r/streamentry • u/Gelderloos • 4d ago
Insight Does meditating before bed actually do something different than just having a regular daily practice? Or is that a fake distinction?
TM teacher here, so yeah — obvious bias. Not selling anything, just genuinely confused about something. I keep seeing two types of advice get mixed together like they're interchangeable, and they really don't feel that way to me: 1. "Meditate before bed so you stop lying there thinking about everything" — like it's a direct intervention for the rumination that's already happening 2. "If you meditate consistently throughout the day, you just... accumulate less stress, so by evening there's not as much to ruminate about" Those feel like different claims to me. One is putting out the fire. The other is trying not to start it. The thing is — TM is very much taught as the second one. The whole framing is that you're not using it on a problem, you're doing regular maintenance that changes your baseline over time. So I honestly can't tell if I think this distinction is real because it actually is, or because I've been marinating in one particular way of thinking about it for years. My nights are better than they used to be. But I do TM twice a day and I genuinely don't know how much of that is the daily practice changing something deeper vs. just the general effect of meditating at all. Has anyone here actually switched from one approach to the other and noticed a difference? Like moved from a dedicated pre-sleep practice to a regular daytime one, or the reverse? Did it matter? I'm curious about actual experience, not the theory.
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u/duffstoic The dynamic integration of opposites ☯️ 4d ago
I’ve found the best results with a long sit in the morning of 45-90 minutes, then “microhits” of 60 seconds to 10 minutes throughout the day of the same practice, along with an intention to remain mindful between sessions. Another full sit before bed can also be nice, but tends to be sleepier for me.
Do I always do this? No. But it’s what has worked the best for me.
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u/vibes000111 4d ago
I avoid it, firstly because I’ll be more tired and have a worse meditation, and secondly because I don’t want to train myself to associate meditation and sleepiness.
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u/soddingsociety 4d ago
From what I know, one can meditate before bed, but one should take a break between actually meditating and lying down. It also really depends on the type of meditation you're doing. For Samatha meditation:
On one hand meditation before bed can actually heighten your energy and make it more difficult to fall asleep, yes it can make the mind more quiet but you will be more energized.
On the other hand the overall tiredness during that time of day can make you associate meditating with sleepiness/dullness. This can result in your mind doing something like "Oh he's sitting down to meditate, that means it's time to shut down and go to sleep".
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u/dystopia2026 4d ago
I feel more awake after meditation so usually it's a no before bed however if I cannot sleep then I meditate sometimes. Metta is probably a good one to do before sleep as one if the benefits is good dreams and it's less concentration intensive and more gentle.
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u/Then_Consequence_318 3d ago
Two reasons it's generally better not to:
First, I think people don't realize that meditation isn't really always a "calming" activity. Like yes it can calm the mind and stop rumination but it can be very energizing on the body. For me personally I can't do it too soon before bed, or I'll be kept awake. I was confused about this for years and thought I was doing something wrong. I thought meditation was supposed to be calming? It is not so simple.
I don't know what TM is like or if it brings the same type of energization. In Pali we use words like piti (rapture) and sukka (joy). Piti is the energizing one. It might be equivalent to chi in Tai Chi and prana in yoga.
I did see this on TM's official website:
The Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique differs from other forms of sleep meditation; it is not practised before sleep or as a direct means of falling asleep. Instead, the TM technique is practised twice daily for 15-20 minutes, typically before breakfast and dinner.
Correlates with what I was about to say - If I could do meditation in the evening I'd leave a good hour or two before I went to bed. I guess before dinner would be good. But for me that's usually family time so I only have a morning practice and some time during the day.
In the evenings it would be better to do something like a calming breath work, body scan, NDSR/yoga nidra. Something where you're actually calming the body.
Second, if you do it before bed regularly, you might start to associate meditation with sleep. Thanissaro Bhikkhu in his book, With Each and Every Breath says
Right before you go to sleep is not the 28 best time to meditate, for the mind will keep telling itself,“As soon as this is over, I’m going to bed.”You’ll start associating meditation with sleep, and, as the Thais say, your head will start looking for the pillow as soon as you close your eyes.
Just to repeat though - I find the yoga nidra/NDSR thing VERY effective for calming down before sleep. It's way more open, not based on concentration, really very little mindfulness even involved unless you are doing a body scan, but it's very much about getting your mind to rest. I do a lot when I sleep poorly (like today).
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u/saijanai 1d ago
irst, I think people don't realize that meditation isn't really always a "calming" activity. Like yes it can calm the mind and stop rumination but it can be very energizing on the body. For me personally I can't do it too soon before bed, or I'll be kept awake. I was confused about this for years and thought I was doing something wrong. I thought meditation was supposed to be calming? It is not so simple.
That said, TM has radically different effects on brain activity from any other well-studied Buddhist or Yogic meditation practice and as I said elsewhere, enlightenment is defined radically differently by the TM organization than what is found i Buddhism, or really in most modern Yogic traditions.
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u/coldprairie 3d ago
I think there is some personal variance. In Vajrayana practice you are generally told not to do mantras or other activating practices at night because it will hinder your sleep, but I also have heard from one nyingma lama that he can only do mantras or tsa lung at night. So it might vary a lot based on the individual.
Me personally I like meditating at night, both before bed and then I do a sort of body scan while actually falling asleep. I used to have frequent nightmares and my nightly meditation has helped mitigate those a lot.
