Mindfulness meditation is to cultivate awareness of the present moment, self-sympathy, and not to pursue results, which is helpful to alleviate mental and physical pain. In recent ten years, there have been more and more empirical studies on mindfulness meditation to improve sleep. From 2008 to the beginning of 20 19, more than 12 randomized controlled trials on using mindfulness meditation to intervene insomnia or sleep disorders have been published. In the past two years, the data of new randomized controlled trials for postmenopausal women and elderly insomnia patients have also been published, and there are some other documents and analyses that prove the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in improving sleep disorders. Research shows that mindfulness meditation has the most significant therapeutic effect on improving the quality of self-reported sleep and reducing the total time of waking up from sleep when the total insomnia time remains unchanged.
When comparing a large number of empirical studies on mindfulness meditation therapy with other methods to treat insomnia, mindfulness meditation as an alternative therapy is very worthy of consideration. Generally speaking, a lot of evidence shows that mindfulness meditation can improve sleep quality and reduce insomnia symptoms of different groups of people. Compared with various studies on insomnia or sleep treatment, mindfulness meditation also has therapeutic effects. Similar to cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT- 1), mindfulness meditation is effective in measuring the quality of sleep and the severity of insomnia, and reduces the total waking time. Compared with drug therapy, mindfulness meditation is equivalent to or slightly better than drug therapy in reducing sleep latency and improving sleep quality. However, drug use has a higher risk of adverse events, such as acute cognitive impairment, although there is no data on adverse events related to active meditation and drug treatment.
People usually think that meditation is done at night, so it is easier to relax and fall asleep. However, as far as we know, no study has reported that meditation time is related to changes in sleep patterns. In our own mindfulness meditation research, we usually ask participants to practice meditation first when they don't sleep during the day. Once they gain experience in meditation practice, if they can't sleep, we allow them to meditate at night. However, we strongly warn them not to use meditation to try to fall asleep-this violates the principle of not relying on results. Further research is needed to determine whether there is an optimal meditation time.
In some research reviews, it is pointed out that more women have joined the randomized controlled trial of mindfulness because of sleep disorder. Maybe women are more interested in mindfulness, or women do better in mindfulness than cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT- 1) or insomnia medication. An early study in our laboratory found that in women, the excitement of awakening before sleep is related to negative emotions, while in men, it is related to internal sleep control points. These findings indicate that there are potential gender differences in cognitive-emotional patterns related to insomnia. Recently, we reported that mindfulness meditation can effectively reduce the cognitive arousal related to insomnia. These findings show that mindfulness meditation is very consistent with the cognitive-emotional characteristics of insomnia women.
In a word, practicing meditation has become a popular means of self-regulation, which can be used to manage stress, cope with chronic diseases and improve self-expression ability.
-the article is taken from the network.