And the CEO of Google,
is an avid practitioner of NSDR
because it has this amazing ability to reset your energy levels and focus.
Whereas with meditation, many people find meditation hard.
And part of the reason they find it hard is that it requires focus.
So non-sleep deep rest NSDR is an acronym that I coined
because it encompasses a lot of practices that are not meditation per se,
but that bring the brain and body into a state of relaxation and focus.
So hypnosis is one variant of NSDR. There are other variants of NSDR.
You can just look these up and you'll find them.
And I think that they've caught on
And the CEO of Google,
is an avid practitioner of NSDR
because it has this amazing ability to reset your energy levels and focus.
Whereas with meditation, many people find meditation hard.
And part of the reason they find it hard is that it requires focus.
NSDR is a state, which is very calm and relaxing, you don't have to work too hard.
You're just listening to a script.
Whereas most forms of meditation, not all, but most forms of meditation
involve cranking up the activity in your prefrontal cortex
and trying to see your thoughts as opposed to thinking your thoughts
or, focus on your breath, but then third personing yourself in some respect and that's work.
And so many people who meditate quite intensely feel more exhausted.
Now that doesn't mean that meditation doesn't have any
utility, but it's distinctly different than NSDR.
And I think that people are working, certainly the CEO of Google,
I have to imagine is working very hard and using his forebrain,
if he's going to have 20 or 30 minutes to take a break,
he should, and I think this is what he's doing,
he should go out for a jog and not listen to anything and just kinda let his mind wander,
or sit there in a chair and just zone out, or do NSDR.
The problem is people are not that good at shifting states.
We are all actually pretty good at, even people with, severe ADHD, we had an episode about this,
can become hyper focused on things that they actually enjoy,
because dopamine, and most of the drugs designed to treat ADHD
are drugs that increase the levels of dopamine.
So when you like something there's dopamine release and you can focus,
it's when you don't like something that it's hard to focus.
Shifting states is hard.
I'm sure you've experienced this. If you've ever been in deep research or podcasting podcasting...
and then all of a sudden you go for a run,
you'll probably spend the first third of that run thinking.
And then in the middle third, you're kind of, that thinking is fractured a bit.
And then in the final third is where you finally get to relax.
Because the brain doesn't shift states very quickly.
We can go from sleep to wakefulness quickly.
We can go from wakefulness to sleep quickly,
but we don't shift between different states of consciousness, like a step function,
except in rare cases.
Fear is one. All of a sudden we hear an explosion right now, it's a step function, we're in fear
or we're in alertness.
A heightened state of alertness.
But NSDR is terrific at allowing people to learn to shift their state.
And I actually would venture to argue that
part of the value of meditation and exercise is the actual state
that you get into in deep meditation or exercise.
But just as valuable is the transition that you have to take yourself through
from one state of mind to the other and then back again.
When I look, you know, David Goggins, he always seems to come up,
because he represents so many important things.
Drive, determination, override of emotional state,
going from being a 300 pound plus person to a fit person through.
He's never revealed anything substantial about what he ate or what he didn't.
He basically says like, "listen, run a lot, eat less."
But what's remarkable is, so much of what he says is about those transitions.
About taking oneself from a state of "I don't want to" to scruffing oneself and like
"you're going to do it anyway."
And then being able to carry that into regular life, so to speak.
So I think that NSDR is immensely powerful. It's zero cost.
And one of the reasons I'm such a fan of people doing it is that
most people don't stick to a meditation practice.