Suffering From Insomnia? - Try Meditation

By Margarita Nahapetyan

For individuals who have chronic trouble getting a good night's sleep, the scientists from the United States recommend now to consider meditation which could be the ideal behavioral intervention to treat insomnia. According to a new study, people with persistent insomnia reported that their sleep quality, as well as total sleep time, sleep efficiency and depression, significantly improved after trying meditation.

According to Ramadevi Gourineni, a principal investigator of the study and a director of the insomnia program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Illinois, insomnia is believed to be a 24-hour problem of hyper-arousal. And what is even more, increased level of arousal can be observed throughout the day. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, persistent, or chronic insomnia is described by scientists as difficulty to fall asleep or to stay asleep for a time period of at least thirty days.

For the study purposes, the researchers gathered data from 11 healthy individuals between the ages of 25 and 45 years whose only problem was chronic primary insomnia. For a period of 2 months, all the participants were split into two intervention groups. Subjects in first group were taught Kriya Yoga, a form of meditation that is used to focus internalized attention and has been shown to bring down measures of arousal.

Participants in the second group were assigned to receive health education about health-related topics and how to improve health through diet, physical activity, weight loss and stress management. In addition to all that, the experts collected subjective measures of sleep and depression at the start of the experiment and after the 2-month period. Both groups received education on sleep hygiene.

The results revealed that two months later, individuals who practiced meditation, showed improvements in their sleep quality and sleep diary parameters. These patients saw improvements in sleep latency, total sleep time, total wake time, wake after sleep onset and sleep efficiency. "Results of the study demonstrate that teaching deep relaxation techniques during the daytime can help improve sleep at night," Dr. Gourineni said.

Dr. Gourineni completed her medical school at Kurnool Medical College in Andhra Pradesh, India. She was raised in the United States. Dr. Gourineni has a special interest in behavioral treatment of insomnia and at a current time is involved in research that looks at the effects of meditation on stress and sleep in people who suffer chronic insomnia.

About 9.4 per cent of people in the United States, or an estimated 20 million individuals, have been practicin meditation for a period of one year, according to a 2007 study by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Meditation is being used for a variety of health problems, such as anxiety, pain, depression, stress and chronic problems with sleep. According to an evidence by U.S. health officials, meditation is associated with health benefits, possibly because it causes heart rate and breathing to slow, therefore improving blood flow and reducing activity in the sympathetic nervous system.

The results of the study were presented at SLEEP 2009, the 23rd annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, in Seattle.