According to Osho, insomnia isn’t a medical disease but a lifestyle imbalance: when we don’t engage in sustained, hard physical or creative work, the body hasn’t "earned" deep sleep. Rich, sedentary living breeds restless nights, fatigue, and futile fixes. Restore nature’s rhythm through meaningful daily labor—gardening, chopping wood, painting—so sleep arrives effortlessly and energy is naturally rejuvenated.
If you don’t tire your body with real daily work, sleep won’t come; work well by day and sleep comes by itself.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, an article in an american woman's magazine says that as many as fifty million americans suffer from so-called insomnia. According to this article, insomnia, after the common cold and headache, ranks number three for visits to the doctor. Would you please comment?
Insomnia is not a disease. Insomnia is a certain way of life. Man is made by nature to work hard for at least eight hours. Unless he works hard for eight hours he does not earn the right to have a deep sleep. And as a society grows richer, people are not working hard. There is no need; others can work for them. The whole day they are doing small things which they enjoy doing, but it is not hard work like that of a stonecutter or a woodcutter. The body is made so that after eight hours of hard work it naturally needs to fall into sleep to rejuvenate its energy. But it seems difficult... you have earned enough money and still you are chopping wood for eight hours? Then for what have you earned all that money? It seems stupid. You could have chopped wood even without becoming…
Osho, here the urge to eat becomes very strong.
Yes. It is the very craving to eat that makes eating unbalanced. How much food is actually needed is put aside, and the relish of eating becomes more important. Very few of us feed the body; most of us feed the tongue. Taste is not a requirement of the body; taste is the mind’s lust. And because of taste we overeat. If you act a little consciously, this won’t happen. Be a little more aware and keep the simple remembrance that what you eat should be beneficial for the body as well as agreeable to the mind; it is not as difficult as we imagine. And if the desire to eat more arises, it is better to chew much more. Then you will eat for a longer time. After all, what pleasure can there be in eating for half an hour? For half an hour one keeps experiencing taste. So…
There was one more problem for the monks: they had collected too many suppressions in their unconscious and in sleep all those suppressions started surfacing and entering their dreams! So a kind of fear about sleep arose, because all the things that they had ignored during the day started surfacing in their sleep at night. The women they had left and run away from into the forest started arriving in their sleep. The monks started seeing them in their dreams. The money, the fame that the monks had run away from started following them in their dreams. So they felt that sleep was a very dangerous thing -- out of their control -- so the less they slept the better. These monks created a kind of feeling in the whole world that sleep is something unspiritual. This is an extremely foolish notion.
A friend has asked: Osho, if through meditation or spiritual practice one can conquer death, does not the same state occur in sleep? And if it does, why can’t death be conquered through sleep?
But meditation and hypnosis are not the same. Understand me carefully. I said: up to this point it is hypnosis, mesmerism—so long as we are manufacturing suggestions. When the manufacturing of suggestions stops and you awaken—where awareness begins—there meditation begins. Where witnessing begins, meditation begins. And the reason for this hypnosis is that you have fallen into a reverse hypnosis. In scientific language, this is not hypnosis but de-hypnosis. Not mesmerism, but the breaking of mesmerism. We are the ones mesmerized—but we don’t know it. In life we have become hypnotized, and we have no idea how many kinds of hypnotic trances we have taken on, by how many devices we have produced them. A large part of our life is hypnosis. And when we want to be hypnotized, we don’t notice what we are doing. For example… we live like this all our lives. If we became aware of…
In the day we wake and we account for our waking. A man’s effort is to manage with as little sleep as possible. In the West, many scientists think that sooner or later we should arrange that man need not sleep. If sleep is not needed, life can be longer by twenty years. If you live sixty years, twenty are lost in sleep. Rather than lengthening life by twenty years to eighty, would it not be better to save the twenty years that go to waste in sleep and let you fully live sixty? So scientists think someday we will find a way that man need not sleep. They do not know—this is the result of overemphasis on the positive. The man who forgets how to sleep will have a waking that is dull and meaningless. Have you noticed?