Daily NSDR or yoga nidra can proactively refill the dopamine reservoir, especially during periods of high output.

“NSDR is so powerful, because first of all, it doesn't require that you rig yourself to any device, it doesn't require that you take much time out of your day, it doesn't require that you ingest anything, except air, and it can have so many positive effects right down to the neuromodulator level”

“the non-sleep deep rest does have some research to support it, there's a beautiful study done out of a university in Denmark, I will later provide a link to that study, that showed that this meditation and yoga nidra-type meditation allows dopamine and other neuromodulators in an area of the brain called the striatum that's involved in motor planning and motor execution, to reset itself”

“There's growing amounts of quality science pointing to the neurochemical replenishing effects, as I mentioned before, dopamine, but also the potential for NSDR to replace sleep that you've lost.”

“In fact, the elevation in dopamine that occurred during this practice, this yoga nidra-like nonsleep or NSDR-like practice, actually prepared them to be able to move in a much more dedicated and robust way afterwards.”

“The key thing to understand here is that the period of motionlessness and deep relaxation while awake increases dopamine in the nigrostriatal pathway. It increases mental imagery. That is, it increases access to the bank or the library, if you will, of possible solutions or elements to engage in the divergent thinking process. But divergent thinking itself does not occur during NSDR a.k.a. yoga nidra.”

“The NSDR and yoga nidra, a deep relaxation meditation, whatever it is you want to call it, sets a dopaminergic tone. And that's actually the appropriate use of the word dopaminergic tone it raises the baseline of dopamine transmission in that circuitry that then positions you to engage in divergent thinking more effectively.”

“What they observed was a 65% increase in dopamine release.”

“It's-- and there there's some good data really, mostly out of a laboratory in Scandinavia showing huge increases in nigrostriatal dopamine when people go-- basically, engage in a practice of deliberate non-movement and that the brain actually enters states of a very shallow sleep.”

“Have a practice that is research supported to replenish dopamine, and incorporate that practice any time of day. Again, NSDR can be done morning, afternoon, or evening, or middle of the night if you wake up and you need to get back to sleep, it can be very beneficial for that. But do it as a consistent practice so that dopamine reservoir remains tapped off.”

“There's another study, lesser known, from that same group that was published in 2011, which is entitled Dopaminergic stimulation enhances confidence and accuracy in seeing rapidly presented words. This was a cognitive task. They explored yoga nedra, a.k.a. NSDR, in the context of increasing striatal dopamine. They already knew that it did that, so that's great. They confirmed that result. But what they also found is that doing NSDR could restore confidence in cognitive ability and performance in these cognitive tasks.”

“This is why I'm such a fan of using NSDR, a.k.a. yoga nidra, at least once a day and especially under times when you're engaging in a lot of high output. [...] The real key is to always tap off that or refill that reservoir once a day before it's completely depleted.”

“But to return to NSDR, a.k.a. yoga nidra, as a practice, yes, it's been shown in laboratory studies, in humans, by the way, to restore dopamine levels.”

“There are two studies out of Denmark that have explored yoga nidra in the context of dopamine. The first one simply involved having people do a yoga nidra practice. [...] leads to dramatic, really dramatic increases in striatal dopamine reserves. So it essentially is replenishing the dopamine reserve pool.”

“those have been shown to increase the amount of dopamine in your dopamine Reserves by up to 65 percent which is a remarkable number”

“there are practices that are supported by the scientific literature to increase your Baseline level of dopamine that are independent of sleep but are similar to sleep and I like to refer to these as non-sleep deep rest this is not meditation”

“the protocol that immediately leaps to mind is the use of certain non-sleep deep rest protocols now non-sleep deep rest or nsdr is actually a term that I coined because there is a practice that's been established for many hundreds of years called Yoga Nidra which actually means yoga sleep whereby individuals potentially you if you decide to do them lie down listen to to a script that is listen to an audio script which generally instructs you to do long exhale breathing to deliberately relax your musculature of your face and of your body and Yoga Nidra typically also involves doing certain intentions and the instruction always given at the beginning of Yoga Nidra is that you should try to not fall asleep”

“we know based on several studies from the University of Copenhagen that that actually replenishes levels of dopamine in certain key areas of the brain that restore mental and physical Vigor and do not disrupt nighttime sleep but rather enhance one's ability to fall and stay asleep or to fall back asleep”

“There's a beautiful study done out of a university in Denmark. I will later provide a link to that study that showed that this meditation and yoga nidra type meditation allows dopamine and other neuromodulators in an area of the brain called the striatum that's involved in motor planning and motor execution to reset itself.”

“we're deliberately shifting our thinking away from the very types of thought and action that deplete the dopamine Reserve pool right and should we be surprised that there's this significant increase in dopamine and the striatum post Yoga Nidra or nsdr probably not because you're not tapping into that neural circuitry for a period of time”