Andrew Huberman· PhD
If you wake up in the middle of the night (which, by the way, is normal to do once or so each night) but you can’t fall back asleep, consider doing an NSDR protocol when you wake up.
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If you wake up in the middle of the night (which, by the way, is normal to do once or so each night) but you can’t fall back asleep, consider doing an NSDR protocol when you wake up.
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Because they really can help you learn how to turn on the parasympathetic/calming arm of your autonomic nervous system. There's no other way that I'm aware of to teach your system to slow down and turn off your thoughts and go back to sleep.
As I always say, do them in the middle of the night if you wake up and you want to go back to sleep during the middle of the day, to teach your nervous system to calm down and do them first thing in the morning if you didn't feel you got enough sleep.
So if you wake up in the middle of the night, really try and get back to sleep. And if you can't do that by doing, for instance, long exhale breathing, which can work, use some other tool of the body to shift the mind. And the tools that I'm recommending are of the non-sleep deep rest variety.
Rather than trying to fight your mind, trying to fight anxiety, which is always a terrible thing to do, I always say it's very hard to control the mind with the mind, look to the body. And that's what NSDR scripts do. Things like yoga nidra, even the sleep hypnosis done in the middle of the night if you wake up and want to fall back asleep oftentimes will help you fall back asleep immediately. And if they don't, they will at least put your brain and body into a state of deep relaxation that more closely mimics the sleep state that you ought to be in than the awake, ruminating, stressing about the fact that you're not sleeping state.
I highly recommend NSDR to anybody that has trouble falling asleep or that wakes up in the middle of the night and needs to get better at falling back asleep, as well as to anyone out there that has issues with anxiety or self-regulation of any kind.
try nsdr try the revery app try yoganidra try some long exhale breathing
you could do it first thing in the morning when you wake up if you feel you haven't slept enough you can do it in the afternoon you can do it in the middle of the night if you're not able to sleep and offset some of the Sleep loss that you otherwise would have experienced
Last night, I woke up. I went to bed about 10:30. I woke up at 3:00 in the morning. I knew I wasn't feeling rested. I did a NSDR protocol. I fell back asleep.
Similar circumstances can arise if you're taking care of a very sick loved one. You're up all night. Try and stay calm using NSDR protocols.
these are 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
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 5 that's a little early for