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Sleepiness
Sabre
Veteran
:vimp:
Dear all,
Lately I've been having quite some troubles staying sharp in meditation. It even came to the point that I fell asleep for a moment. But also outside of my meditation I experience this. I sleep a lot more than usually and still feel a bit drowsy when I get out of bed. Also my work is not getting the concentration I usually can give it.
I think it is just a reaction of my body to the short days this time of year on the northern hemispere, because so far I haven't found any mental causes.
Does anybody recognise this? Is there anything I can do other than waiting for it to pass? Or may there be a mental cause after all?
Maybe I should drink some more coffee instead of tea! :coffee:
Thanks in advance!
Sabre
Dear all,
Lately I've been having quite some troubles staying sharp in meditation. It even came to the point that I fell asleep for a moment. But also outside of my meditation I experience this. I sleep a lot more than usually and still feel a bit drowsy when I get out of bed. Also my work is not getting the concentration I usually can give it.
I think it is just a reaction of my body to the short days this time of year on the northern hemispere, because so far I haven't found any mental causes.
Does anybody recognise this? Is there anything I can do other than waiting for it to pass? Or may there be a mental cause after all?
Maybe I should drink some more coffee instead of tea! :coffee:
Thanks in advance!
Sabre
0
Comments
Try turning up the lights to simulate a long day. It may help to get a timer that turns on a bright light for you a half hour before you wake up. Heater lights also work great.
If you want to get hardcore, they sell special glasses that you can wear around that give you a dose of light.
Also, try to get some regular exercise.
Finally, you might want to supplement with a few thousand IUs of Vitamin D (the "sunshine vitamin"). Magnesium is also good to take with Vitamin D, as they work together. People are notoriously deficient in both. Do some research. Magnesium also helps some people with depression. Btw, vitamin D deficiency is linked to many health disorders, and vitamin D supplements have been shown to confer a wide range of benefits (check the web, there are a ton of studies).
If you don't want to take vitamin D, you can also get some by going to a tanning parlor regularly.
Finally, Omega-3 DHA (like fish oil) is supposed to help with maintaining a health brain and is also used to treat depression. (It's also the only supplement that consistently shows it reduces cardiovascular risks).
As for meditation, it still helps to meditate with a bright light on (even if your eyes are closed). Alternatively, you can keep your eyes open. Also, you may want to do some walking meditation, which is a great practice that isn't encouraged enough.
Generally when your relatively new to meditation and being mindful in daily life your mind just isn't used to being peaceful and calm. It's used to incessant thinking and processing data. Often the only time that such a mind is calm is in the moments before sleep. As the mind becomes more and more used to being calm, sleepiness becomes less and less of an issue, the habitual reaction of the mind equating calmness for time to sleep begins to resolve itself.
There are a few different things you can try. When meditating on the breath (which I assume is your meditation object) and you begin to notice the first signs of sleepiness, shift most of you attention from the breath to sleepiness itself, observe it and begin to know it. Then after a while "you" and the sleepiness become separate, "your" no longer sleepy, there's just sleepiness which arises and passes away; you're no longer fighting it which only serves to tire the mind even more. Once the sleepiness passes shift your attention back to the breath.
I think one of the main practices that got me through my period of sleepiness was taking up walking meditation. Nowadays I do just as much if not more walking meditation as I do sitting; it's difficult to fall asleep while walking! Also the act of walking itself generates energy.
Another thing you can try is doing some form of discursive meditation prior to doing breath meditation; this also helped me. Try doing metta or body sweeping meditation; just something that requires thought or contemplation, which makes the mind more active.
I'm not sure what your health is like but perhaps you could even just try eating a healthier diet and exercising more, this might help, if only a little, with sleepiness in daily life at least.
When you go through these sorts of periods of difficulty in meditation, it sometimes seems like it will always be this way, and then out of the blue it's no longer a problem.
Check out this video by Ajahn Jayasaro.
