Break the cycle of anxious thinking and rumination that keeps you up at night. With this much-needed guide, you’ll learn to quiet your mind, relax your body, feel less tense, and finally get the sleep you need. Sleep plays a crucial role in our waking lives. While we sleep, our bodies are recharging with energy, damaged tissue is repaired, and our memories are stored. When we don't get enough sleep, we are tired, less positive, less motivated, less focused, and more likely to feel depressed. We may even experience more intense cravings for high-fat, sugar-rich foods. And yet, despite the myriad advantages of getting a good night's sleep, countless people suffer from chronic insomnia. If you’re one of them, this book can help. In this guide, a trained mindfulness expert teams up with a behavioral sleep specialist to offer evidence-based meditations and an innovative four-week protocol to address the emotional stresses and anxieties that lie at the root of sleep issues. You’ll learn practices grounded in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), mindful self-compassion (MSC), and guided mindfulness and acceptance for insomnia (GMATI) to alleviate the mental, emotional, and physical suffering caused by insomnia. You’ll also learn to identify both internal and external factors that may be compromising your sleep, and develop a plan to address these issues. There is nothing we can do to “make” ourselves fall asleep. In many ways, this is why insomnia can be so maddening. But what we can do is help create the conditions necessary for healthy slumber. The mindfulness tools in this book will help you do exactly that.

Insomnia is a pervasive problem among adults that impairs cognitive abilities and the immune system, and it can intensify other mental and physical disorders. Yet, existing medical, psychological, and alternative treatments have only limited success in treating this persistent disorder. In this clinical guide, Jason Ong introduces mental health practitioners to an innovative, evidence-based form of treatment to treat chronic insomnia: mindfulness-based therapy for insomnia (MBTI). MBTI is an 8-session group intervention that combines mindfulness meditation with principles and strategies derived from cognitive behavioral therapy. Through guided meditations, group discussions, and daily activities performed at home, participants cultivate greater self-awareness and change their unhealthy thoughts and behaviours surrounding sleep to reduce stress, sleeplessness, and other insomnia symptoms long after treatment has ended. As well as teaching mental health professionals how to integrate MBTI into their own practices through detailed session-by-session guidelines, this book helps practitioners evaluate potential participants prior to treatment by assessing any physical and psychological issues that underlie their insomnia and determining whether MBTI will be appropriate for them. Practitioner competency is also given special focus.

In this time of quarantine and global uncertainty, it can be difficult to deal with the increased stress and anxiety. Using ancient self-care techniques rediscovered by Herbert Benson, M.D., a pioneer in mind/body medicine for health and wellness, you can relieve your stress, anxiety, and depression at home with just ten minutes a day. Herbert Benson, M.D., first wrote about a simple, effective mind/body approach to lowering blood pressure in The Relaxation Response. When Dr. Benson introduced this approach to relieving stress over forty years ago, his book became an instant national bestseller, which has sold over six million copies. Since that time, millions of people have learned the secret—without high-priced lectures or prescription medicines. The Relaxation Response has become the classic reference recommended by most health care professionals and authorities to treat the harmful effects of stress, anxiety, depression, and high blood pressure. Rediscovered by Dr. Benson and his colleagues in the laboratories of Harvard Medical School and its teaching hospitals, this revitalizing, therapeutic tack is now routinely recommended to treat patients suffering from stress and anxiety, including heart conditions, high blood pressure, chronic pain, insomnia, and many other physical and psychological ailments. It requires only minutes to learn, and just ten minutes of practice a day.

Sleep deprivation is a growing problem worldwide. We go to our doctors for advice, but they seem to have nothing but pills to counteract this predicament, and these quick fixes fail to get to the root of the problem.Buddha's Book of Sleep is the first book to treat sleep disorders from the perspective of mindfulness meditation. Yet this is a natural choice - mindfulness meditation has proven effective for other psychological problems such as stress, depression and anxiety and these very issues are what become sleep problems when our heads hit the pillow. Divided into two sections, this book attacks sleep disorders with a combination of wisdom and practical meditation exercises. The first section describes the reasons why mindfulness meditation's basis in self-awareness is appropriate for dealing with this problem, detailing the practices of this popular form of meditation. The second section contains seven specific exercises to practice at bedtime or in the wee hours of the morning, depending on when sleeping problems occur. Supplying readers with a new perspective on why they cannot fall asleep (even when they feel exhausted), and arming them with easy-to-use tools from the practices of mindfulness meditation, Buddha's Book of Sleep will help the reader calm their hurried thoughts and rest easy.

If you're having trouble sleeping, mindfulness can help. Do you worry about the fact that you are awake when you want to be asleep, and how tired you will feel during the day? You are not alone – sleep problems are often triggered by stress, illness and getting older. However, practising mindfulness meditation regularly can help. We can learn to become less reactive and more accepting of being awake, which in turn reduces our anxiety around not sleeping. This may mean we drift off to sleep, but even if we are still awake, the mind is quieter. In Mindfulness and Sleep Anna Black introduces mindfulness and explains how it can help change your relationship to sleep as well as reduce stress. There are 25 practices and activities that introduce mindfulness and how to practise it. These include meditations for night- and daytime, as well as everyday activities that shine a light on our habitual patterns and behaviours and help create better habits to support the body's self-regulating sleep system. Learn how to keep a sleep diary, too, which allows you to make notes about what you discover when you pay attention to what helps and hinders you in sleeping.

Good sleep, including positive dreaming, is essential to good health. In this friendly guide to cultivating deep, restful sleep — naturally — mindfulness and dreamwork expert Tzivia Gover offers practical lifestyle advice, easy yoga poses, 10-minute meditations, simple breathing exercises, visualization and journaling activities, and lots of encouragement and inspiration. You’ll learn how to set the stage for safe, productive dreaming, cultivate your dream recall, and learn to gain insight from your dreams. Gover also helps you create healthy bedtime and morning routines to ensure a restful night and refreshed, joyful living the next day.

Forget expensive mattresses, fancy foam pillows, and white noise machines. There's no better treatment for insomnia than cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Research has shown that CBT works even better than powerful sleep medications, and with this workbook, it's easier than ever to put these strategies to work to help you ward off insomnia and finally get to sleep. The Insomnia Workbook is designed to simulate the experience of seeing a professional CBT sleep specialist. First, you'll assess your sleep habits with questionnaires and evaluate how your sleep problem affects your life; then you'll learn a variety of proven techniques sleep specialists recommend to their clients. This book includes all of the tools you need to better understand your insomnia and create an effective plan for getting the sleep you need. With this complete program, you'll:•Stop the racing thoughts that keep you awake at night•Train yourself to sleep using stimulus control, sleep restriction, and deep relaxation skills •Identify foods and lifestyle factors that may be making things worse•Keep a personal sleep log to track your progress