Mindful Sleep: A Three-Step Approach to Letting Go, Relaxing, and Harnessing Dreams

What if the start to a peaceful night’s rest wasn’t a new mattress, sleep aid, or gadget, but rather learning to let go? Mindfulness, the practice of paying attention to the present moment without judgment, offers exactly that. By empowering us to let go of spiraling, intrusive thoughts and return to the present moment, mindfulness can become a kind of superpower for sleep.

Learning to Let Go of Thoughts

Almost all of us know the frustration of lying in bed, physically exhausted but mentally wide-awake. Thoughts race through the mind—everything from unfinished work to future worries—making it difficult to drift into sleep. Mindfulness training teaches us to notice when we are lost and carried away by these thoughts, acknowledge them without judgment, and return to the present moment. This ability is crucial in working with intrusive thoughts that tend to creep in at the most inopportune times. We can learn to recognize when we’ve become lost in these downward thought spirals, and without judgment, let them go and return to the present moment and the sensation of our body in bed. This is one of the biggest gifts that mindfulness meditation can bring us, the ability to recognize when we are being carried away by our worries and fears, and let them go and no longer be caught in their grip. Mindfulness is a foundational tool for sleep, and on top of that we can build additional skills that can take us even further in optimizing our nighttime experience.

Learning to Intentionally Relax

As athletes, we often push our bodies and minds to their limits. We live busy days filled with training, conditioning, and high-pressure competitions, and this stress can accumulate in our body. If we do nothing to address it, it can potentially create challenges in falling asleep. In order to sleep at night, it’s important to find an outlet for intentional relaxation to relieve that stress and return our nervous system to a state of equilibrium. There are many different ways we can accomplish this, whether through connection with loved ones, connection with nature, breathwork, non-sleep deep rest, light movement & yoga, humming & sound - a big part of this sleep journey is learning your body and mind’s unique needs and your own individual preferences to find the best way for you personally to incorporate relaxation into your life.

Learning to Dream

Dreams are a fascinating yet often-overlooked component of sleep. Many people believe that dreams are just random noise, but modern sleep research suggests that they can serve important functions in the areas of emotional processing, problem-solving, and creativity. Our nightly experience can cover a huge spectrum of possibility, ranging from uplifting dreams that fuel us with creativity to frightening nightmares that fill us with fear and concern. Mindfulness - the skill of paying attention to the present moment without judgment - isn’t only useful to our daytime experience, it is also a useful tool that we can bring into the nighttime. By bringing mindfulness into our dreams, we can learn to observe these subconscious experiences with curiosity and non-judgement. Just as we can notice unhelpful thoughts during the day and let them go without judgment, so too we can learn to acknowledge a challenging anxiety dream or nightmare and let it go without judging the content of that dream. Our dreaming mind’s job is to process challenging emotions.

Understanding this fact can empower us to change our mindset about nightmares from one of fear and concern to one of appreciation and gratitude. Any time we experience a challenging dream, it is simply our dreaming mind doing its job, this difficult work of processing the vast array of emotions that we all experience in our daily life. Building awareness of our dream experience through mindfulness allows us to use our dream experiences as a tool for self-reflection, uncovering valuable information about our mental state and discovering creative solutions to challenges. Armed with these three skills - learning to let go of thoughts, learning to intentionally relax, and learning to dream - we can fully optimize the one-third of life we spend asleep in bed.

by Eric Spirko - Mindfulness of Sleep Coach