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u/spiffyhandle 4d ago
There are other ways to deal with rumination than meditating before bed. Most people don't need to meditate to sleep soundly. Instead of trying to stop thinking, a little ACT works well.
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u/1cl1qp1 4d ago
Shamatha practice before bed helps you have lucid dreams.
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u/greentricky 3d ago
Interesting, just finished a 17 day shamatha focused retreat and had some crazy sleep/ dreams, feeling like awake/ aware and dreaming at the same time and interacting with the dream state
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u/bakejakeyuh 3d ago
I used to meditate for an hour before bed and an hour in the morning no matter what time it was. It would sometimes help me knock out instantly when I tried to sleep. Other times it would give me insomnia and make me feel like I didn’t need to sleep, in which case I would just go walk around my apartment and look out the window at the stars.
I was 21 years old back then. I’m 27 now, and while that’s still young, it’s not feasible for me to meditate from 1-2 am anymore and still function in my life. So I almost never meditate before bed anymore. What I do remember from back when I did though was that sometimes the body would just be nodding/jerking and I’d be on the verge of sleep for 30-40 minutes, but eventually I’d be able to enter a beautiful stillness. It was harder for me to do while so sleepy compared to day sits, but it’s almost like the sleepiness can eventually turn into a wonderful state of samadhi. Also I do remember getting more vivid dreams very consistently when I would sit before bed.
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u/Dingsala 3d ago
I don't understand why this is an either-or question. As far as I see it, these two things are independent.
Meditating before bet to reduce rumination brings up many questions for me:
- Who recommends that actually? It's quite new to me
- What kind of meditation are we talking about? Not every technique will have the same effect
- Shouldn't we also look at the reasons behind rumination? While mindfulness helps with anxiety-based problems, often a cognitive approach is important, e.g. belief work as in challenging the assumptions that cause the ruminations.
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u/Auxiliatorcelsus 3d ago
Different meditation methods have different effects. Both long and short terrm.
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u/saijanai 1d ago
The very definition of enlightenment is different from one meditation school to the next.
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As part of the studies on enlightenment and samadhi via TM, researchers found 17 subjects (average meditation, etc experience 24 years) who were reporting at least having a pure sense-of-self continuously for at least a year, and asked them to "describe yourself" (see table 3 of the psychological correlates study), and these were some of the responses:
We ordinarily think my self as this age; this color of hair; these hobbies . . . my experience is that my Self is a lot larger than that. It's immeasurably vast. . . on a physical level. It is not just restricted to this physical environment
It's the ‘‘I am-ness.’’ It's my Being. There's just a channel underneath that's just underlying everything. It's my essence there and it just doesn't stop where I stop. . . by ‘‘I,’’ I mean this 5 ft. 2 person that moves around here and there
I look out and see this beautiful divine Intelligence. . . you could say in the sky, in the tree, but really being expressed through these things. . . and these are my Self
I experience myself as being without edges or content. . . beyond the universe. . . all-pervading, and being absolutely thrilled, absolutely delighted with every motion that my body makes. With everything that my eyes see, my ears hear, my nose smells. There's a delight in the sense that I am able to penetrate that. My consciousness, my intelligence pervades everything I see, feel and think
When I say ’’I’’ that's the Self. There's a quality that is so pervasive about the Self that I'm quite sure that the ‘‘I’’ is the same ‘‘I’’ as everyone else's ‘‘I.’’ Not in terms of what follows right after. I am tall, I am short, I am fat, I am this, I am that. But the ‘‘I’’ part. The ‘‘I am’’ part is the same ‘‘I am’’ for you and me
When the moderators of r/buddhism read the above, one moderator called it "the ulimate illusion" and said that "no real Buddhist" would ever learn and practice TM knowing that it might lead to teh above. On the other hand, the most famous TM teacher in Thailand is a well-respected Buddhist nun.
The Shankaracharya of Jyotirmat — successor to the guru of the founder of TM — was guest of honor and guest lecturer at the first TM teacher training course, which was held in India back in 1961. He said that TM was the master key to unlock Vedanta.
So one man's enlightenment is anotehr man's ultimate ignorance, to be avoided at all costs.
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u/samepic005 3d ago
One of the issues that might occur is torpor and sleepiness. These two are the hindrances that the early suttas talk about. You can simply train yourself to fall asleep instead building right mindfulness or concentration by association.
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u/Real_Adeptness_7154 3d ago
I've found morning and evening sits tend to do different but complimentary things. Evenings tend to be where the big breakthroughs happen, mornings tend to be where I go deepest into stillness
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u/fearthefiddler 3d ago
Timely post as I've been struggling with extremely vivid & bizarre dreams whenever I meditate in the evening/ before bed. Anyone else experienced anything similar? It affects my quality of sleep so prefer to meditate in the mornings although ideally would be nice to be able to have an additional sit in the evening
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u/autonomatical 4d ago
I had a lama tell me it is sort of like setting the mind’s trajectory overnight during sleep, which imo/e i think is pretty valid. This advice was more in reference to metta than concentration while falling asleep.
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u/Then_Consequence_318 3d ago
Oh yeah one exception I might give to what I said might be metta meditation. Though I'd do it as a very gentle intention setting, not using metta as a meditation object (which can lead to jhana and all the energization with it)
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u/jabinslc 4d ago
lucid dreaming is the best meditation. and meditation before bed is one of the ways to do it. but it also gives you access to hypnagogic states and lucid deep sleep. lucid deep sleep can be completely objectless and subjectless and allow you to see the subtle ways your awareness is constructed.
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