Allowed to Stay Awake, for when trying to sleep is the trouble.
Let It Rain Tonight, to let the day wash off.
Feel to Heal, a four-minute poem.
All the sleep meditations, in one playlist.