Can Meditation Replace Sleep?

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Welcome to the Eastwesticism podcast where our host Todd Perelmuter shares the lessons he's learned spending eight years living with gurus, monks, lamas, and shamans across 35 countries and five continents. Join in the journey as he brings the best scientifically proven methods for living your best life from the east and the west, straight to you. The path to peace, love, health, and happiness starts here. 

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Hello, and welcome to path to peace with Todd Perelmuter. I'm your host, Todd Perelmuter, thank you so much for joining. Today, I'm going to answer a common question I get. And that question is, Can meditation replace sleep? And I understand where that question is coming from. 

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Meditation is so restful, and so energizing. And when you do it a lot, you do feel like you don't need sleep. And the truth of the matter is absolutely nothing can replace sleep, they just reach different levels of the brain states and they serve different functions.

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Meditation is very rejuvenating, and energizing. But sleep really detoxes the mind of all these chemicals that are built up during the day.

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Each has so many different phases of our brain states meditation, you know, takes us through these alpha waves and theta waves and beta waves and delta waves and sleep takes us through dream states and REM states. And each one serves a crucial and vital element to our well being to our long lives to our healthy lives. 

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Sleep is the number one indicator if you're sleep deprived, that you could develop Alzheimer's, make mistakes, from sleep deprivation, car accidents, lack of sleep is responsible for between two to 3% of GDP costs. 

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So whatever the GDP of a country is, sleep deprivation lowers that by about two to 3% because of the accidents, the illnesses, the mistakes on the job, that lowers productivity, and economic progress. 

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So sleep is incredibly important. It's very vital, you can't go without it, you really need between seven and nine hours of sleep. There's a few people who are genetically predisposed to not need as much sleep. But that's a very small number. 

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And it's it's a magical time, and it lets our body settle down and actively heal and restore itself. Meditation lets the mind settle down. You know, a lot of times in sleep, our mind is more active than worrying when we're awake. And so it's vitally important that we give our mind a break, and we let it settle down, and we let it find its peaceful, natural, restful state.

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Many people though, do report that they need less sleep when they meditate. And this is important to acknowledge because sometimes people aren't getting as deep asleep as they need. 

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Sometimes people don't pop out of bed in the morning, just ready to take on the day. And this is when a morning meditation can really help. And for some people who have trouble fitting in meditation throughout their day, setting the alarm clock an extra 20 or 30 minutes early, even just five or 10 minutes so that you can wake up and first thing you do is meditate can really feel like 10 cups of coffee, but without the heart jitters. 

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And you can just be rockin and rollin all day long, with a little bit of morning meditation. So the answer is no, it doesn't replace sleep. But it can be very energizing, very restful. You know, people say how can it be restful and energizing, because you need rest to have energy. And that's why meditation can really help you do all the things you need to get done in the day. 

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Focus. Increase your attention span, increase your awareness of what's going on around you. And most importantly, meditation can improve your sleep and improve the quality of your sleep. You know, one of the things that people so many people around the world, one in two people are sleep deprived, and it's caused by many things. 

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Obviously, it could be too much caffeine late at night. It could be too much white lights TV screens, computer screens, phone screens.

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That can delay your body's production of melatonin, the sleep chemical, because it thinks it's daytime still. But one of the main causes of sleeplessness is that racing, restless mind, and nothing can help that mind calm and quiet, like a meditation. And sleep aids, sleep medicines, alcohol, cannabis, they all can put you to sleep. But they don't give you quality sleep.

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They just knock you out. But they disrupt your brain's natural processes that you should go through when you're sleeping. And so it is very important to get real quality sleep. And there really is no better method than meditation and evening meditation 5-10, 15-20 minutes, you can even just do it until you fall asleep because it works wonders. And you'll probably be asleep before you can even get to 20 minutes.

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So when you're lying in bed, close your eyes, you know, it's also important to dim all the lights in your house a couple hours before bedtime, it lets your body know that we're getting ready for sleep. Try to put those screens away for as much as possible in the last hour before you go to bed. 

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And then when you're finally ready, get in bed, lie down, close your eyes. And practice your meditation practice whether it's saying, um, and you just say that to yourself in your mind over and over again. It's kind of like counting sheep, but for grownups.

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Or you can just turn your focus to your breath. And just observe the air coming in through your nostrils, filling up your lungs and your belly, and then coming back out and feeling every little detail and just turning your attention completely to your breath. This takes us out of our thinking mind, and puts us into our observing and just being mind. So that is more of a mindfulness meditation.

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And both of those, they're very simple, they're easy to do, they don't take a lot of effort. And so it's a really great way to just kind of either drift off or to just settle your mind to prepare you to go to sleep. So we all have so much stress in our days in our lives, that can really keep us up at night, we have so much to think about so many things we keep track of in our brain, what we have to do tomorrow, what we have to do at work, all the errands we have to run. 

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And we have this kind of constant, subtle fear underneath our consciousness at all times. I hope I don't forget anything. And so we've kind of conditioned ourselves to constantly be reminding ourselves and that's part of why we have this constantly racing mind. And it's more important than ever, that we just set aside a little bit of time to turn it all off in our mind and just focus on our breath or our mantra.

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Let go of all the worries of the day, heal ourselves from any stress we had that day by tapping into the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for our rest and recovery. And just fully prepare your mind and body that sleep is coming. 

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And the more you do this, the more your body knows, okay, we're meditating, that means sleeps coming, that means time to turn off the internal lights and get ready for bed. So it's a great way to improve the quality of your sleep, the length of your sleep. And if you're meditating, and you're finding you need less sleep, that's wonderful, too. It's very normal because you are giving your mind and body arrest during the day. It's wonderful. 

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And just just observe what happens and don't judge it and don't put stress on yourself. Just keep going and enjoy the process. Hope that answers your question. 

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Thank you so much for listening. This has been path to peace with Todd Perelmuter. You can follow us on social media at @toddperel please like and subscribe give us five stars and really means the world to us. Thank you so much for listening, peace and love. You were listening to the

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