Naps are good. Great, even; wonderful, sometimes, when a hammock or a seascape is involved. They can also be bad, when they veer into immoderate territories: the too-long nap, the depression nap, napping while driving. But generally, naps are beneficial “as long as you sleep within the parameters of what a nap is,” says Rachel Salas, MD, a neurologist and assistant medical director at the Johns Hopkins Center for Sleep and Wellness. “People say, ‘I took a three-hour nap’… Well, that’s not a nap.” The perfect nap occurs before 2 p.m. and lasts somewhere north of 10 minutes but certainly shy of an hour, and just about every authority agrees it can benefit not only our energy levels but also our memories and moods, even our reaction time.
So you must forgive a well-napped person like myself for reacting so quickly and fiercely to a newfangled wellness trend called “non-sleep deep rest,” an umbrella term for the various ways in which the human body can enter a brief and conscious state of self-healing. I cannot help but cry aloud about what kind of world we live in—a world that allows a perfectly good thing to undergo such a savage rebranding campaign that turns it into something as grotesque and unrecognizable as “NSDR.”
“Non-sleep deep rest” describes a kind of non-sleep, whereby instead of dropping into REM you hover above it, surfing on the brink of consciousness. A nap happens when you fall under. NSDR was born in that liminal space where the territories of Goop and Infowars abut. The Sleep Foundation, a website that is not affiliated with the National Sleep Foundation but rather sponsored by the etailer Sleep Doctor, defined NSDR as “relaxation techniques” that encourage “deep relaxation.” The term itself was coined by Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and Stanford professor.
Those familiar with Huberman may know him as the lumberjackish face and voice of the blockbuster Huberman Lab podcast, an endlessly whirring dispenser of neuroadvice covering topics like relationships, empathy, and sleep. Or they may recognize him as the subject of a New York magazine profile that reported his seemingly pathological infidelity and zeal for supposed wellness-boosting techniques that have limited scientific backing. But the important thing about Huberman is that his recommendations exercise an outsize influence on how lay people understand their own brain, and immediately after he speaks, his words crystallize into something that looks like theorem. He often reminds listeners—millions of whom listen to him on Spotify, watch him on YouTube, or follow him on Instagram—that he’s not a doctor, but a professor, and is thus given to professing things.
Huberman has evangelized NSDR far and wide. He has been a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast four times, and the conversation always turns to sleep—being, as it is, recharge mode for the brain. Huberman calls optimization techniques like NSDR “protocols,” shading his speech with a militant flavor of masculinity. (His sleep routine also includes red light therapy, but non-cosmetically so, he insisted to Rogan: “I’m not trying to heal acne or anything.”) On the Lex Fridman podcast, he explained how NSDR “encompasses a lot of practices that are not meditation per se.” Hypnosis is one form of NSDR; so is yoga nidra, or yogic sleep.
Huberman’s speech is often laced with references to peer-reviewed studies, and bolstered by podcast guests, like the sleep scientist Gina Poe, whose insights help ratify his advice. But this advice does not benefit from his proximity to figures, like Rogan or Fridman, who have been criticized for platforming less than credible figures, who go on to spew misinformation into the podcast record. When it comes to NSDR in particular, a lot of what Huberman shares is probably true: That entering hypnagogia, the state between waking and slumbering, activates our parasympathetic nervous system, one of our body’s many fabulous built-in healing apparatuses.
“You’re basically putting yourself in a deep state of relaxation,” says Angela Holiday-Bell, a certified clinical sleep specialist in Illinois. The restoration process is triggered when brain activity slows into long and languorous “delta waves” that typically come about in the deepest stage of slumber. NSDR, in theory, allows you to plunge in and out of this state, as opposed to a nap, which is a slower descent. Holiday-Bell likes to pair the two: She may do a guided meditation or short yoga nidra practice to fall asleep. “It can improve stress and anxiety, cognitive functioning, mood,” she adds.
Yoga nidra has been the subject of decades of research, with studies consistently demonstrating positive effects on mood, personality, and cognition, attributed in part to increased dopamine release and brain circulation. (It’s most effective when done consistently for 30 minutes a day, a few times a week.) Huberman has repeatedly talked about how his research in NSDR was inspired by yoga nidra, which he’s practiced between one and seven times per week since 2017. “I coined NSDR,” he told Rogan in 2022, “because I didn’t like the words yoga nidra and meditation, all sounds kind of magic carpet-y and acts as a barrier for people.” What kind of people, I wonder?
In fact, yoga nidra precedes the trend by about some five thousand plus years. Sri Dharma Mittra, a guru in Lower Manhattan who has practiced for six decades, thinks it probably even precedes yoga. “Many people in the past knew that in order to restore our bodies, in order to go into healing, we have to place the body in sleep,” he explains over Zoom. The earliest yoga sessions in human history would regularly end with short intervals of rest. “Gradually, teachers worked up the process of relaxing a little longer,” he said; they would ring bells at intervals to keep practitioners on the brink of consciousness.
Huberman’s preferred protocols, as well as the free ones he offers to his own congregations, borrow that ancient tool known as the YouTube guided meditation audio-video. Mittra suggests setting alarms on your phone for every two minutes, like digital bells, and setting yourself up as comfortably as possible in your bed. “At a [yoga] studio, if the floor is uncomfortable, people get restless,” Mittra says.
“I recommend a lot of yoga nidra to patients,” explains Dr. Salas, who typically prescribes it to patients who experience anxiety or insomnia, at the onset of their bedtime routine. She instructs her patients to poke around Google until they find a soothing video or audio, but also invented a protocol involving a breathing exercise in which patients blow their worries into the air, visualizing them floating away and popping into nothingness; she calls them Salas bubbles. “It’s merging rest with intention,” she says.
Dr. Holliday-Bell maintains a simpler practice. If given 30 minutes and the choice of a nap or NSDR session, she’ll take the former. But my favorite protocol was the state of concentration Mittra described instead. “Let’s compare our body to a telescope. During the first step, the first level, we are repairing the telescope,” he explains. “Once the body is relaxed and the telescope is fixed, we get to see the power of the telescope—and go deep into divine perception.” It could take a lifetime, or longer, to catch even a glimpse through this lens, and it requires the sustained practice of removing one’s consciousness from time and place. It takes “a tremendous effort,” Mittra says, “not to disappear completely.”
A tremendous effort begs the question: Why not take a nap? If we have yoga nidra, which is old, and naps, which are older—why do we need a confusing third thing? Dr. Holiday-Bell, for her part, is a power napper. She has yet to come across any studies comparing “NSDR” or yoga nidra to old-fashioned naps, but she prefers the latter anyway. “The benefits are similar, in that taking a short power nap can help with stress, anxiety, infirmity,” she says. “But I do think there are more benefits to going through at least some of the sleep stages.” All you need is between 20 and 45 minutes and a dark room. Really—all you need.
More wellness “trends” on our FYPs:
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- The Ayurvedic Beauty “Trend” Completely Misses the Point of Ayurveda
- Taking Those “Tanning Pills” All Over TikTok Could, Indeed, Change Your Skin Tone
Now watch Jordan Chiles’ daily routine.
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