Waking Up Anxious

If you are blessed with being able to get a regular eight hours of sleep every night without interruption you are fortunate. You almost certainly rise refreshed and ready to take on the day. Your thinking will be sharp and your decision making focussed and effective. Your behaviour will be consistent and emotionally you will feel centred and balanced. Headaches, inconsistent bowel movements and accidents hardly ever occur.

The alternative scenario of finding it difficult to get to sleep and stay asleep, of waking in the night with a ‘tumble dryer’ of thoughts swirling around and getting up feeling anxious is common.

Sleep is Nature’s gift to ensure that the body and mind can process and heal. This is the time when the body heals itself at the cellular level and the mind processes information. Consistent and chronic poor sleep will impact on both mental and physical health, compromising the immune system and long term memory.

How to counteract poor sleep

To counteract this it would be helpful to take up a technique which gently helps you question your negative or anxious thoughts and helps you take on and do things you'd usually avoid because they make you anxious.

Waking up anxious is possibly a sign that the brain is not taking the opportunity of sleep to effectively process information and de-stress. One of the reasons people don’t sleep well is because they are overloaded with stress. Sleep is the most natural de-stressor, but so often we find it difficult to get to sleep or stay asleep. Those nights when the mind is tossing around a multitude of thoughts are very debilitating. By taking up a meditation technique like Vedic Meditation, which I teach, removing stress and long held fatigue becomes easy.

Meditation for modern life

Vedic Meditation is an easy to learn and easy to practice mental technique practised sitting in a chair undisturbed with the eyes closed. You think a mantra, a sound chosen by the teacher, which quietens the mind, and the body rests very deeply. After 20 minutes you come out refreshed, energised and feeling happy. When this is practised twice a day anxiety soon melts away.

Meditation does not replace sleep but it does clear the mind of all those anxieties and worries that can sabotage our time when eyes are shut. It also helps with critical thinking, memory retention, creativity, increased productivity and improved relationships. Feeling calm and more focussed is a great way to approach the day.

You can read more about how Vedic Meditation can supplement sleep in my post Meditation vs Sleep and read more about how Vedic Meditation helps you sleep and why it’s important.

Thinking that meditation could help you sleep better and manage stress? Come along to one of our free introductory talks in London.

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