Sleepiness

Sleepiness can arise at any time on our Headspace journey. More often than not it arises toward the beginning. So, it's almost as though we've been rushing around our entire life and all of a sudden we pause just for a moment, and in posing we realize just how tired we are. It's almost like a residual tiredness. It's in the body, it's in the mind, it's almost like it's kinda oozing, oozing out of us. And the result is that sometimes even if we don't fall asleep, we feel a little bit sleepy. So it's quite common when you sort of ask people after they've done their first few sessions of how do you feel and they say, "Whoa, I feel calmer but I also, I feel really tired. I feel really sleepy." It's really important to acknowledge that it's not the exercise or the technique that makes you feel sleepy. The technique simply provides a framework in which we see how we're feeling in both body and mind more clearly, and very often to begin with as I say that is a sense of sleepiness. Now, it's really tempting to think, okay, well, there's no point in me doing this. If I'm just gonna fall asleep it's kinda a waste of time but it's really not. For sure, if you sit down and that the intention is to go to sleep then, you know, it's a bit of a waste of time (narrator chuckles) but as long as we sit down with the intention to follow the technique through and we then fall asleep partway through, that's okay. That's not wasted time at all. And in fact, the other information will still be going in. In fact, what usually happens is there's quite a sort of a usual commons or pattern, and that's the first few weeks, maybe two, three weeks, for some a little longer but normally just the first few weeks. This kind of tiredness comes to the surface, we find ourselves falling asleep as we continue, so that happens less frequently. In fact, we may, for some people nobody kind of experienced that again after that initial few weeks. For some it continues. So, there's a few things you can do to make sure that you are less likely to fall asleep during the session. So, obviously the first is time of day. If we save our Headspace for very last thing at night so much so that is the last thing we remember to do as we're lying there in our bed before we go to sleep, then of course we're more likely to fall asleep. So, find a time of day which is conducive for this kind of exercise. Avoid times of day sort of like immediately after lunch when the stomach sort of requires all our energy and again we're more likely to fall asleep. The best time of day when the mind is brightest although that won't be the case for...