Groggy? Not Sleeping Well? Can’t Focus? Have You Tried Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR)?

We know as human beings that if we start to experience a lack of sleep it will impact our physical and mental health overtime. We live in a world of quick fixes and feeling like we don’t have enough time to perform a 30 minute meditation or workout for an entire hour. But what if you could start with a 10 minute protocol that could help with memory retention, enhance rates of neuroplasticity, relieve stress, increase cognitive function, improve sleep quality, and enhances focus and mental clarity.

Welcome non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) and the goal of NSDR is to slow down the brains waves, similar to what happens during slow-wave sleep which is one of the four stages of sleep, specially the 3rd phase of non-rapid eye movement sleep (non-REM sleep). Pretty cool stuff if you ask me!

What’s so important about slow-wave sleep? Well, slow-wave sleep is a stage in sleep when the body rejuvenates and heals itself; greatest percentage of growth hormone is released during this stage promoting tissue growth and repair in addition to this stage of sleep activating our parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest).

It is crucial for our body to go into a parasympathetic state to be able to sleep well and since the effect of NSDR on the cerebral cortex mirrors that of slow-wave sleep, you can enjoy the restoration benefits of deep sleep without falling asleep. Non-sleep deep rest can be a great tool that people can use everyday to start to make drastic changes with their health.

Two different NSDR protocols to use are yoga nidra and hypnosis (no, not stage hypnosis). If you search on YouTube these two different protocols you will find a lot of useful videos that will guide you through it. Give it a shot for a least a week and see how it goes!