Side effects: Sleeplessness and tinnitus

[Bethany]

When you have difficulty sleeping, try practicing a yoga nidra technique. You can find a lot of examples on You Tube, and it should help you to relax and fall back to sleep.

[MiM]

Thank you for the suggestion. A quick search on the net gives me the impression that the bodyscan used in mbsr falls into that category (yoga nidra), or at least very close. Am I right, or are there some major differences that I am missing?

I actually have been doing a modified bodyscan when having problems falling asleep. Many times with good results. I tend to get restless legs if I try to do it laying on my back, but is seems to work better if I lie on the side.

[Mal_Smith]

Anyway, yesterday after my yoga practice I noticed I had not registered any tinnitus at all during the yoga, so with any luck it might have been something temporary.

I had the opposite experience, I started suffering from tinnitus after I gave up meditating.

There are several books that discuss Mindfulness as an approach to treating tinnitus*.

After a long lapse from meditating I found myself with tinnitus & headaches, started meditating again, and re-read my Kabat-Zinn collection. There are several books on mindfulness and tinnitus, so I ordered one but by the time it arrived the tinnitus and headaches had gone! (Thanks Jon...)

Note, I didn't practice yoga or body scan, simple mindfulness of breathing did the trick (plus I was lot calmer, happier, etc. Why oh why don't I keep meditating ... Maybe this time...)

* http://www.tinnitus.org.uk/mindfulness-for-tinnitus

[MiM]

I am spending a couple of days alone at a cottage and am trying to create something akin to a retreat out of it. So I try to enjoy the scenery, do things mindfully, do some extra yoga and meditations and cut down on being on the internet. ("Things" includes little chores, relaxing, and some vigorous physical activity, like chopping wood). I constantly notice, that I haven't been mindful in whatever activity I was in, and then try to bring my mind back to the moment, which generally succeeds for a short while, until... Generally I am quite happy with all of this, and my day has been a good one.

However, this afternoon, when having my coffee, I noticed a horrible ringing in my ears and a "just below pain threshold" headache. And when I tried to do a sitting meditation after that, I noticed that my "stress knot" (the place in my back between my shoulder blades, that becomes sore whenever I am under a lot of stress) was aching horribly. Changing the sitting meditation into a yoga helped some with that, and I am now in much less pain. But the question stands. Why am I tensing so badly, when trying to be mindful, and what can I do to make the experience physically more relaxing?

So, as an answer to the question I started this thread with, I now definitely think the tinnitus issue links with being physically tense. But are there others with experience from tensing up when trying to be mindful or meditating? Any ideas on how to do differently to get a more relaxing experience out of it? (Except "striving less", that is obvious. Yoga is also helpful, but I feel a strong need to be more in my mind, than I am during yoga)