Sleeping Well at A Silent Meditation Retreat
A brief guide to getting the most out of your next retreat by gently inquiring with your sleep
As some of you know—I’ll be attending my first 30-Day Silent Meditation retreat starting tomorrow! Even though I’ll be unavailable for direct contact, if you’re interested in booking 1:1 sessions with me in March and April you can let me know here. If you’re interested in a custom sleep-health workshop or program series, you can inquire here1. If you’re hoping for a reply from any of my content, I promise I’ll get back to it as soon as I am able.
In the meantime, for the next month, I’ve pre-scheduled some content have you reflect over the month around different ways you can gently pursue The Art of Rest on your own.
For the final post before I fully disappear, I thought, what could be more appropriate than diving into the nuances of getting good, quality rest on a silent meditation retreat? Looking forward to connecting with you all when I’m back around.
As per usual, thanks for being here.
Mindfully,
Dagny Rose
Sleeping Well on A Silent Meditation Retreat
Whether you are going to your first silent retreat or are re-entering silent retreat for the 60th time, there is one component that can always make a silent retreat experience soothing, or feel fairly intolerable—sleep.
While this guide is by no means comprehensive, it hopefully will set you up for success on your next silent retreat to get the most out of your experience.
Before You Go
Before you even get to the silent retreat there are some important things you should consider.
Please Let the Center Know About Sleep Needs
In order for you to be accommodated, and help accomodate the community members around you on your silent retreat—it’s important to be honest on your housing forms whenever you’re booking with a silent retreat. If you snore (or if loved ones swear you do, even if you swear you don’t) it’s important to note this on your form. If you use a CPAP machine, similarly, it’s important to let the center know. If there are other important needs, like the desire to be close to a bathroom, this would also be important information for the center to have. Your honesty in disclosure will help everyone, including you, sleep more soundly on retreat.
About 10 Days Before, Take A Sleep Inventory
This does not need to be a high-pressure sleep inventory, nor do you need to sign up for a state-of-the-art sleep study. If you’re wanting to be extremely structured, you can go ahead and download a free sleep diary form, but in general, just jotting down a few notes about how you’re sleeping before you leave for retreat can help you understand what is normal for you, and what is wildly different from your normal.
Some things to consider tracking:
Total Sleep Time - How long you spend in bed from the time you’re lying down at night to the time you’re getting up out of bed in the morning
General sleep satisfaction - On a scale from one to ten, how did you feel about your sleep from the evening before?
Notable sleep disturbances - If you woke up more than twice in a night, what was the cause? Were you able to go back to sleep easily?
General daytime stress - On a scale of 1 to 10, what is your daytime stress like, especially important to consider how stressed you’re feeling before bed or immediately upon waking
By having a general idea of these patterns before retreat—when your mindfulness practice kicks up a notch on retreat, you won’t be surprised. Additionally, if anything significantly changes, you’re able to be curious about why that change is occurring for the sake of your practice, rather than catastrophizing the shift. Which brings us to some light, psycho-education about sleep….
Some Light Reading About Sleep
In general, it’s finally popular knowledge that people should be tending to their sleep health and sleep hygiene. Great! However, what has not yet become popular knowledge is how deeply intertwined sleep and the social and emotional elements of our live are. It is also not very common knowledge in popular culture to understand how sleep, mindfulness, and self-compassion all intertwine. Although this is not comprehensive, it might help frame some understanding around why sleep is likely to shift away from our normal baseline while we are on retreat.
Sleep and Social and Emotional Functioning
What the heck is social and emotional functioning?
Depending on which field of psychology you enter, you might have a slightly different precise definition. For the purposes of generally orienting to sleep on retreat, we can understand that anything from our day-to-day world that impacts our emotions, or impacts how we socially interact with others can be held under the umbrella of ‘social and emotional functioning.’
