I’ve been meditation almost daily for 15-20 minutes the last 1.5 months. I enjoy the pratice, and it is nice and relaxing, however I find the changes, if any, to be very subtle (to the point that they might as well be placebo).
Curious to hear your experiences.
It doesn’t give superpowers or anything, it’s more of a reminder to be present. If you think meditating is going to give you mastery of your problems in life then that’s the wrong way to look at it IMO, I use it to spot-treat lack of focus or general anxiety and it works well enough for me at that.
That resonates with my experience as well. I think I still have some ways to go with regards to lack of focus. But it feels like I’ve become more aware in general.
When meditating 1 hour a day (using a vipassana-samatha method that is mostly sustained breath concentration while maintaining broad background awareness), I typically start to experience side effects like insomnia and hyperarousal within a week or two.
Looking back at my journal, with only 47 hours of practice I was already experiencing what academics call “energy-like somatic experiences” (ELSEs), and what Theravada Buddhists might call coarse piti and sukha.
With dedicated, daily practice and sufficient skill and instruction, it does not take as much as you would think to get dramatic pleasure and to experience altered states from meditation. I would rate some of my experiences in meditation as significantly more pleasurable than orgasms, and there is a part of me that is very aware that there is not much else that offers what meditation can. That said, it’s a bit like running in that it requires training and is not effortless. 😅
The side effects are also not always positive, I never found a way to be entirely comfortable lying in bed all night every night not being able to sleep, only losing consciousness sometime in the early morning. Unlike common recommendations to just meditate through those periods, I found meditation would worsen the insomnia, and I needed the rest to be able to meditate well - dullness and fatigue are some of the biggest challenges, and they are a bigger problem when your sleep is disrupted.
@dandelion @alf
insomnia is not a side effect of meditation. you may experience higher levels of energy and therefore need less sleep. but this effect would not last.most likely, there are underlying causes to your insomnia that get worse because vipassana meditation requires you to work through such issues. and this would be the same with therapy, or any other method that ultimately would lead to your well being.
moreover, nothing is permannent… anicca…
did you read the article I linked?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4054695/
Decreased sleep duration in meditators during periods of intensive practice, such as multiday silent retreats is a well-known phenomenon27 and is considered a sign of meditative proficiency and progress.19 Kornfield163 documented decreased sleep duration in Theravada Vipassana meditators on 3-month retreats (12–15 h of meditation/day) compared to a control group who meditated 1–2 h/day. Seventy percent of the retreat participants reported an average 2 h decrease in sleep duration in comparison to 10% of controls, who also reported increases in sleep duration (10%). The periods of sleep decrease were associated with periods of greatest self-reported and teacher-observed mindfulness.
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A recent study examined sleep duration of meditators in daily life, using objective, EEG-based measures of sleep in a much larger sample. This cross-sectional study165 recorded single-night polysomnographic sleep studies (high-density EEG) in long-term (8700 average lifetime meditation hours) Tibetan and Theravada Buddhist meditators and age- and gender-matched non-meditating controls. The meditators had a significantly reduced total sleep time (6.2 vs. 6.7 h, P= 0.001) as well as increased minutes of wake after sleep onset (74 vs. 44 min, P =0.003) compared to controls.
…
Thus, the point when meditation practice no longer produces drowsiness and sleep, but instead engenders increased and sustained wakefulness, may be an indicator of the neuroplastic changes that signify meditative proficiency. In this sense, “awakening” is not a metaphor, but rather an iterative process of neuroplastic modifications and increased efficiency that supports a new level of perceptual sensitivity and insight.
tl;dr enough skillful meditation reduces your sleep
Since I experience this reduction in sleep as unwanted and disruptive, I call it insomnia - but call it what you want, it’s increased wakefulness and decreased sleep.
