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

- A talk about non-sleep deep rest or NSDR for short. The aim is to find a protocol that is useful for people to explore, given the importance of sleep. - A 10 to 20 minute yoga nidra or NSDR script is a safe and useful protocol for restoring mental and physical vigor.

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 eight hours. I 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 arrhythmia, 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 nidra potentially allowing people to tap into intentions and things like that. Okay, great. I learned about this process by the way. Somewhere around 2015, 2016, 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 and visited 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 nidra 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, I 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 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 very similar protocol, but an hour using what's called PET positron emission 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 are 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 positron emission tomography, that people who did this one hour yoga NIDRA 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. 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 sleepworge researcher, the great Matt Walker, to explore what is happening at a neural level using brain imaging during non sleep depressed. Matt has some, my understanding is some insight or hypotheses. I don't know what exactly 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 undergo sleep like states in things like nsdr, Yoga Nidra. That is not whole brain sleeping, but it might be pockets of brain areas going to sleep like states. 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 anecdata if you will. These are people who have challenges falling asleep. Often benefit from doing non sleep deep restrictions. 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 NIDRA scripts, at least the ones I've heard you hear, you're going to move from thinking and doing to being and feeling. Very new agey language, but let's explore that. Thinking and doing is about anticipation. It's about memory to feeling and being. You're going into a 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 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 depressed 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 it this morning. I Woke up at 5. That's a little early for me. Actually had a phone call 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 nidra. I come out of that and I recall being in a pseudo sleep state and I personally just feel as if I've slept eight hours and many people report this 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've 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 and feeling again, very New Agey. But what are we doing? We're deliberately shifting our thinking away from the very types of thoughts 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 goal directed behavior, even when we don't realize it. And so 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, 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 different and always better.