So, you slept nada last night.
And today might be doable if you could catch some quick shuteye halfway through.
But, unfortunately, you’re the sort who’s worse off after attempting a midday micro snooze. Whether it’s ten minutes or twenty, all laying down does is squash what little momentum you managed to dredge up when you peeled yourself from your pillow this morning. And then the rest of the day feels impossible. You’re not alone. This is classic sleep inertia: interrupting a sleep cycle and feeling bewildered as a result. I get it too, actually. For me, napping is like playing Russian roulette with a lethargy bullet. Maybe it’ll clear the cognitive cobwebs. Maybe it’ll make me leave the house with two different shoes on and forget the coffee I so desperately needed on the roof of my Honda as I drive away. I never know. But when I know that I can’t risk feeling even worse than my night of insomnia left me, I can always turn to one side effect free refresher that’s tried and true:
Meditation.
Given that you’re sitting up the whole time, not sleeping, and in a state of restful awareness, there’s no worry of interrupting any sleep cycles. None have been initiated to begin with. That’s the first benefit. The second is that you get to rest the ogle orbs living in your skull. The twofer to this is that those muscles finally get a break; but, also, constantly visually processing information is fatiguing. We’re perpetually judging what unfolds around us, whether intentionally or not. And this creates a level of stress that ultimately results in fatigue. By nixing our visual input for a bit, we get to diminish one contributor to the stress that’s making us even more tired than we already were after a sleepless night.
But that’s not the only way meditation stops us from succumbing to stress. Even without witnessing the world around us, we’re still victim to another anxiety inducer. And it’s the biggest one we’ve got: our own minds. By sitting in quiet, lightless silence, and focusing solely on a mantra or your breath, the spotlight slowly swings away from what is wearing us down from the inside out – and onto the comfort of a repetitive mental effleurage, coupled with the sensation of comfort that comes with it. The shoulders begin to loosen. The neck feels less tight. A weightlessness transpires in the chest. Constructive ideas on what our next move should be may even arise. And, suddenly any the attachment to whatever was siphoning from our already low gas tank’s eradicated, letting us complete the day peacefully, and with better awareness. What’s more, our brain gets better at whatever habit we practice. So, if we practice focus and body calming for a good twenty minutes, the chances of that accompanying us through the day’s remainder are excellent.
Now, there is one issue you may face as you try this. As a beginner, it’s easy to get stressed out when you realize you’re not meditating, but worrying for the duration of your time trying. Sure, you start with the mantra. But then it quickly spirals out. This is totally normal and expected. We come to meditation due to our tendency toward an overblown stress response. So, we shouldn’t expect anything from ourselves but a stress response when we find ourselves mentally straying. That’s just habit kicking in. And, like all habits, it takes time to break. The trick? Learn to be humored by it. Have a laugh at the fact that your brain is running away, like a fuzzy puppy from a bath. Do you get mad at a puppy? No. You find its errant nature nearly adorable. Likewise with the mind. It needs cleaning, it’s trying to run away, and your only task is to lovingly draw it back to your breath or the mantra. And while that concept of “self love” may sound silly and new-age-y to some, it’s actually not. It’s just a replacement thought programming for the current one – which is to stress out about everything. (Which is probably why we’re not sleeping in the first place.) I promise the replacement is better.
So, in sum, if you can’t get midday shuteye, try opening your third eye instead.