A Guide To Meditation
This section of the website looks at the use of breathing, relaxation and meditation exercises to help manage insomnia and other common sleep disorders.
The information contained here will help you to relax and achieve sleep, but it should be combined with other recommended practices to create the best results. These practices include, but are not limited to, such things as your bedtime routine, diet, exercise and the use of dietary supplements and herbal remedies. In other words:
"This is just one weapon in your arsenal to fight insomnia and other sleep disorders."
Deep, sound and refreshing sleep is vital to your general health and well-being and sleep disorders can rob you of your rest, resulting in sleep deprivation. This, in turn, can lead to problems in your daytime activities. Sleepiness, distraction, ineffectiveness and irritability are all common in cases of sleep deprivation - not to mention the physical stress that sleep deprivation can put on your body's systems.
There are a variety of sleep disorders which affect people of all age groups and in a variety of different ways.
Chronic insomnia is a common sleep disorder that is estimated to affect 35 million Americans, with a further 20-30 million suffering from occasional, short-term or transient insomnia problems.
Sleep apnea, characterized by the interruption of breathing during sleep, affects an estimated 18 million Americans every year.
Restless legs syndrome, characterized by a tingling, crawling or prickling sensation in the legs and feet, affects some 12 million Americans annually.
Narcolepsy, Characterized by the body's inability to properly regulate sleep, affects nearly a ? million Americans each year.
Add to these the problems of jet lag associated with our increasing desire for travel and insomnia resulting from growing levels of shift work, and you can see that the management of sleep problems is a major topic of discussion in today's world.
While sleep medications may be effective for short periods of time, and to meet specific sleeping difficulties, they are not effective, or safe, in the longer term. The possible, indeed probable, side effects and addictive properties of the vast majority of sleep medications mean that the safest and healthiest way to resolve insomnia problems is to manage your care yourself.
There are a variety of behavioral therapy options that can teach you to create an environment conducive to rest and sleep and you can train your body to become relaxed and to recognize the patterns of behavior that are a precursor to sleep.
One group of skills that falls into this category is that associated with breathing, relaxation and meditation.
Breathing, relaxation and meditation exercises can not only help you to achieve sleep at night, but can also serve as valuable tools during the day. If you are tensing up in traffic, anxious about an upcoming meeting or simply feeling overwrought, several of the exercises contained in this report can be performed at just about anytime and almost anywhere.
Having these tools available to you will help you to manage your stress levels, not only making you feel better as a result of performing the exercises, but also having the added benefit of lowering the risk of diseases such as hypertension (high blood pressure), heart disease and stroke.
This guide is divided into the following sections:
The information contained here should NOT be used as a substitute for the advice of an appropriately qualified and licensed physician or other health care provider. The information provided here is for educational and informational purposes only and in no way should be considered as an offering of medical advice.
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