Ever have trouble falling back to sleep, especially when you're at work or those first day or couple days when you're finally off duty? Wake up at three or four o'clock in the morning and just can't fall back asleep even if you're not at work. Well today we got a quick hitter episode that's full of resources for you and we're going to expand on a different type of yoga called Yoga Nidra.
Welcome to the Firefighter Craftsmanship Podcast where we coach you to deal with the stressors of the job as a first responder as well as how to thrive off duty. My name is Kevin Housley, a Human Performance Coach and a Firefighter since 2005. I've been able to coach over a thousand emergency responders on ways to be more resilient, better prepared for the job and how to be happier and healthier at home. So let's get to it and talk about Yoga Nidra.
And Yoga Nidra has gotten a lot of press lately. We did an episode with Emily Hightower where we talked about Yoga Nidra that's linked in the show notes and then last episode with Olivia Mead from Yoga for First Responders. We got into the leads about Yoga as a practice and what Yoga actually stands for and how it allows us to tap into our nervous system through tools like our breath. It really has nothing to do with stretching initially.
And now today we're going to talk about a different type of yoga which has no stretching at all. You actually just lay there and listen to a vocal script. It's called Yoga Nidra and even more recently than that Dr. Andrew Huberman has gotten a lot of exposure for non-sleep deep rest. And you can check out some of his stuff or I have some links in the show notes on non-sleep deep rest and what that means and how to do it. And it's essentially just a version of Yoga Nidra.
So Yoga Nidra for those of you that aren't familiar with it is somewhat like a form of progressive muscle relaxation and sometimes it's even referred to as local sleep. And so it has been identified as a sleep replacement practice but the brain wave analysis of that you're not actually fully asleep. But it does create rest and relaxation. It creates parasympathetic tone meaning rest and digest. It calms your nervous system down and that's all shown through multiple studies.
I have some studies linked in the show notes that you can deep dive if you would like. And a big thing that it does is it helps slow your respiration rate down. So for those of us in emergency services we are exposed to different sorts of things throughout our careers throughout our shifts throughout the different cycles or jobs that we have within our emergency services. And not all of them are 911 call related by any means.
So one of the problems with emergency services and for us as emergency services personnel is we are exposed to different things which can create hypervigilance which means we really can't turn our brain off. We have a very, very small window of tolerance and a reminder for the window of tolerance. So I'll have a window of tolerance podcast episode that we did in the show notes as well.
But the window of tolerance is that space between the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight and the parasympathetic nervous system, rest or digest. And we want a nice big wide window of tolerance because it means that we're more resilient and are able to adapt to different stressors. And so some of us do a great job with stressors on the job. We do a great job processing and succeeding and crushing it when the 911 call comes in.
And then we do a really bad job in other areas of our life, things like driving down the road or when we walk into the house maybe our relationships suffer a little bit because our window of tolerance is very, very small and we don't have a lot of resilience towards different sorts of stressors.
And so all of us that have had little kids understand what this means and some of you are currently living that reality right now and you might snap it a little kid for doing something that just little kids just do like leaving the cap off the toothpaste or whatever drawn on the wall, you understand my point.
So the window of tolerance, we have a nice big window of tolerance and we have a good wavelength between that sympathetic nervous system and that parasympathetic nervous system were more resilient to stress. And this is essentially what heart rate variability is measuring is how resistant can it forecast you being resilient and resistant to different types of stressors.
So those of you that are wearing wearable technology, whoop, apple or a ring, all those sorts of things that measure HRV heart rate variability. That is a pretty good snapshot to your window of tolerance and you can watch how that is impacted throughout your career throughout different shifts, different call types. And most importantly, how you're reacting and adapting and your parasympathetic nervous system versus sympathetic nervous system is reacting to sleep debt.
So yoga nidra is a good way for us to attack sleep debt. It doesn't replace sleep by any means, but it can help us refocus, calm down and fall asleep, fall back asleep or take that quick power nap that safety nap. And so in the show notes, I'm going to have a script that's linked to and the big thing for yoga nidra for me, it's really just progressive muscle relaxation where you lay there and you literally just listen and follow the script of the voice that's talking to you.
The really big key that I found with yoga nidra specifically is finding a voice that doesn't make you go completely insane or piss you off. And so if you have a yoga nidra script that you're listening to and the voice just irritates the crap out of you, it's probably not going to relax you. So the one that I have linked, which is a Spotify link in the show notes is a voice that doesn't drive me completely insane.
If it does drive you insane, you can simply Google yoga nidra script, yoga nidra audio, you can jump on YouTube. The problem with YouTube is sometimes there's commercials that interrupt you in the middle of your yoga nidra practice. You can also find them on Pandora Spotify, tons and tons of really, really easy to access resources out there. Cool thing about yoga nidra is it's pretty heavily studied through peer reviewed scientific research.
And there's a good study here called the effectiveness of a short yoga nidra meditation on stress, sleep and well-being in a large and diverse sample by I'm going to butcher their name, Mozik Von Ortzen and Heisen's renner. That study will be linked in the show notes from 2020 where they did a yoga nidra study which just using an 11 minute yoga nidra meditation practice. And the meditation group which had a sample size of 341 participants.
So it wasn't just a super, super small study size by any means. Those 341 people that went through the meditation group, the yoga nidra group showed lower stress, higher well-being and improved sleep quality after the intervention.
