Having just returned from Sri Lanka at the time of this writing, my sleep cycles are way off. I woke before 3 a.m. after sleeping only a few hours and couldn’t fall back asleep. Rather than frustrating myself by lying there, I got up and began my morning meditation practice. I sat for three hours.

There’s a stillness during those early morning hours that is especially conducive to meditation. The world is quiet, my mind is calmer, and I’m able to settle into much deeper states.

The same thing happens when I fly to Sri Lanka. It usually takes a week for my biological clock to adapt to the local time, so instead of fighting it, I use those early wake-ups to meditate. I figure I might as well be doing something productive with the time.

Jet Lag and Exhaustion

The first day after getting back to the United States, I felt way off — a mix of wired but tired, restless, achy, even experiencing restless legs. I find it difficult to meditate when I’m in that state, but I can still breathe into the whole range of discomfort I’m feeling. Lying there, I let my awareness meet what was happening in my body, instead of resisting it.

Eventually, I ended up sleeping most of the day, which was exactly what my body needed after eighteen hours of flying from Sri Lanka to Doha and then on to New York. I’d also been short on sleep for days leading up to the trip. Meditation, even in the midst of discomfort, engages the body’s innate healing intelligence, accelerating recovery from the wear and tear of long-haul flights.

Sleepless Nights at Home

Most nights I sleep well. But like anyone, there are times when I can’t fall asleep or I wake in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. Again, I don’t want to lie there frustrated. Instead, I turn to meditation.

How I practice depends on how I’m feeling in the moment.

If I’m really exhausted and too tired to get up, I breathe into the exhaustion I feel while lying in bed. Often, this alone helps me drift back to sleep.

If I’m trying to nap during the day and can’t fall asleep, I use the same approach — breathing into whatever fatigue or bodily sensations are present. Even if I don’t end up sleeping, I find that I feel more rested.

If I wake during the night feeling wide awake, I sit up and meditate. If I start to get drowsy, I lie down again and usually fall asleep soon thereafter. If not, I'll continue meditating for two or three hours.

Finding Opportunity in Disruption

Travel, irregular schedules, and late nights can disrupt sleep. That’s simply part of modern life. But meditation gives me a way to adapt.

Instead of treating sleeplessness as wasted time, I use it to sit with myself more deeply, to recover from travel, and to digest whatever experiences or emotions I’m moving through. When I’m truly tired, I nap whenever the opportunity presents itself. When I’m unable to sleep, I practice.

Breathing From the Depts of the Anxiety

There have been times when I’ve struggled with financial insecurity and the uncertainty of working with people who can be so inconsistent — even flaky. It’s not surprising in this era of smartphones and endless digital distractions. People’s attention spans have grown shorter, and many have become so disconnected from themselves that they’re losing touch with their inner being. Even though many are deeply wounded and their bodies are not in good shape, they’re often less self-aware — and as a result, less likely to follow through with the steps necessary to bring about the healing they so badly need.

Lying awake in the middle of the night, consumed with overwhelming anxiety, I would sometimes stay in bed and breathe from the depths of what I was feeling. Other times I would sit up and breathe — and I found the anxiety actually became more manageable when I did.

It could take hours, but slowly the intensity diminished. As the anxiety eased, sleep often returned. And even in the process of breathing through those restless hours, something else often emerged — creative insights, a clearer sense of how to adapt to the “digital ADHD” brought on by people’s excessive reliance on devices, social media, and quick-hit online content that is reshaping the biochemical makeup and neurostructure of their brains. At times I also received an intuition about someone I should reach out to, or inspiration for new ways to connect with those in need of healing.

Heartbreak, Biochemistry, and Sleepless Nights

Whenever we’re in the midst of a devastating breakup, divorce, or other painful relational drama, our nervous system goes on high alert. As that happens, our bodies’ chemistry shifts: cortisol and adrenaline surge, and we go into dopamine and oxytocin withdrawal. Serotonin — the stabilizer of mood and sleep — also drops, which makes us more prone to anxiety, sadness, and endless rumination. This volatile cocktail keeps us wired, making it hard to fall asleep. We may also find ourselves awakened in the middle of the night, consumed by unsettling emotions, and unable to drift back to sleep.

During the nighttime hours, when our bodies are tired — when we’re sleeping or trying to — our defenses soften. Emotions that might otherwise remain buried rise to the surface: grief, anger, fear, dread, longing, that horrible empty void. While unsettling, it’s important to recognize that these emotions have been living in our bodies, and they need to surface so they can be digested and the wounded parts of ourselves can begin to heal.

