Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I want to kind of shift gears for a minute and talk about how I didn't get a good sleep, I don't know, for a couple nights in a row, and I have deadlines and things to work on. I was feeling very amotivated, as you like to say. And so I was, of course, deep in some of your stuff and came across this non-sleep deep rest. And I had never heard of it. I mean, I'm sure it's become popular since you've talked about it, but I would love for you to talk about the non-sleep deep rest. NSDR. So sleep is important for replenishing dopamine. And I didn't get that replenishment of dopamine. And so some tools that people can do, again, we're talking about behavioral tools that we've just mentioned, a few. But this non-sleep deep rest is interesting to me and how it can help replenish the baseline pools.

Dr. Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So 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.

I went and, 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, then 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. 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 I decided, okay, we could talk about yoga nidra, but it's a little bit like talking about meditation. And then you have these names, which is 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 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. 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 it 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. And 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 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 percent 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 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 rest 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 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 what exactly it's 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. 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 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 as much as possible a purely sensory state. You're focusing on just how things feel. You're not thinking into the future or past. You're just feeling sensation in your body. Very interesting. 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.

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 it this morning. I woke up at five. That's a little early for me. I 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 and 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. We've put a few of those out there on YouTube and there are a lot of them out there I really like. If I want a female voice I'll listen to the ones by Kamini Desai. D-E-S-A-I or Kelly Boys. B-O-Y-S. She's on the waking up app. She has terrific NSDR scripts and yoga nidra scripts. And then there's some with my voice. I can't bear to hear the sound of my own voice, believe it or not. So we have a 10-minute and 20-minute one at our clips channel. And there are a bunch of Spotify scripts and you can find them out there.

But to me it's one of the more interesting aspects of protocols. Meaning 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 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 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.

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: I did your 10-minute – one of your 10-minute NSDRs.

Dr. Andrew Huberman: How did it impact you?

Dr. Rhonda Patrick: It made me feel better, and I did it like I said, I hadn't gotten good sleep in the last two nights. It was like my sleep was disrupted. And so I stopped and I did your protocol. And listening to your voice was very soothing. And it also helped me, like, I was able to shift right back into my work. And I don't know if it's because I was understanding I was trying to read how it's affecting dopamine, replenishing dopamine. And so I sort of believed myself into it. Or if it just actually worked. Right? I mean...

Dr. Andrew Huberman: I hope so. It's also not a nap. Well, I'm glad you had a good experience with it. If people don't, of course, there's no obligation to do it again. It's different than a nap because it does not create sleep inertia. Matt Walker's talked about the fact that not everyone needs to nap. But a nap can improve cognitive performance. If you're going to nap, don't nap too late in the day, or certainly not if it's going to disrupt your nighttime sleep. A 20-minute nap seems to be the limit beyond which it can increase sleep inertia. You can wake up feeling groggy, have trouble waking up, and then people then will use caffeine, and then it disrupts their sleep. I like a 20-minute to 30-minute nap.

I'm guilty of sometimes taking a 30-minute nap, but yoga nidra is being awake while deeply relaxed, and that's a very unusual state. I also want to just speculate a little bit further. There's some interesting ideas out there about how body-still/mind-active states can be very useful for creativity. We had a couple of guests on the podcast, including Karl Deisseroth. He has a practice, believe it or not, where he sits completely still, deliberately completely still, and forces himself to think in complete sentences for about an hour at night as a way to sort of practice thinking. Very interesting. Body-still/mind-active. Then Rick Rubin, when he was on the podcast, not a scientist, but I'm fortunate to be friends with Rick. He does something similar.

What is a part of life where the brain is very active? The body is completely still and is known to be associated with ideas, learning and creativity? Rapid eye movement sleep. So there's something about the body being still and the mind remaining active that may lend itself to certain types of cognitive effort or cognitive endeavors. I don't know. This hasn't really been explored using neuroimaging, but I'm excited about this as a potential tool. And non-sleep deep rest, and yoga nidra. Again, the writing about it tends to be from these more ancient traditions, but starts off talking about replenishment of sleep, learning how to relax, et cetera.

But remember, they were doing this at a trauma treatment clinic, and I asked them, why, is it to just calm everybody down, make sure they get enough sleep? And they said, no, we're doing so much work here, trying to get people to remap their relationship to traumas. And they were really ahead of their time in understanding that the actual rewiring of neural circuits occurs during sleep. So they want to maximize the amount of deep rest that people were getting to maximize the rewiring, but also that, in these states of deep rest, you also replenish the ability to lean into what really is the hard work of trauma therapy. It's not easy. And does the brain rewire itself more readily if we're doing NSDR, yoga nidra? I don't know. I suspect yes, based on the similarity to sleep.

But that's one of the things that Matt and I would like to explore. Can it replace sleep that one's lost? Can it enhance the speed of learning? Can it reinforce learning in the same day? Because there's a thing called the first night effect, where the first night of sleep after a bout of learning is really critical for consolidating that learning. But let's face it, sometimes we don't get that night of sleep. So can you wake up the next morning and do a 30-minute NSDR and consolidate learning? Sometimes that learning is new information. Sometimes that learning is the dumping of information you don't want. This is why people who are rapid eye movement sleep-deprived often carry forward a lot of emotionality that, frankly, they would like to unload.

Then you get a great night's sleep and you're like that thing that was bothering me, that's like nothing now, right? So, rapid eye movement sleep is incredibly important. And yoga nidra, or I should say NSDR is a build-out from yoga nidra, in fairness, I think is a super powerful technique. And 10 minutes is pretty minor investment.