10 Minutes of This Feels Like 8 Hours of Sleep (Andrew Huberman)

if ever there was a protocol that is useful for people to explore given that sleep is so important and mental and physical Vigor are so important it's a 10 to 20 minute or I've continued to do it about once a day and I personally just feel as if I've slept 8 hours feel amazing people who did this experienced a 60% increase in dopamine in these key brain areas this is wild this is a big effect what is this I first thought about and learned about something called Yoga Nidra Yoga Nidra means yoga sleep there's a

thousand-year-old or more protocol where you lie down and you try to stay awake while remaining completely still it involves some long exhale breathing which we know slows the heart rate through respiratory sinus arhythmia which is a good thing it slows the heart rate and it had long been used as a way to offset sleep loss as well as to just create states of replenished mental and physical Vigor even if you slept well and there are a bunch of theories and some actually interesting writings about yoga Nedra potentially allowing people to um tap into intentions and

things like that okay great I learned about this process by the way somewhere around 2015 2016 and I decided to shift a significant portion of my lab from animal studies to human studies and I was very interested in stress mitigation and Trauma so I went visit a trauma Treatment Center in Florida where they were doing Yoga Nidra with people every morning for an hour they would wake up they would do this yoga NRA for an hour I decided to participate once or twice and I found it to be incredibly restorative because I wasn't sleeping well

on that trip and I would come out of it thinking like I just felt like I slept eight hours I only slept four or five broken hours I do this one hour of Yoga Nidra and whoa feel amazing like this is wild this is a big effect what is this go back to my laboratory we're studying stress stress mitigation techniques and for whatever reason you know I decided okay we could talk about Yoga Nidra but it's a little bit like talking about meditation and then you have these name which is you know a little complicated

for the scientific literature because it's not clear exactly what it is and I want to be very clear I'm not trying to take anything away from Yoga Nidra or those practices I have tremendous respect for them but I came up with this thing called non-sleep deep rest or nsdr for short which a gives people some sense of what they're doing and B strips away the intentions and any kind of mysticism whatsoever and it really just involves lying down for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes or an hour I suppose and people are doing long exhale

breathing to slow their heart rate and calm down doing a sort of body scan of paying attention to different parts of their body trying to stay awake but if they fall asleep it's okay we observe that it creates very dramatic decreases in sympathetic autonomic arousal AKA alertness and places the brain into and body into kind of a of a a shallow state of sleep not surprising but a state that is unusual and at least to my knowledge not observed in other meditative States at least you know to my knowledge but to be fair we didn't

do neuroimaging of this so we didn't have a lot of insight into it I started digging around in the literature and turns out there's a study out of a medical hospital in Denmark that had people doing Yoga Nidra for an hour so a very similar protocol but an hour using what's called pet positron amiss tomography measuring the amount of dopamine in the reserve pool in a certain key area of the brain called the striatum which is involved in the generation of movement it's also part of the reward and motivation pathway although you know there a

bunch of different Pathways for dopamine so I want to be clear about that we talked about that earlier so what they observed was really interesting they observed at least by Patron amission tomography that people who did this 1hour yoganidra protocol experienced a 60% above Baseline increase in dopamine in these key brain areas just from this hour of lying there completely still trying to stay awake listening to this script relaxation I think like this is wild and then there's some other studies showing that post Yoga Nidra performance on memory tasks or other cognitive tasks is improved

I got very excited about this and started whittling down the non-sleep Deep breast protocol to what we hope is the minimal effective dose which is about 10 minutes of non-sleep deep rest um we've done some exploration of that in my lab currently there is a collaboration Brewing between myself and Dr Matthew Walker the author of why we sleep the great sleep researcher the great Matt Walker to explore what is happening at a neural level using brain Imaging during non-sleep deep rest Matt has some my understanding is some insight or hypotheses I don't know you know

what exactly um is based on so I want to be very clear this is all very very preliminary that certain pockets of the brain might be able to go under go sleep-like States in things like nsdr Yoga Nidra that is not whole brain sleeping um but it might be pockets of brain areas um going to sleep like States H but the whole purpose of doing these experiments going forward this collaboration is to figure out exactly what's happening at a neural level during non-sleep deep rest and how closely it mimics sleep can you recover sleep that

you lost we don't know here's what we do know subjectively and again this is anic data if you will these are people who have challenges falling asleep often benefit from doing non-sleep deep rest a 10-minute or 20-minute protocol at any time of day or night because it's teaching you to self-direct your own relaxation it's different than meditation because meditation involves focusing meditation is really a focusing perceptual exercise think about your third eye center focus on your breath redirect your focus every time it drifts meditation is a focus exercise and work from Wendy Suzuki's Lab at

NYU has shown that it can improve performance in different cognitive tasks but the traditional forms of meditation sometimes can disrupt people's ability to sleep well why well you're increasing Focus capacity to fall asleep you need to kind of defocus and let go of your thoughts it's kind of interesting at the beginning of all yoga needra scripts at least the ones I've heard you hear um you're going to move from thinking and doing to being and feeling very new Agy language but let's explore that thinking and doing is about anticipation it's about memory to feeling and

being you're going into as much as possible a purely sensory state right you're focusing on just how things feel you're not thinking into the Future Past you're just thinking future or past you're just feeling sensation in your body very interesting and we so different than than meditation different than hypnosis hypnosis is a sort of meditation designed to solve a specific problem quit smoking relax less pain okay meditation more of a focus exercise non-sleep deep rest is used to restore mental and physical Vigor and to teach you to relax yourself so it can be done in

the middle of the night if you're having trouble sleeping it can be done in the morning this is when I typically like to do it I did morning I woke up at 5:00 that's a little early for me I she had a phone call uh for about an hour and then I realized oh goodness I got to get up soon I'm going to take 30 minutes and do a 30 minute non-sleep deep rest or in this case it was yoga Nitra I come out of that and I recall fa being in a pseudo sleep State

and I personally just feel as if I've slept 8 hours and many people report the similar sensation and again it's subjective but I think if ever there was a protocol that is useful for people to explore given that it's safe at zero cost and that sleep is so important and mental and physical Vigor are so important and the data on dopamine it's a 10 to 20 minute Yoga Nidra or nsdr script to me it's one of the more interesting aspects of protocols meaning you know we have exercise protocols we have nutrition protocols we got deliberate

heat exposure deliberate cold exposure protocols what about protocols for restoring mental and physical Vigor that aren't meditation that aren't hypnosis that aren't pharmacology and what does that look like it's taking the brain out of that anticipatory mode so if we speculate go okay move from thinking and doing to being in Feeling Again very new Agy but what are we doing we're deliberately shifting our thinking away from the very types of thought and action that deplete the dopamine Reserve pool right and should we be surprised that there's this significant increase in dopamine in the striatum post

Yoga Nidra or nsdr probably not because you're not tapping into that neural circuitry for a period of time it also underscores the extent to which in our Waking Life we are constantly in Gold directed Behavior even when we don't realize it and so um I find nsdr to be among the most potent and important tools or protocols that I've used in my own life I've continued to do it about once a day um any time of day or night sometimes based on need to get more sleep sometimes just as a practice and even 10 minutes

of nsdr for me I emerge from that feeling completely completely different and always better