Sleep and meditation are two practices that have been used for centuries to promote physical, mental, and emotional health. While both activities reduce stress and help to revitalize the body and mind, they are not the same. Sleep is essential for living, while meditation is essential to living life in the best way. Sleep and meditation are similar in that they both contribute to physical, mental and emotional health and well-being.
Both reduce stress and help revitalize the body and mind. Meditation and sleep are hypometabolic states, in which breathing and other bodily activities decrease. Both release tensions, but the rest that meditation provides is much deeper than the rest that comes from sleep. Therefore, the deepest ingrained impressions, or samskaras, leave the system.
Perhaps the main thing to keep in mind is that, as far as the body is concerned, meditation and sleep are two different things. While sleep is meant to replenish your energy and help you heal, meditation is designed to cancel the stress that tired you in the first place. A little chicken and egg.
Sleep meditation
is a practice or technique that produces a state of deep relaxation while awake and alert.Researchers found that reduced sleep is quite common at times of intensive meditation practice, such as multi-day silent retreats. Sleeping less is often considered a sign of meditative ability and progress. Buddhist texts suggest that competent meditators sleep about 4 hours a night. For starters, Bruce O'Hara of the University of Kentucky recommends replacing only half the amount of sleep with meditation. Proper diet & exercise; a calm, cool and calm environment to sleep; set food and bedtime; reduce the amount of alcohol and caffeine consumed at night, all these things can have a big impact on your sleep.
You can slowly increase the length of your meditation sessions and experiment with shorter sleep times. The second part of the study looked at the amount of sleep and mental acuity of experienced meditators compared to a group of non-meditators. Sleep is like a brain scrub, sleep helps the brain remove many toxic by-products and a chemical called beta-amyloid that can cause Alzheimer's if allowed to build up. Although in sleep consciousness is not active in any of its ways, it is still present as a witness of sleep. Although sleep and meditation share some common characteristics, they have slightly different effects on the body and mind. Instead, it is better to think of sleep and lack of brightness during meditation as the release of fatigue and stress.