Thank you guys so much for the advice. I will look into everything. I'm sure it's going to work out.
Besides, today as I woke up, finally there is some sunshine again after a few weeks. :vimp:
I bought energy drink to try how it would influence my meditation. Ok, didn't fall asleep but this was even worse. Hard to sit still and even harder to still the mind. Not to be tried again.
Last attempt I took my sweater and shirt off during meditation. This worked remarkably well. My house is not very well heated so when I got out of meditation I was quite frozen, but whatever. It was not the best meditation ever but better than drifting off into dullness where you don't even know where your attention lies. So this might be a good idea for others who experience this problem.
Thanks again, will try more suggestions.
Although I do meditate before going to sleep, I also "meditate" all throughout the day. This is a technique of Samatha-Vipassana where you focus/observe the in- and out-breaths as you go through your daily activities, every moment. If you notice you've lost focus, re-focus. This creates something of a barrier between the mind and the world (mind-objects), as well as calming the mind which is the foundation of insight (Vipassana). Insight can arise at any time when the mind is in such a prepared tranquil state.
Anyway, today was a good day in the end with lots of hours of meditation, still drowsy, but without the actual sleeping. The moment before I went to bed (i was very tired) I realized.. No, wait I can do it now. And had a good meditation which totally made the tiredness disappear and replaced it with attention. I still don't know what it was that made the change but I will see in time.
Probably tomorrow will be worse than ever, though. :vimp:
But yeah.. well even if it's tiring it is good, maybe that was the 'insight' I got.. thinking this up as I'm typing. But anyway, off to bed now.
Happy new year y'all! Have a good night without much sleep. :rolleyes: :nyah:
@buddhajunkie: I started the vitamins you suggested and they seem to be working physicly (might be placebo effect :crazy: ) Sleepiness will probably still be a long time hindrance for me mentally, though. I will probably come back here for some more advice sooner or later. Thanks again @Magga for the support. :vimp:
In metta,
Raven
You might want to consider seeing a sleep specialist and/or doing a sleep study. You may have a mild form of sleep apnea which could be solved by something as easy as changing sleeping position or getting a nighttime dental appliance.
You probably lack sleep.
However, like everything, this too can be an encouragement to practice. I have had to learn that I cannot control meditation - often I drift off. Sometimes I even snore in a meeting, which is really embarrassing! (embarrassment is good for controlling the ego, so my teacher tells me). But being unable to control drifting off now means that when I am alert in meditation, I feel compelled to be extra alert and make the best of that phase.
I also tend to forget about the sleepy periods and concentrate instead on the bits where I can do something - endlessly circling the metaphorical carpet about my tendency to fall asleep wears out the carpet and achieves nothing. So, sometimes I sleep. It is just a reminder that I do not control my mind - yet.
I personally do not consider sleepiness as suffering - it is struggling to be alert that is difficult, not the state of being sleepy. I have even meditated on my sleepiness! It is quite interesting to observe, if you can stay awake long enough to observe it.
My advice FWIW: take your sleepiness, accept it as a part of you and see what you can do with it. You might be surprised.
I often meditate with a friend who has had a heart transplant. She can be very sick sometimes, with the horrible medications etc. she has to take, and she gets very tired and worried. Recently, every time we meditate, she's asleep within minutes but you know, listening to her relaxed breathing makes me smile. I don't think its a waste of her time - I think during meditation is one of the few times she gets any respite.
I think too many people are discouraged from trying meditation for fear of falling asleep but it really isn't a problem. After all, as Genkaku pointed out, you can't sleep for a week.
I learned that my sleepiness in meditation is partly because of the fact I relax my mind before it has the chance to become mindful and aware. So then I just fall asleep.
My sleepiness in the rest of my life is gone since I started taking the vitamins and magnesium as suggested in one of the posts. Thanks a lot! But the sun also came back again after all those grey and snowy days. I guess this also has to do with it. Al lot of mamals hibernate during the winter, I think there is some part in humans that also wants to.