The Practice of Yoga Nidra to Improve Your Sleep and Stress | Dr. Andrew Huberman

[Music] the practice that for me has really helped reduce stress and allowed me to fall asleep more easily and control my state of mind late in the evening is this practice that some people call yoga nidra which literally means yoga sleep and that practice of taking 20 or 30 minutes a day and it doesn't have to be done every day and lying down and doing a sort of body scan it involves some long exhale breathing which is very relaxing to the nervous system and really allowing the mind to enter one of these pseudo sleep states

we know from work in my laboratory and work that i'm doing with david spiegel's laboratory as well as work from other labs that that state of shallow nap or shallow sleep done in waking allows the brain to and the person to get better at turning off their thoughts and falling asleep in the evening so i use both behavioral tools and pharmacology which of course is really what supplementation is i don't have any problem with buffering cortisol a little bit in the short term so doing that for a week or two but i wouldn't suggest that

people suppress their cortisol long term unless there's a real clinical need to do that long term being longer than two weeks you mentioned long exhales in the context of the yoga nidra practice is it fair to refer to that yoga nidra practice is also non-sleep deep rest or nsdr are those separate phenomena yeah so yoga nidra is one of several what we call nsdr non-sleep deep rest protocols admittedly i coined the term nsdr because scientists like acronyms almost as much as the military likes acronyms and i did it deliberately not to rob the beautiful history

and community that is yoga nidra and the yogic communities of anything but rather because many people are averse to doing anything that has a name like yoga nidra and yet it's such a powerful tool it's a zero cost tool that has enormous effects on not just accessing sleep and calm but enhancing rates of neuroplasticity something that we could talk more about also david spiegel again our associate chair of psychiatry at stanford and close collaborator and friend of mine is a world expert in clinical hypnosis we are part of a just in in full disclosure we

both sit on the advisory board of a company called reverie r-e-v-e-r-i dot com reverie is a zero-cost app beyond android and apple that has short hypnosis protocols anywhere from 10 minutes to 15 minutes hypnosis and yoga nidra both fall under the umbrella of nsdr non-sleep deep breast and these are protocols that people can use to deliberately access states of deep rest for sake of again falling asleep more easily reducing stress but also for enhancing rates of learning of neuroplasticity and because these are zero cost tools i and because they're grounded in excellent peer-reviewed research i

feel comfortable mentioning them and what you find is that if people who are not familiar with meditation or mindfulness or maybe they're not from west la or the bay area um if they hear yoganidra they think magic carpets and they think and they hear hypnosis and they think that somebody's going to control their brain nsdr is my attempt to create a more friendly language which is because all of these things are really just the same thing they really involve two things one self-directing a state of calm that's something that we never learned how to do

unless we have a need to do it we suffer some trauma we have chronic stress we start taking a mindfulness class we self-inducing a state of calm through respiration and vision is the hallmark of yoganidra and hypnosis and frankly of all meditative practices our thoughts follow our vision and breathing and i can explain why that is in a moment in addition these nsdr type practices involve not just self-directing calm but they also involve directing our focus to something we generally have a hard time falling asleep because we think we have to turn off our thoughts

completely like a switch but the transition to sleep involves allowing our thoughts to become fragmented and then we become relaxed and then the brain enters the state where space and time are very fluid and not under our conscious control and those are things that we can teach ourselves so yoga needs your scripts are found all over youtube there's some great apps out there the zero cost ones that i use are any of the stuff by comedy k-a-m-i-n-i desai d-e-s-a-i i like her voice very much some people like my sister loves liam gillen's voice another zero

cost yoga nidra tool liam gillen double l-g-i-l-l-e-n you have to find a voice that you like the revery app is david's voice he has a very hypnotic voice and there are scripts in there for smoking cessation stress and anxiety sleep etc these i really want to emphasize in addition to being zero costs are very powerful tools if done regularly there are two papers that were published in the last two years from cell reports and cell press journal excellent journal showing that a 20-minute non-sleep deep breath protocol after a bout of intense focus or intense attempt

to learn anything skill learning or cognitive learning accelerates plasticity by about 50 so you are learning faster much faster and retention of that information lasts much longer and that's because these are sleep-like states and we know that neuroplasticity the brain's ability to change in response to experience is triggered by high focus by deliberate periods of very high focus but the actual rewiring of neurons the formation of new synapses and the reordering of the circuitry that leads to that skill or that cognitive ability becoming reflexive that happens in states of deep rest and non-sleep deep breast

nsdr whether it's hypnosis or yoganidra or a shallow nap of about 20-30 minutes those things will all accelerate learning you