While are many aspects of social and emotional functioning that impact sleep some of the major areas of sleep research that explore this have found things like:
we typically sleep more poorly if we have highly evocative emotions anytime before bed—whether those are pleasant emotions or unpleasant emotions
if we are feeling ostracized or cast-out from our social groups in any way we are also likely to sleep more poorly
feelings of closeness to our loved ones can help us sleep more soundly
There are many other attributes beyond these few examples, but it’s important to know that anything that falls outside of your normal social habits or your normal emotional schedule is likely to shift your sleep, even ever so slightly.
If we think about some of the main components of attending a silent retreat, we know that deepening our meditation practice often brings us into more close contact with difficult emotions. We also know that when we are in retreats that enact noble silence, we are also shifting our normal social structures to help deepen into our mindfulness practice. Sometimes this shift is small and so insignificant we barely notice. Other times, it can be quite dramatic for people in the form of vivid dreams and nightmares.
Dreams & Nightmares
One way we process our deep social and emotional content is through the REM cycle in our sleep. During our REM cycle we are typically experiencing most of our narrative dream content. On silent retreat, especially retreats that span more than 3 days, it is not uncommon that people report experiencing extremely strange, vivid dreams or even nightmares.
Depending on the lens you’re interested in exploring—dreams and nightmares can indicate a variety of things. Most of these lenses to view dreams and nightmares are not something to worry about, but instead, something to simply make note of and use as an opportunity to provide yourself with extra loving-kindness and compassion. As most teachers might say, this is a phenomena that is naturally occurring, no need to shoot yourself with a second arrow.
This information about nightmares or stress dreams isn’t to create anxiety, but more so to normalize any unpleasant experiences that might come up on retreat surrounding unusual dreaming.
However, the great news is, sleep is an amazingly resilient part of our human make-up. Sleep shifting slightly while you’re on retreat is more of a sign that you are growing and changing, rather than there being something permanently disrupted in your sleep patterns. It’s also important to know, that not all sleep shifts on retreat are disruptive, some can even be soothing.
Mindfulness, Self-compassion, and Sleep
While on silent retreat, our focused attention is often increasingly directed at various elements of mindfulness and self-compassion. Although in the scientific literature, mindfulness and self-compassion are not perfectly operationalized in the same meaning as in buddhist literature or dharma-practice, there is a fair amount that we are learning about how these concepts overlap with sleep.
We know that in general, over long periods of time, practicing mindfulness increases most people’s total sleep time, reduces their symptoms of insomnia, and increases people’s sense of sleep satisfaction. We also know that things like self-compassion help with reduced sleep disturbances, more alertness upon waking, and better overall daily mood during the day and less insomnia symptoms during the night.
While these trends typically come from research studies that are looking at a before and after of 6 to 8 week periods, some people begin to notice these shifts once they are in the retreat setting2. Some research emphasizes that we evolved to sleep in community, so for some people’s nervous systems—even though we do not talk throughout the week—sleeping near other bodies who are also sleeping well and safely, can create a type of co-regulation for our own nervous systems. This allows sense of everyone in a room sleeping peacefully can allow us to drift off more peacefully than we might in our typical home environment.
In addition to the nighttime rest we are able to get on silent retreat, the neural pathways that we are activating during meditation are very similar to those in early stages of sleep and have similarly restorative effects. This is great news for people who do not get adequate nighttime sleep. Much of the cognitive functioning (and perhaps even some of the social or emotional functioning in some smaller doses) can be restored with as little as 20 minutes of meditation. When on silent retreat, many of us find ourselves meditating most of the day, giving our minds an opportunity to utilize similar pathways to nighttime rest, regardless of if we are sleeping well or not.
In other words, even if we are not sleeping well on silent retreat—it is likely that we are resting well. This increased rest restores us profoundly.
Sleep During the Retreat
During the retreat there are several things you can do to really set yourself up well for success. Most of these things are what you might typically hear about as falling under a “sleep hygiene” advice column. Essentially, many of these behaviors are things you can do to bolster your sense of agency and sleep during retreat:
Bring eye shades and earplugs to reduce external stimuli
Have a consistent wind-down routine, unique and specific to you, each night before heading to bed
Find some way to cool off your core body temperature before bed by taking a brief (5-10 minute) hot shower.
