Today’s blog is just about sharing something that works for me, because sharing is caring. 🙂
It was a Tuesday, about 1:15 in the afternoon, and I was lying face-down on my kitchen table with my cheek on a placemat. Not dramatically — just tired in that specific, mid-July, three-kids-home-for-summer way where lunch is finally cleaned up and your body suddenly remembers it hasn’t sat still since 6:40 that morning. My 9-year-old walked by, looked at me for a second, and said, “You okay?” I said, “I’m resting my eyes,” which was a lie, because my eyes were closed but the rest of me was very much awake and mentally re-running the grocery list.
That same afternoon a friend texted me a voice memo — she does this instead of typing, which I’ve made peace with — going on about something called “non-sleep deep rest” that she’d started doing between calls. She said it wasn’t a nap, exactly, more like a 20-minute reset you do lying down with your eyes closed, guided by an audio track, where you stay awake the whole time on purpose. I told her that sounded like a nap with extra steps. She told me to just try it before I judged it. Fair.
The Science Bit: Yoga Nidra, Cortisol, and Why This Isn’t Just a Nap
Because I can’t try something without also falling down a small research hole about it first (occupational hazard, I used to get paid to do this), I looked into where the term actually came from. Non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) is a modern umbrella term, popularized by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, for practices such as yoga nidra and other forms of guided deep relaxation. The interesting part to me was the cortisol angle. A handful of studies on yoga nidra show it can lower stress hormone levels and even improve deep sleep at night, and unlike an actual nap, a 20-minute session apparently doesn’t leave you in that groggy, swimming-through-fog state afterward. No sleep inertia, is the technical term. I did not know “sleep inertia” was a phrase before that day, and now I use it constantly, mostly to describe my 7-year-old at 6:45am.
So: not a nap. A rest. Fine. I was willing to be convinced.
What Actually Happened When I Tried It
Day one, I found a free 20-minute NSDR audio and lay down on the floor of our guest room, which is the one room in the house without a bunk bed, a Lego bin, or a half-finished art project in it. I made it about six minutes in before my 11-year-old opened the door to ask where the good scissors were. I do not know why this always happens the exact moment I close my eyes. It’s a skill, honestly, and I’d respect it more if it weren’t aimed at me.
Day two went better — I did it at nap-adjacent time while the girls were at a friend’s pool, so the house was actually quiet, and I got through the whole thing. I won’t pretend I floated into some transcendent state. Mostly I noticed my shoulders, which apparently had been up near my ears since sometime in June, slowly come down. By the end I felt less like I’d slept and more like someone had turned my volume down a couple of notches. Loud thoughts, quieter. Still there. Just quieter.
By day four I’d stopped needing the guest room at all — I could do a shortened version sitting in the car in the pickup line, eyes closed, engine off, five minutes before the bell rang. That one surprised me the most. It’s not glamorous. It’s a woman in a minivan doing absolutely nothing that looks like relaxing from the outside. But it worked better than scrolling my phone for the same five minutes, which is what I’d otherwise have done.
Not every day worked. Friday I tried it after an actual meltdown (the 7-year-old’s, not mine, though it was close) and my brain simply refused to power down — I lay there running the whole argument back in my head instead. That’s the honest part I want to include, because it would be easy to write this as “I found the answer to exhaustion” and that’s not true. Some days my nervous system just wasn’t having it, guided audio or not.
Where I Landed
I’m not calling non-sleep deep rest a fix for anything. It’s a tool, and like most tools it works better on some days than others, and it is absolutely not a replacement for actual sleep if what you’re short on is actual sleep — nothing replaces that, I’ve learned this the hard way plenty of times. But as a way to get a body that’s been go-go-go since sunrise to believe, even briefly, that it’s allowed to stop, I’ll take it. It costs nothing, it takes twenty minutes or less, and the worst case is you lie on a floor for a while and get interrupted about scissors.
If you give it a try, I’d love to hear what you think.
See you next time.
xx
— L
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