Why Do I Fall Asleep When I Meditate?

You fall asleep when you meditate because you’re tired. That’s it. That’s usually the whole answer. Meditation asks you to sit still, close your eyes, soften your body and stop doing things, which is more or less the exact recipe you’d follow if you were trying to fall asleep. If there’s any sleep debt in your system, your body will take the opportunity. It isn’t a sign you’re bad at meditating. In my experience it’s far more often a sign that your body is telling you something true.

And I want to say something that might surprise you, because most articles on this will hand you a list of tricks for staying awake: some of the best meditation of my life came from letting myself fall asleep on purpose.

Let me tell you what happened, because it genuinely changed how I teach this.

The year I couldn’t stay awake

This was fairly early on, when I’d become a full-time mindfulness teacher and a couple of my books had come out. I was travelling constantly. Teaching all over the world, living in airports, permanently a few time zones out of step with myself.

And I got tired. Properly tired. The kind of tired that jet lag stacks on top of teaching, week after week, until it stops feeling like tiredness and starts feeling like who you are.

Every time I sat down to meditate, I fell asleep. During the day I was exhausted. I’d wake in the morning without the energy to do the work in front of me. I was, if I’m honest about it, burning out. Which is not a good look for a mindfulness teacher, and I felt that keenly. There’s a particular embarrassment in being the person who teaches this for a living and not being able to stay awake for ten minutes of it.

So I made a small decision that turned out to be a big one. Instead of pushing through the tiredness, I started going back to bed. I was working from home, so when the tiredness came mid-morning, I’d just go and lie down. Not meditating, not really sleeping either. Just stopping.

Then I went looking for a retreat, and found an entire one on YouTube, led by the monk Ajahn Brahm.

The instruction I’d never heard a teacher give

He said (and I’m giving you my memory of it, not a transcript) that especially in the first part of a retreat, you should lie down, rest your attention very gently on the breath or the body, and allow sleep to happen. If you fall asleep, fine. If you don’t, also fine.

Fully allowing. No part of you standing guard against dozing off.

I’d been meditating for years by then and nobody had ever given me permission like that. It fits with everything else he teaches, because his whole approach is about letting go rather than trying harder. But applied to sleep, it felt almost transgressive.

So I did it. And for the first day or two I simply fell asleep. Every time. I’d lie down, turn towards the breath, and go under.

Then on the third day, something shifted that I hadn’t done anything to cause. Instead of falling asleep, I found myself fully present. Completely awake and mindful, without any effort at all.

The other half of it is that I wasn’t just being aware, and I think this is the part people skip. I was combining awareness of the breath with a lot of kindness and compassion. A sense of caring, rather than the cold, watchful attention that meditation instructions sometimes imply. That made an enormous difference.

What followed was one of the most beautiful meditations I’ve ever had. No effort to meditate at all. My body became so relaxed and soft it seemed to disappear, and there was a kind of golden light to the whole thing. Bliss is not a word I use casually, and I’m wary of promising anyone else an experience. But that’s what it was, and it came directly out of giving myself permission to sleep.

My body had needed three days of rest first. It was never going to give me stillness until it had been given that.

Is it bad to fall asleep during meditation?

No. And when a student tells me “I can’t meditate, I just keep falling asleep”, which they tell me often, here’s roughly what I say back:

Falling asleep isn’t failure. It’s information. Your body is telling you what it needs before it can do anything else, and sleep is a wonderful thing to need.

Plenty of people would give a great deal to fall asleep easily. If your body can drop into sleep the moment you give it stillness and kindness, that’s not a broken meditation practice. That’s a body doing its job.

It’s worth knowing how common the underlying tiredness is. A survey of 2,000 UK adults by Opinium for the Mental Health Foundation (October 2025) found the average UK adult gets only three days a week of good-quality sleep, and one in seven say they don’t get the sleep they need to function well on any day in a typical week. So if you sit down, go quiet, and immediately start to drift, you are extremely normal.

There’s a line that does the rounds on this, usually attributed to the Dalai Lama: “Sleep is the best meditation.” I like it, and I’ve said it out loud more than once. I’ll be straight with you though. I’ve never been able to trace it to an actual talk or book, so treat it as folk wisdom rather than scripture.

But aren’t I just avoiding meditation?

Sometimes, yes. Sleepiness can occasionally be the mind’s way of ducking out of something uncomfortable. The tradition has known about this for a very long time, and it isn’t nothing.

But I’d put it near the bottom of your list of explanations, not the top. In twenty years of teaching I’ve met far more people who were genuinely exhausted than people who were subconsciously dodging their own practice. Reach for tiredness first. Reach for kindness second. Only much later, if you’ve slept well for a fortnight and still can’t stay awake for five minutes, is it worth asking whether something in you is turning away.

Starting with “I’m avoiding it” tends to add a layer of self-criticism to a body that was only ever asking for rest. That helps nobody.

Does meditating while sleepy still count?

It counts. You showed up, you turned towards your breath with some warmth, and your body took what it needed. That’s a good outcome, even if it doesn’t look like the photograph on the front of a meditation book.

And there’s reasonable evidence that meditation and sleep help each other rather than compete. In a randomised trial published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Black and colleagues (2015) taught a six-week mindfulness programme to older adults with moderate sleep problems and found meaningfully better sleep quality than a structured sleep-education comparison, a between-group difference of 1.8 points on the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (95% CI 0.6–2.9). Worth two caveats, though: it was a small trial, just 49 people, with an average age of 66. Encouraging, not conclusive. You can read the full paper here.

How to meditate when you keep falling asleep

Not a list of tricks for forcing yourself awake. This is what I’d actually suggest, in order:

1. Sleep first. If you’re short on sleep, treat that as the practice for now. Go to bed earlier, or nap. Meditation is not a substitute for rest and it will not go well as one.
2. Give yourself explicit permission. Before you begin, decide: if I fall asleep, that’s completely fine. Say it to yourself. Removing the struggle is what makes the difference. You’d be amazed how much energy goes into not-falling-asleep.
3. Add kindness, not just attention. Rest your awareness on the breath with a sense of care, as you’d sit with someone you love. This is what I call kindfulness, and in my own experience it was the missing ingredient, not an optional extra.
4. Lie down if you want to. Yes, really. It makes sleep more likely, and per steps 1 and 2, that’s allowed.
5. Give it several days. In my case the stillness arrived on day three, after two days of simply sleeping. Judging your practice on one sleepy session is like judging a night’s rest by the first ten minutes.
6. Then, if you’d like to stay awake: sit upright rather than lying down, eyes softly open with your gaze low, somewhere cool with a bit of light, and not straight after a heavy meal. Also try a different time of day. Falling asleep at 10pm may say more about the hour than about you.

Note the order. Every “stay awake” tip lives at step six, after five steps of rest and kindness, and that’s deliberate.

In short

If you keep falling asleep when you meditate, your body is almost certainly asking for sleep. Let it have some. Bring kindness to the whole business rather than a struggle, and give it a few days.

The stillness comes after the rest, not instead of it. That was true for me on that retreat, and it’s been true for most of the people I’ve taught since.

If tiredness is the bigger picture for you, I’ve written about dealing with tiredness and about ten ways into deep relaxation. If you’d rather use meditation to sleep better at night, start with these four meditations for deep sleep. And if you’re still working out how long to sit for, here’s my honest answer, which begins at one breath.

You can find my books, including Mindfulness For Dummies, here.