Unpleasant and at times painful, it’s important for us to understand this process as an opportunity to heal and transform the deeply wounded parts within us. Whenever I’ve experienced this, I’ve made a concerted effort to remain present with whatever emotions or bodily sensations arise, breathing into the depths of all that emerges.

Diffusing and Digesting the Emotions that Keep You Awake at Night

Most of us are carrying some form of distress — struggles with work or health, challenges in our relationships, or the devastation of a breakup or other heart-rending drama. These kinds of experiences stir up a wide range of emotions, and when those emotions remain unprocessed, they can make it difficult to for us fall asleep. Or we may find ourselves waking in the middle of the night and unable to drift back to sleep.

As much as we’d rather avoid feeling these emotions, suppressing them only harms us. Undigested feelings don’t disappear — they remain trapped in the body, causing greater damage over time. They prevent us from coming to a place of resolution and reinforce the very patterns and realities that are causing our distress in the first place.

Our lived experiences and the emotions they stir need to go through a process of digestion. Begin by acknowledging what’s keeping you awake — the events or concerns that weigh upon you, and the feelings they bring. Notice where those feelings live in your body. Then breathe softly and deeply, immersing your awareness in the depths of whatever arises.

At first, the emotions may intensify as you breathe into them, and that can make sleep feel even further away. But if you stay with the process, the intensity gradually diminishes. Sometimes this takes only fifteen to thirty minutes, other times it may take hours.

The truth is, we all have to face realities that are difficult, even distressing, and that evoke powerful and often unpleasant emotions. These emotions are already present — they are the way the deeper parts of our psyche communicate with us. It’s in our best interest to learn how to work with them effectively. When you do, you’re not only soothing yourself back toward rest, you’re also facilitating healing and growth. You’re taking your lived experiences and emotional responses and transforming them into fuel for growth.

Caffeine, Exhaustion, and the Sleep-Debt Spiral

It can be difficult if you’re feeling exhausted and struggling to function and get through the day, but if you’re not getting adequate sleep, I encourage you to minimize your use of caffeine, because it further exacerbates your difficulty sleeping. Caffeine can feel like a lifeline when you’re dragging, yet it often keeps the cycle going: it masks fatigue, pushes the nervous system harder, fragments nighttime sleep, and leaves you reaching for more the next day.

When Sleep Goes Sideways — Crashes, Jet Lag, and Resets

There have been stretches when I couldn’t get adequate sleep — like when the banksters (yes, the white-collar criminals in the financial industry) crashed the economy in 2009 and the bottom fell out from under me, as it did for so many others. Other times my system spun out from long-haul flights, long commutes, and long hours. The quality of my sleep suffered: trouble falling asleep, waking too early, waking at 2 or 3 a.m. and not getting back down, or sleeping poorly — sometimes all of the above. Getting through the next day felt like dragging a dead weight. Fortunately, I’m good at finding windows for naps, and I can sometimes doze even sitting up.

Getting adequate sleep is a crucial part of caring for ourselves. When the system gets this out of balance, it often perpetuates itself. Sometimes we need an intervention — a reset. For me, acupuncture, deep-tissue bodywork, and reflexology have all helped when my system was out of whack and sleep was shaky. Most helpful has been the vision quest, a traditional Native American practice of fasting alone in the mountains without food or water. I love the profoundly deep sleep that arrives after I come down from the mountain. (I’m sharing my experience here, not prescribing — a vision quest requires real preparation and guidance and isn’t for everyone.) Many of the people I work with tell me that the individual sessions I facilitate act like a reset for their bodies too, helping them regulate their sleep cycles.

Having to contend with disrupted sleep can be difficult, but meditation transforms those hours of frustration into moments of stillness and renewal. If you’re struggling with insomnia, anxiety, jet lag, or the disruption of irregular schedules, you don’t have to spend those hours in frustration. Meditation can transform that time into something restorative, creative, and deeply healing.

I’ve spent decades developing practices that help people not only make constructive use of sleepless hours, but also digest their anxiety, restore balance, and grow stronger in the process.

If this resonates with you, I invite you to reach out. Together we can explore meditation practices that fit your life and help you find calm, resilience, and renewal — even in the middle of the night.

📞 Message or call me at (332) 333-5155 or visit benoofana.com and TeachMeToMeditate.com to learn more and schedule a session.

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