Dr. Andrew Huberman

If you take a step back, if you can tolerate craving for a second, you just did it, so why couldn't you do it for another second?

If I can do it for another second, another second.

It's not as if it necessarily increases linearly or over time.

So, you know, what's going on?

And so, again, sort of our ability to realize and regulate our states across time and to realize there's this funny thing where when we feel terrible, we think it's going to go on forever.

And when we're happy, we're like certain it's going to stop.

There's a kind of asymmetry in our nervous system that we don't understand.

We showed, he started talking about yoga nidra really seems to help addicts recover and stay sober.

They do it regularly.

I thought, well, this is cool.

What is it?

I'm a neuroscientist.

We started studying it in my laboratory.

We discovered that the brain goes into these states during yoga nidra that are similar to sleep.

Body still, mind alert.

And that seems to be very beneficial, maybe even accelerates neuroplasticity in learning, and indeed there's evidence for that, and there's evidence that yoga nidra from a laboratory out of Scandinavia, not my laboratory, showing that it can increase dopamine levels in the striatum, basal ganglia, by up to 60% using human

positron emission tomography imaging.

So we're talking about how to increase dopamine through non-pharmacologic means.

This is something about body still, brain active, very, very powerful way to do that.

I made up this term, this acronym, non-sleep deep rest, because I have tremendous respect for yoga nidra and the yoga traditions.