Good Sleep - First Step to a Good Health

Most important step towards improving your health is optimizing your sleep. A good sleep deepens the rest provided to the body mind complex, thereby, not only improving general well being but also improves the immune system. An additional bonus of a restful sleep is that getting up early no longer remains a difficult task, setting you up further, on a path of healthy life.

Points mentioned below are in order of essentiality. Follow up to whatever you can. Remember, ‘Best’ is the biggest enemy of ‘Good’, so don’t wait for perfection, just start practicing.

 1. Light & early dinner: single most important step to achieve a more restful sleep is a light and early dinner. 6 pm is good, never after 7 pm. Please avoid Non Veg food & Alcohol.

2. Move away from screens, 1 hr before your designated sleep start time (11 pm): Interacting with screens like mobile phone, Laptop, TV etc has a stimulatory effect on the mind. Being away from screens for at least  one hour before hitting the bed helps the mind to move towards its basal level, leading to early achievement of deep sleep when you hit the bed. So no screens after 10 pm.

3. Preparatory period of an hour or so before hitting the bed: here also, do what is doable for you. Slowly with continued practice, you may extend your practices.

• Outdoor walk: after detaching yourself from all screens, spend 15-20 minutes walking in fresh air (without your mobile phone). If your family members can join, nothing like it.

• Bath with water at room temperature: After your walk, take 5-10 min rest and than take a bath with water that is at room temperature (neither hot nor cold). Kindly note that after taking bath, you can not touch any other human being (you are now going to start preparing for Shiva Aradhana). Married couples can have their relationship activities before their respective baths.

• Prepare your bed for sleep and sit on bed.

• Chant: Bhramari (x7), Nada (4x7) & Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra (x7 or x11).

• Surrender everything to Shiva as final step: before surrendering yourself to Goddess Nidra, surrender everything you possess to Shiva – start with keeping aside, on the bed, all your material belongings, then put aside all your relationships and finally put aside your body.

[An important note about bed arrangement: No other body should touch your body while you are in this optimized Shiva Aradhana state of sleep, so you should have a separate bed. As mentioned above, married couples can have their relationship activities before their respective baths.]

4. Leaving the bed before Bramha Muhurta starts: As soon as you are awake, recite Adi Shankara’s Pratah Smarnam (https://youtu.be/DpHdEZCFk28?si=8YFU4qTeVGNHFdJP). Bramha Muhurta starts 96 minutes before sunrise, so to catch it, you need to leave the bed around 4.15 am. Never use an alarm to wake yourself up. Just tell yourself that body needs to be awakened at 4.15 am, and it will happen. With a more restful sleep getting up early is not a big deal at all. For late nighters, one suggestion, what you do at late night, why don’t you try doing the same early morning. 

5. Morning Routine: You can have a glass of tepid water and do some gentle stretches till you feel the urge for a motion. Once you are done with your essential daily ablutions and before starting your day, you can do a 45 min to 1 hr of yoga (the protocol suitable to you will depend upon presence / absence of a chronic systemic illness like BP, Sugar, etc). For people with no chronic systemic illnesses, one option is Isha Yoga’s Up-Yoga: https://youtu.be/Jf5qUhz-FVk. An alternative is Govt of India’s Intl Yoga Day’s protocol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av5ib_XRKT4

6. Imp Note: A very important spiritual aspect of this technique is we are able to convert the total sleep period into a period of Araadhana (Worship), Araadhana of Shiva’s Mrityunjaya form (the form which takes care of liberating you from the cycle of manifesting & unmanifesting). As sleep is nothing but mini death, Bhagvaan Shiva is the ‘go-to’ entity for optimizing your sleep period.