Yoga Nidra

Yoga Nidra means yogic sleep. You lie still in savasana and follow a spoken instruction through a fixed sequence of stages, while staying just on the waking side of sleep. One session lasts 10 to 30 minutes, and the ten minute version below is the one most people should start with.

The state is genuinely odd, and it has been measured. In a study of 26 practitioners, people remained awake by every standard sleep scoring criterion, and yet showed increased delta activity in central parts of the brain and decreased alpha at the back of the head. The researchers call this local sleep: parts of the brain producing sleep like activity while the person is technically awake. That is a reasonable description of what it feels like from the inside, and it is why the practice is not simply a nap with instructions.

What it is not. It is not meditation, because there is nothing to concentrate on and no effort to sustain. It is not a nap, because there is a voice and a sequence. It is not progressive muscle relaxation, because you never tense anything. And it is not a treatment for insomnia, depression or high blood pressure, whatever the effect sizes in the meta-analyses look like at first glance.

The one thing that makes it unusual on a yoga site is that it demands nothing. No flexibility, no fitness, no ability to sit cross legged, no experience. If you can lie down and hear, you can do it tonight.

This is the script I use for the last ten minutes of the day. Read it slowly to yourself, have somebody read it to you, or record it in your own voice. The pace is what matters: roughly half as fast as you think, with a pause of two or three seconds at every full stop. It ends without bringing you back, because it is designed for bed.

Settling, about one minute.

Lie on your back. Legs a little apart. Arms away from the sides, palms turned up. A blanket over you. Let the eyes close.

Take one slow breath in. And let it go, longer than it came in. Again. And once more. Now stop managing the breath, and let the body breathe itself.

Feel the weight of the body on the bed. The back of the head. The shoulders. The hips. The heels. Nothing to hold up any more.

Resolve, about half a minute.

Say silently, three times, in the same words each night: I am at ease. I am at ease. I am at ease.

Rotation of consciousness, about five minutes.

Take the attention to the right hand thumb. Second finger. Third finger. Fourth. Fifth. The palm of the right hand. The back of the hand. The wrist. The forearm. The elbow. The upper arm. The right shoulder. The right armpit. The right side of the ribs. The right waist. The right hip. The right thigh. The right knee. The calf. The ankle. The heel. The sole of the right foot. The top of the foot. The big toe. Second toe. Third. Fourth. Fifth.

Now the left hand thumb. Second finger. Third. Fourth. Fifth. The palm. The back of the left hand. The wrist. Forearm. Elbow. Upper arm. The left shoulder. The armpit. The left ribs. The left waist. The left hip. Thigh. Knee. Calf. Ankle. Heel. The sole of the left foot. The top of the foot. Big toe. Second. Third. Fourth. Fifth.

Now the back of the body. The right shoulder blade. The left shoulder blade. The whole of the upper back. The middle back. The lower back. The back of the pelvis. The back of both legs. The back of the head.

Now the front. The forehead. The right eyebrow. The left eyebrow. The space between the eyebrows. The right eyelid. The left eyelid. The right cheek. The left cheek. The nose. The upper lip. The lower lip. The chin. The throat. The right side of the chest. The left side of the chest. The centre of the chest. The upper abdomen. The navel. The lower abdomen.

The whole body lying still. The whole body. The whole body.

Breath count, about three minutes.

Take the attention to the breath at the navel, rising and falling. Count each exhale backwards, silently, from twenty seven.

Breathing out, twenty seven. Breathing out, twenty six. Breathing out, twenty five. And carry on, in your own time, all the way down towards one. If the count is lost, begin again at twenty seven, without minding.

Ending, about half a minute.

Let the counting go. Let the breath go. Say once more, silently: I am at ease.

There is nothing else to do tonight. Stay exactly where you are, and let sleep arrive on its own.

If you are practising in the daytime, do not stop there. Add this: become aware of the sounds in the room. Become aware of the weight of the body. Move the fingers and the toes. Take one deeper breath. Roll onto the right side and stay for a minute. Then push yourself up with the hands, and open the eyes last.

The most searched question about this practice is whether it helps you sleep, and here the evidence is better than for most things on this site.

A randomised trial in 41 people with chronic insomnia compared Yoga Nidra with cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, which is the standard first line treatment. Both groups improved on total sleep time, sleep efficiency and the time spent awake after falling asleep. The Yoga Nidra group showed a marked increase in the proportion of N2 and N3 sleep, the deeper stages, and their salivary cortisol fell significantly, from 3.63 to 2.16 nanograms per millilitre, while the CBT group's did not. In a separate study of novices without sleep complaints, four weeks of twenty minute sessions raised sleep efficiency by 3.62 per cent and cut time awake after falling asleep by about twenty minutes.

Neither study says it replaces treatment. Insomnia that has lasted more than three months deserves a doctor, and cognitive behavioural therapy remains the treatment with the strongest evidence base. What these trials support is that Yoga Nidra is a reasonable thing to do at bedtime, that it is not merely relaxing but changes measurable sleep architecture, and that it is worth a fortnight of your evenings.

