I'm curious if anyone has experienced anything similar:

I've been having trouble sleeping for a number of months. I go to sleep without any issues, but later wake up time after time. Sometimes it feels like I never really get into deep sleep. I need to be in bed 9-10 hours to feel like I'm rested. After looking at various things like caffeine intake, alcohol/water consumption, possible depression, medications, temperature, sound levels, etc., I find that nothing really seems to account for this.

I'm wondering if it might have something to do with passing through Dark Night. Has anyone ever had sleep issues related to progressing on the path?

Also, this morning, I drifted in and out of sleep in a sort of partially aware state for a few hours, and when the alarm finally went off, I found to my surprise that I was actually in jhana.

So, I'm wondering if I'm managing somehow to enter meditative states while asleep, and if so, maybe this accounts for some of the sleep disturbances?

Any comments on this?

Andy

Hmm... I could comment by saying that I have had many many sleep related disturbances caused by whichever stage of insight I happen to be in.

In general A&P makes me sleep less, and Dark Night makes me sleep more. In Dark Night I wake up drowsy and tired, I am more prone to think "screw it" and go back to sleep.

I'm curious how often you meditate? I started sitting several times a day a few months ago and pretty soon after developed sleep "problems" - either waking up in the middle of the night in various states or simply needing so much less sleep that if I go to bed at my old regular time I wake up before dawn. I don't know if it's partly because the meditating substitutes for some sleep needs, or just the extra energy from different states. When I was only sitting once a day I never had problems with sleep (typically sleeping 7-8 hours a night).

It doesn't seem to be tied to A&P vs dark night parts of cycles that I can tell.

I say "problem" above because after the first few weeks I've simply adjusted to it, going to bed later so my five hours sleep fits into a reasonable time frame, for example. (eta: thus my posting at 1am, from my current location) If I wake up in some kind of state I just lay there and let it run its course and fall back asleep again. Once in a while it gets a little extreme/scary, but usually its just sort of waves of this or that kind of energy or trembling or twitching, and it subsides after a few minutes.

I do sometimes hit periods where I get very sleepy during meditation, but that seems unrelated to how much sleep I'm getting. That is, I can be totally energetic during the day, and the sleepiness only arises when I meditate, so it's more of some kind of evasion that I just have to deal with during the sit itself.

If I feel like I need more sleep than I can manage to get I listen to really boring podcasts about economic history or something I have no interest in (preferably read by someone with a droning voice), which muffles mental activity and puts me to sleep in an instant.

I'm curious what others have done to cope, or if their experiences were/are similar?

Hmm this happened to me recently... I think I was crossing A&P. I'd go to sleep at 1 or 2 normally, wake up, be like "what time is it?" and realize it's like 3am. I'd wake up every few hours. My initial thought upon waking was "hmm I seem pretty rested," but upon moving to check my clock I was like "ah time to sleep more, I'm actually tired." And I think I know what you mean.. at one point I was like half-awake for a while, sort-of meditating but not really awake.

It passed after a few days, not due to anything in particular I did, so hopefully it will for you too!

I think it's absolutely true that energetic phenomena related to meditation can cause sleep disturbances. One yogi over at KFD jokingly called this "night training." I also think the evasion that was mentioned--sleepiness arising as a result of some kind of unconscious avoidance of something--is a real phenomenon.

However, just to throw out something here, I believe that most of us vastly underestimate the impact of diet/caffeine-consumption on sleep patterns, the far-reaching, negative effects of lack of sleep in general, and how all of this can undermine our alertness on the cushion at times.

What I've learned recently is that lack of sleep (as well as excessive exercise like long-distance running) will raise your cortisol levels and, in turn, your insulin resistance. In fact, one author, who asserts that we need 9.5 hours of sleep per night for at least seven months out of the year, says that lack of sleep contributes significantly to our current rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
Inadequate sleep apparently has a number of negative physiological effects. The aforementioned disturbance in cortisol levels tends to scramble the body's sense of what time it is and whether and how much a person needs to sleep. Thus many people who aren't getting enough sleep will feel drowsy and dull during the day (perhaps while trying to meditate in the morning) but strangely wired and alert at night. Obviously, this leads to a vicious cycle of inadequate sleep begetting further inadequate sleep. Another effect, owing to the increase in insulin resistance, is a distinct craving for sugar and other carbohydrates, which, of course, when consumed in large quantities will raise your blood glucose/insulin levels still further--another vicious cycle.

I've been doing my best to go to bed just an hour earlier and making myself stay in bed and sleep as late as I can before it's time to get up and go to work. I've also completely stopped eating refined and easily digestible carbohydrates (grains and grain products, sugar, etc.). I'm sleeping more and better, and the difference in alertness on the cushion has been remarkable. This isn't to say that we shouldn't be able to sit there and disembed even when drowsy, or that the sensations associated with drowsiness should be regarded as something to be avoided at all costs. But I think a lot of the time we're sleepy on the cushion because we haven't gotten enough sleep, and our sleep patterns are sketchy because we're eating too many carbs during the day, drinking too much coffee and just generally are out of sync with the natural rhythms of the sleep cycle.

Just my two cents...

During the week, I meditation between 45 minutes to an hour once a day. Sometimes too I'll sit if I can get a spare 15 minutes. I also do noting practice about an hour a day while driving to and from work on the freeway, but I'm not sure how much that really counts. On Saturday and Sunday I get 2+ hours in a day in two sittings/day.

This issue seems to be more of an interrupted sleep issue and part of me was wondering if I was somehow ending up in jhana during the night and it was somehow interrupting my sleep. I didn't think it was very likely, since I think I would have remembered it, but I seem to remember something about meditating while asleep being part of one of the nanas.

I don't think I ever got the "I don't really need as much sleep now phase."



I'm dealing with that more than occasionally now. Some day, the sit is more about exploring sleepiness than really sitting. Avoidance seems a likely explanation, but so does getting poor quality sleep.

I'm going the medical route / simplest explanation route, but I was curious if this was a known thing or not.

I'll check that out at KFD. Thanks for the pointer.



Agreed. I limit my caffeine to green tea, and then rarely after lunch.



Interesting. I cycle. This year I put in over 2000 miles. I've learned the hard way that if I push too hard for too long, I'm not going to get a good night's sleep. I've not read about a link between overreaching and increased cortisol levels. Can you provide this author's name and perhaps suggest some further reading that describes this process?

Sure. I'd recommend checking out the Primal Fitness Guide at Mark's Daily Apple. It's a free download if you register for the site. The author, Mark Sisson, is a former Olympic marathon runner and triathlon junkie who has shifted his approach to exercise in part because of cortisol-related stuff.
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/

You could also go to iTunes and sign up for the Paleo Solutions podcast by Robb Wolf. If you start from the beginning with the early podcasts, you'll hear Robb talk at length about his efforts to get his top-performing CrossFit and other athletes to rest more and dial it down a notch or two. Once he gets their cortisol issues under control, he says, they tend to feel and perform better.

Robb talks a lot about the importance of sleep as well. I would not recommend the book Light's Out by T.S. Wiley, although Robb Wolf sometimes recommends it. To me, this book is poorly written. However, it is full of NIH and other research about sleep, cortisol, insulin-resistance and the current epidemic of obesity, diabetes, CVD, etc. Lastly, on the diet issue, run, don't walk, to read Gary Taubes's tour de force, Good Calories, Bad Calories. (Sorry if I'm trying too hard to "lay my trip" on folks!)