In the summer: having a thin cotton scarf you can get damp and lay on the warmest parts of your body for evaporative cooling
In the winter: sitting with a hot beverage or hot water bottle by your hands and feet will warm the extremities and pull a bit of heat from the core while also keeping you comfortable.
If you find yourself awake in the middle of the night, have a plan so you don’t disturb anyone you’re sleeping near. Most meditation centers will keep their meditation hall open at all hours, and many also have a lounge area where you can drink tea, or read a book in the middle of the night until you’re sleepy enough to head back to bed
Avoid drinking liquids 2-3 hours before bed
Have some self-compassionate phrases ready for nights you may not sleep as well as you would have liked
Instead of counting sheep to fall asleep, imagine your walking meditation practice with as much sensory detail as you possibly can
Bring something familiar as a touchstone like a favorite sleeping t-shirt, blanket, or pillow that will help ground your body and nervous system into a sense of safety
After the Retreat
As many of us know, incorporation after silent retreat is often the most important part.
We spend days in silence, intentionally training in our specific practice. However, most of that means nothing unless we can go back into our daily lives and begin to incorporate that information skillfully. Thinking about what we learn about sleep on our silent retreats can be another layer of our incorporation experience.
If you slept exceptionally well during retreat, spend some time reflecting on what elements might have made your sleep more robust during your time:
Was it the consistent routine and consistent bed/wake time every day?
Was it the reduced decision making and daily stress load experienced throughout the retreat?
Was it lighter meals close to bed time?
Was it sleeping in community?
As you make note of what felt supportive for your sleep, begin to get curious around if you can make subtle changes in your life to accomodate more of these attributes as you return to your regular routine.
If you slept more poorly during retreat, it can be similarly helpful to reflect on why:
Were you dealing with very difficult emotional content? How might you manage that content differently in your more-regular life?
Did noble silence (and thus, social disconnection) feel particularly hard for you this retreat?
Did content from vivid dreams or nightmares continue to progressively get worse over the course of the week?
Was there too much stimulation in your sleeping environment?
Was the novelty of the sleeping environment unsettling to your nervous system?
Regardless of what felt disruptive to your sleep, it is important to be extra compassionate with ourselves as we return to our regular lives. Perhaps your sleep will go back to your normal, or perhaps you learned that you might need some additional support around your sleep after leaving retreat to help bolster your practice, and your life.
There is no right or wrong here, only information for moving forward.
Dream On
An important component many people notice on silent retreat is their sleep. Great sleep can bolster an intensified period of practice, and disrupted sleep can give us opportunity to practice with elements we might not normally choose. Whether you usually sleep well on retreat or not, we hope this gives you some tools for future silent retreats to more mindfully understand your experience. And if you catch any dreams along the way, we hope you hold them mindfully and compassionately.
If you feel like sharing them—please don’t hesitate to reach out. We’d love to catch them with you.
This sub-section of The Art of Rest, is all about—you guessed it—The Rest.
As a trained sleep scientist and mindfulness teacher & researcher, here we explore the everything related to rest. Whether we are unpacking the newest evidence-based sleep health tips, exploring day-to-day tools for bolstering and protecting rest, or diving into a world of dreams, “The Rest” is going to regularly touch into what a restful life is, and how to move towards one5
Looking For A Personalized Way to Optimize Your Rest?
Exciting announcement! My books are now open again for the hibernation season! I am looking forward to giving winter guidance around sleep health & nervous system regulation around stress. I offer individualized 1:1 guidance for those who want to use rest as a way to expand their creativity, folks who just need a tune up, all the way towards people who might be dealing with chronic rest related issues. Shoot me an email at dagnyrose@theartofrest.me to inquire about getting started. Spring appointment slots begin March 10.
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Just as a note, this isn’t true of everyone and all of these experiences are normal. If you have ever gone for a long period of time without your mindfulness practice and then re-engaged in it to find yourself feeling that everything is intense and extra sensitive for a few days, this can also be true of sleep in a silent retreat setting.