Yoga Nidra

You set up as comfortably as you can — mat, bolster under the knees, blanket, eye cover — because you will not move again for half an hour.

The classic sequence runs through eight stages: settling, a short personal resolve, a rotation of attention around the body part by part, breath awareness, deliberately pairing opposites like heavy and light, some imagery, the resolve repeated, and a slow return.

The rotation is the heart of it — a teacher naming body parts at a steady clip, faster than you can deliberately think about each one. Falling asleep is extremely common, especially the first few times.

The phrase yoga nidra is genuinely ancient — it appears in the Mahabharata and in medieval tantric texts — but there it names a cosmic or meditative state, not a practice you can be led through.

The guided technique is from the 1970s. Swami Satyananda Saraswati of the Bihar School of Yoga set out the eight-stage system in 1976, and it is his version that almost every class today descends from. A French teacher, Dennis Boyes, published a guided formulation three years earlier, in 1973. Scholars have noted that the rotation of consciousness closely parallels nyasa, a tantric practice of mentally placing mantras into parts of the body — a resemblance worth noting rather than a lineage anyone has proven.

You may also see this billed as NSDR, or non-sleep deep rest — a deliberately secular umbrella term popularised by the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman for essentially the same thing without the yogic framing.

Two claims to take with salt. The first is that half an hour of yoga nidra substitutes for three or four hours of sleep — widely repeated, entirely unsupported. The second is a specific figure about a large dopamine increase during NSDR, which traces back to a single brain-imaging study of about eight people.

What is fair to say is that it is deep rest, it is easy to do badly and still benefit from, and a good recording at home works nearly as well as a class.