How I use it. In bed, lights off, phone across the room, ten minutes, ending without waking you up. Every night for two weeks before you form any opinion. What students report first is almost never something they noticed during a session. It is that they stopped lying awake for the usual forty minutes. If you want a whole evening routine leading into it, the bedtime sequence puts fifteen minutes of gentle movement before this script.

Yoga Nidra as it is usually taught has a fixed structure, and the order is not arbitrary.

1. Settling and internalisation. A few long exhales and the weight of the body. This is the only stage where you are asked to do anything to the breath.
2. Sankalpa, the resolve. A short sentence in the present tense, repeated three times in exactly the same words. It is stated at the beginning and again at the end, when the mind is at its most receptive.
3. Rotation of consciousness. The longest stage, and the heart of the practice. Attention moves through the body in a fixed sequence, part by part, faster than the mind can attach a thought to any of them. This is what quietens the thinking, and it does it by giving the mind more to keep up with rather than less.
4. Breath awareness. Counting exhales backwards from 27. Losing count and starting again is expected. In the first month almost nobody reaches 1, and most people fall asleep somewhere in the teens, which for a bedtime practice is not a problem.
5. Opposite feelings. Heaviness then lightness, warmth then coolness, experienced rather than imagined. Left out of short sessions.
6. Visualisation. A sequence of images in longer traditional sessions. I leave it out of a sleep practice entirely.
7. Sankalpa again, then the return. The same words, then sound, weight, movement, and rolling to the right side before sitting up. For a bedtime session there is no return.

A thirty minute session uses all of it. The ten minute script above uses stages one, two, three, four and seven, which is where the effect mostly lives.

Half of whether a session works is decided before it starts.

• Position: Savasana, flat on the back, legs a little apart, feet falling out, arms away from the body with the palms up.
• Under the knees: a bolster or a rolled blanket. This one change stops more lower back complaints than anything else I do.
• Under the head: a thin cushion, enough that the chin is very slightly lower than the forehead. A chin tipped up keeps the throat tense.
• Warmth: a blanket, always, and socks. You stop generating heat within a few minutes of stillness.
• Late pregnancy: on the left side with a pillow between the knees and one under the head, not flat on the back.
• Back pain: knees bent over a bolster, or lie on the side with the knees drawn up.
• Light and sound: dark for a sleep session, dim for a daytime one. An eye pillow if the room cannot be darkened. No music with a melody: it gives the mind something to follow that is not the voice.

Two hours after a meal, and empty the bladder first, because ten minutes into a session is exactly when you will remember that you did not.

Yoga Nidra has more research behind it than most yogic relaxation practices, and it is also a field where the effect sizes are quoted far more often than the caveats attached to them.

Sleep. The strongest area. A randomised trial against cognitive behavioural therapy in chronic insomnia, plus a four week study in novices with sleep laboratory measurements, both point the same way. The insomnia trial only repeated its sleep studies in patients who volunteered, which is a real limitation.

Stress, anxiety and depression. A meta-analysis of 73 studies and 5,201 participants reports large reductions across all three. The authors themselves state that 77 per cent of the randomised trials were at high risk of bias and that the effects likely reflect inflated estimates. Anyone quoting the headline numbers without that sentence is misleading you.

Blood pressure. A meta-analysis of eight trials found systolic pressure about 12 mmHg lower and diastolic about 6 mmHg lower, but five of the eight were not randomised and were rated at serious risk of bias. A single session study in 32 people at AIIMS Rishikesh found an immediate fall of about 7 mmHg systolic with no control arm. Encouraging, unproven.

What is not shown. That it treats depression, that it replaces medication, or that the deep stages of sleep it appears to increase translate into any specific health outcome. If you are practising for a diagnosed condition, do it alongside your treatment and tell whoever is treating you.

There are no rounds in this practice, so the ladder is length and how much of the script you attempt.

Falling asleep is not a failure and it is not a reason to shorten the session. If it happens every time and you wanted the practice rather than the nap, move it to the afternoon.

Yoga nidra is on more of the condition pages on this site than any other practice in the pranayama family, and the reason is that it is the only one that asks nothing at all of a body that is already tired or sore.

• Yoga for back pain uses it on the day nothing else is practised, because sleep and pain feed each other in both directions.
• Yoga for anxiety uses it as the practice for the evening, when a counted breathing practice is too much like homework.
• Yoga for high blood pressure and yoga for diabetes both use it as the rest that a person under long term medical management rarely gives themselves.
• Yoga for PCOS and yoga for thyroid use it as the close of a week built around calming rather than exertion.

Lie in Savasana with a support under the knees and a folded blanket under the head. It is the natural end of the bedtime sequence, and if you fall asleep, nothing has gone wrong. Being led through it once, in a class, is worth more than a dozen attempts on your own.

Two practical notes. Lie down properly: a folded blanket under the head, a support under the knees, and something to cover you, because body temperature drops when you stop moving. And do it after the body has moved rather than instead of moving, so ten minutes earlier in the day or a few rounds of Marjariasana beforehand both make it work better. It is the practice that the fifth limb, pratyahara, describes, which is set out in the eight limbs of yoga, and the words used in a script are collected in the yoga glossary. If you are new to all of it, how to start yoga at home puts it at the end of a first routine, and Bhramari is what to do beforehand on a night when the mind will not stop.