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During falling asleep, the mind often wanders between past and future thoughts, making it difficult to relax and sleep.
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The vipassana technique, based on meditation, helps to focus only on the sensations of the body, bringing the mind back to the present.
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Mapping body sensations without analyzing them helps reduce stray thoughts and facilitates falling asleep.
Haveyou ever had or still have trouble falling asleep? Do you lie down feeling obvious fatigue, but as soon as you close your eyes, your mind lights up like a carnival and starts thinking about literally everything? The falling asleep phase is most delicate because it must introduce and prepare the mind to change state and move from the alert to the dreamlike. Yet often, at this very juncture, she begins to go anywhere but in the direction of dreams. In fact, it is precisely in these moments that he begins to reprocess things from the past (have you ever, for example, remembered as soon as you closed your eyes something you were supposed to do and forgot to do? Here) and to the future. Just to put your mind at ease. The secret, which is the basis of the vipassana technique (a Buddhist meditation technique that however, rest assured, works even if you are not able to meditate nor if you are a Buddhist) that I will explain in a moment, is to focus only on the present moment and not on the past or the future. How to do it? With very relative mental effort and relying on your body and the sensations it gives you.
The technique
The basis of this technique is that the mind does not relax when you lie down because it starts wandering between thought and thought. Therefore, you have to focus it on something specific. This exercise focuses on the perception of sensations experienced by your body. Before you try it, keep in mind that you don’t have to name what you feel or analyze it, you just have to feel it and move on. How to do it?
- Close your eyes, inspire and exhale and focus on the breath and the air coming in and out of your body. Focus only on the feeling of your nostrils and lips as the air brushes against them
- Now shift your attention from the breath to the top of your neck and all the sensations you feel in that area. It can be tingling, slight pressure, pain, anything
- As soon as you sense something switch to a nearby area, until you cover your whole head a little at a time. The idea is to “map” your whole body and the sensations it produces by just recording them, in short, without naming them or looking for their causes
- Proceed toward the face (eyes, nose, cheeks, etc.) and then down the neck
- Continue to map the whole body. The more thorough the examination you make of each and every portion of your body, the less the exercise will last because you will fall asleep very soon.
Why does it work?
The foundation of this meditation technique is based on bringing every sensation experienced by the mind back to the present moment, so that it focuses only on the time in which you are experiencing/experiencing certain sensations, limiting or zeroing out its ability to reprocess the past or imagine the future. You might be able to do it then by just forcing yourself to think in the present tense but, if you notice, it is much more complicated to do it by thinking about the pure concept of the present tense (if you find out or if you know how to do it, tell us) than instead by gently “forcing” your mind to do it by focusing on your body and what it feels. Hey, are you still there? You didn’t fall asleep, did you! ;) (via The Ascent) https://runlovers.it/2014/limportanza-del-sonno/