Not only does the effect last (as long as you continue to practice enough hours of meditation skillfully), it’s very common and well known among Buddhist monks who meditate that you stop sleeping, even remaining aware during sleep:
In many Tibetan Buddhist161 and also non-Buddhist traditions,162 the goal of cultivating of vigilant awareness in every waking moment is extended beyond the waking state to sleep states as well. One teacher instructs “When you fall asleep, you are asleep with virtually full awareness.”161 Several studies have described meditators’ self-reports of ongoing conscious awareness during sleep.162,163 In support of such increased wakefulness during sleep, several polysomnographic sleep studies have found greater cortical arousal during sleep in meditators, including increased stage-1 sleep, alpha-theta (wake-like) EEG, arousals, reduced slow-wave sleep,144,162,164 and increased gamma.165
The amount of sleep of proficient meditators according to Buddhist texts is around 4 hours a night, with observed amounts of meditators in retreat of 1.5 - 3 hours:
In a qualitative study in our laboratory, a meditator who had completed a 3-month Tibetan-style shamatha retreat (12–15 h/day), reported that for the first 2 weeks of the retreat, her sleep duration initially increased to 8 h/night before gradually diminishing to 1.5–3 h/night by the eighth week. Buddhist texts suggest a nocturnal sleep time among proficient meditators of approximately 4 hours.19
Furthermore, I have no insomnia without mediation - when I meditate regularly I have difficulty falling asleep and maintaining a normal sleep schedule, many nights not sleeping more than 4 - 6 hours. When I stop meditating, I go back to sleeping 8 - 10 hours a night. This happens every time I go back to meditating, and stops every time I stop. It is clearly caused by the meditation.
The meditation is not causing insomnia because of increased contemplation of mental health issues, like therapy might cause insomnia - I do not experience the insomnia as anxious rumination or anything like that. Instead it feels like a generalized hyperarousal, like I took a stimulant, or if you vigorously exercise too late on a sunny day.
I can spend hours counting sheep and it’s too engaging, so I try to manufacture the most mundane and boring situations possible. I would often even remain awake during dreams, it’s just difficult to fully lose consciousness. Usually I would lose consciousness only after many hours of lying awake, usually sometime like 2 - 4 in the morning.
I’m not sure why you are so confident that insomnia is not a side effect of meditation. How frequently and how much do you meditate, and what style of meditation do you do? I think these things could make a difference in your experiences, e.g. I suspect open awareness practices are less likely than concentration practices in terms of creating increased wakefulness.
@dandelion with a bell call at 4am, definitely means less sleep… 😅
and with intensive periods of practice, the benefits of meditation means that both mind and body need less sleep to recuperate. pretty obvious. still not a negative ‘side effect’.
thanks for the article 🙏
Ah, the losing of sleep I’m describing is not due to the bells, but it is a good point that not sleeping is practically institutional at a monastery.
I think whether losing sleep is negative depends on the framing.
In Buddhism, it is taken as a sign of progress, but in secular contexts lacking sleep like that can be a problem, esp. when meditation is mistakenly suggested to help with insomnia.
Mostly I struggled to have equanimity towards the lack of sleep - losing sleep also impacted my meditation, making it harder to concentrate or have good sessions. I would say mostly it felt like I just needed less sleep, but even so it was hard to lie awake every night for several hours, unable to lose consciousness.
I’d normally get off-the-cushion results after about ten days of daily practice.
What effects
You ‘catch’ emotions before they start affecting behaviour. Emotions are what cause procrastination and things like that.
I think the most pronounced effect I got was from visualisation based meditation and made it easier to see clear mental imagery and to control what the imagery is. This was from sporadically doing it for about 10 minutes every couple of days over the course of a couple of months a couple of years ago. Considering picking it up again at some point.
Results? Immediately I guess. I mean, when you direct your attention at a thing, or concentrate on a thing. On text on the screen or an idea in your head or trying to balance on one foot. When you chill out and concentrate on that, you get results immediately, right? I mean you can suddenly balance better, read the book better, play the videogame better, think more clearly… so it isn’t that strange.
And then as I mediate more I get more results. More silence, clarity etc.
And the results always linger after the actual meditation (tapering off over hours and days). So if I meditate and then, while enjoying the results of that meditation, I meditate again, those results stack. So I get bigger results. And if I meditate 6 times that day I get big results. And if I do that for a few days I get very big results.
When I first started meditating I did a concentration type technique and what I did was experiment with a few different things to concentrate on. Visualization, things I look at, things I feel, sounds, mantras… I hunted around till I found a thing to concentrate on that worked right for me.
Now, when I do concentration meditation, I use “the feeling of breath in the tip of my nose” as my thing to concentrate on. (my “object”).
