Mindful Sleep Therapy

Dear All,

Mindful Sleep Therapy has recently been mentioned in the ‘Style’ section of the Sunday Times. To read the article please click here.

What is Mindful Sleep Therapy?…If you ask an insomniac what they do to try and sleep, they will give you a long list of almost ritualistic practices they must perform before bed. In my experience such behaviours only act to promote further sleep anxiety, planting seeds of doubt about our ability to sleep and making natural sleep even more difficult to achieve. Ironically it can be our modern ‘fix it’ approach to sleep that makes insomnia worse. Mindful Sleep Therapy teaches people to accept their insomnia, the theory being that the harder you try to fight it the more you fuel it, and the longer it will persist. It’s learning how to let go that allows individuals to sleep naturally again and get on with their lives.
Mindfulness is not a new approach, having been practiced by Buddhist monks for almost 2500 years. The basic principle is to observe what is going on in the present moment, instead of worrying about the past or imagining the future. And to say that its application to sleep is new is not exactly true either, because if you ask a good sleeper what they do to go to sleep they will tell you ‘nothing’. Mindfulness involves little more than learning to be aware of your thoughts, feeling and physical sensations moment by moment, with a non-judgemental attitude. It is this ‘non-doing’ that allows individuals to observe their reactions to poor sleep without trying to fight against it. Overcoming the desire to want to control and fix your sleep problem is the biggest challenge for anyone who has insomnia. But once an individual realises that he cannot stop his mind from coming up with unhelpful thoughts such as: “If I don’t sleep tonight, I will not be able to cope tomorrow”, he therefore no longer needs to abolish them, and instead simply allows them to be there. The result is that he learns to stop fearing his insomnia, and will soon find that he is cured.

If you would like to learn more about ‘Mindful Sleep’ and how it could potentially help you with your insomnia please visit the London Insomnia Clinic Website. Alternatively if you have a specific enquiry or would like to book a session please email me at guy@londoninsommiaclinic.co.uk.

Wishing you the best of sleep,

Dr. Guy Meadows (PhD)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 9:26 am and is filed under Press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.