The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Because falling asleep actually requires drifting into these kind of liminal states. It's one of the reasons why I'm a big proponent of things like nonsleep deep rest, or these yoga nidra practices, which are basically body scans where you're trying to learn to detach from the sensory world. And they're very effective at-- certainly for me they've been very effective at teaching me to turn off thinking, which is an interesting notion in its own right.
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Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
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but it's a very interesting and unusual brain state for which we're starting to understand more and actually I have some plans in the not too distant future to collaborate with Matthew Walker the author of the book why we sleep and some other colleagues to try and figure out what exact patterns of neural activity are taking place in the brain and rest of nervous system during Yoga Nidra and this similar protocol which I call nonsleep deep rest
I call it non-sleep deep rest but it's based on a practice called yoga Nidra where you just liee down and it's uh these are free audio scripts online we can provide links to these um and you go through a body scan and you do some long exhale breathing which emphasizes the parasympathetic AK relaxing aspect of the autonomic nervous system I know you know this I'm saying that for the audience um and it does involve some intentions and things like that but it can also just be um self-directed relaxation
It involves the um the I think the most critical part of non-sleep deep rest and yoga nidra that to me the the overlap in the ven diagram is includes um self-directed relaxation the ability to do that which of course the incorporation of long exhale breathing will facilitate that because it pushes down on that uh side of the seessaw that is the parasympathetic nervous system and really gets it engaged regardless of how stressed you are as you pointed out getting that parasympathetic nervous system