Can’t Turn Off Your Brain? Try This Sleep Trick

Wind Down: You finally crawl into bed at the end of the night, but of course your brain decides it’s the perfect moment to replay every awkward thing you said over the past week. Fortunately, yoga nidra is gaining traction as a sleep aid for insomnia. In a new study from India, people who practiced this specific type of guided body scan fell asleep faster and slept longer.

How to Do It: Also called “yogic sleep,” yoga nidra is a guided meditation you do lying on your back while a voice slowly turns your attention to different parts of your body as you follow your breath. All you have to do is search for something like “yoga nidra for sleep” on YouTube and follow along. Selecting a 10-minute recording is a good place to start, and falling asleep partway through is totally fine.

The Benefits: Compared with a group that got standard sleep hygiene advice, the yoga nidra group in the study slept roughly an hour longer each night and spent less time lying awake after dozing off. Everyone in the study had heart disease, but an earlier study of people with chronic insomnia found that yoga nidra helped them get more deep sleep too.