The meditation group had a stronger impact on the reduction of negative affect than on the increase of positive affect and also a stronger effect on effective components of well-being, meaning how we're people viewing their well-being and the parts and pieces that go into that. All effects remain stable at follow up six weeks later. So that's a really, really cool thing there. They did a 30 day practice for 11 minutes at a time.
So I know all of us are super busy and we don't have time for another thing on top of all the other things that we need to do, but I bet you you got 11 minutes. And I know for a fact that you got 11 minutes if you're at work and if you're on the fire service or maybe you're working 24 hours on an ambulance and you're able to sleep, you have sleeping quarters more often than not.
If you're having a trouble falling back asleep, yes, sometimes you run lots of calls back to back, but it seems like they're spaced out a little bit more than 11 minutes apart, even for super busy companies that aren't running and never coming back to the house. So you probably have 11 minutes. So if you really struggle falling back asleep, give yoga nidra a shot, especially if you get back at three or four in the morning.
And based on your shift time, maybe you can sleep until six, maybe you can sleep until seven. And a lot of us have a really, really hard time, especially the later we get in our careers of falling back asleep in that three to four o'clock. And then if you're on 48s, if that happens to you on your first night and you're awake from 0300, and then that next day gets going, you got lots of stuff planned, you got training, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And now you're smoked by one, two, three o'clock in the afternoon and you're just trying to survive until shift change. We're not going to get into the 4896 or different shift schedules on this podcast specifically. But yoga nidra is a great thing. Maybe if you're going to take a safety nap, you have a hard time, you know, taking naps. Maybe you're a person that doesn't like to take naps or you're a person that tells yourself you can't nap.
Well, just take 11 minutes or take a 10 minute on that Spotify link that I have in the show notes and just take some time for yourself and calm down. Don't fall asleep. That's great. Hopefully you make it all the way through the practice. And Emily Hightower talked about that in her episode with us on the Firefighter Craspmanship podcast of, you know, yoga nidra, really, you don't really want to fall asleep in her opinion.
But for us in emergency services, if you're having a hard time sleeping or you need to go to sleep and you do fall asleep during yoga nidra, man, that's a win. That's a win for sure. And you know, you can take a nap right there. That's really, really good.
In a study titled a closer look at yoga nidra early randomized sleep lab investigations where they specifically looked at the impact of yoga nidra on people that have insomnia, clinical diagnosed insomnia from sharp and a whole bunch of other authors also linked in the show notes. What they found was that 84, 83, 84% of the part study participants actually reported that they felt like they fell asleep during the yoga nidra practice. This was a 30 minute yoga nidra practice.
And from the actual study that it showed that they slept for 10 to 50% of that yoga nidra practice. So meaning they took, you know, potentially up to a 15 minute nap for people that had clinical diagnosed insomnia. So there's a lot of really, really good benefits to yoga nidra. One of the ways that I like to use yoga nidra, that's not just specifically for myself. I like to do yoga nidra, especially on day two for us that work a 48, 96 hour work schedule.
But I like to use it with the younger crew members, the younger generation and especially with the probes on our crew. And so you can run your crew however you want. But for me, I want high performing probationary firefighters and I want high performing firefighters for the entirety of their careers. And it's up to us to teach them great habits in relation to wellness, fitness, nutrition, mental wellness, and the humongous one of sleep.
And sleep is a very, very big component of overall wellness. It has a tremendous impact on mental health, PTSD. It also has a tremendous impact on cancer. So yoga nidra for us on our crew is a great way for us to teach the probes that it's okay to take 10 to 30 minutes for yourself on a shift, especially when you need it, especially if we got throttled the night before or something was going on at home and you didn't get a lot of sleep because you have a new baby or whatever is going on.
Yoga nidra is a great way for us to say, hey, you don't need to go take a nap. I understand, you know, you don't want to go take a nap. You don't want to be thought of and we're not going to get into the cultural implications of sleep on this podcast specifically, on this episode specifically. But yoga nidra is a great way to say, fine, don't fall asleep. That's great. Just go take a minute and follow this script. It's an audio script. It's a progressive muscle relaxation technique.
It's going to help you calm down. It's going to help you feel rejuvenated, revived, refreshed and ready to catch a good call later tonight and be able to perform. So yoga nidra, huge fan of this. I'm very, very glad that I was introduced to this way back from actually, Emily Hightower from shift. So thank you.
Lots of shout outs to Emily on this episode here and go back and take a listen to the two part episode series that we have with Emily Hightower because she just drops knowledge bombs one right after another. Lots of resources in the show notes for you on this one, including a good easy follow script that I've had lots of success with personally and I've had lots of people with lots of great success stories just by me sharing that to them. That's on Spotify.
I don't know how it works if you don't have a membership to Spotify, but I've never heard anybody say that they can't listen to it. So if that voice drives you crazy, find a different one, send it to me so I can put it into the cache and send it to people where they don't like the voice of the one yoga nidra protocol that I send to them. So take care of yourselves. Really, really focus as we get into the heat of summer here, making sure that your notches on the bullet train all the time.
Take a few minutes every single day for yourself. It doesn't have to be yoga nidra. You can take two, three good quality breaths in through your nose, out through your nose, and just be present and take it down a notch and ramp it back up when you need to, but make sure that as we are in the heat of the summer that we're taking good care of ourselves. We're getting a lots of good quality sleep. We're getting out there training really, really hard.
We're hydrating and we're ready to be great customer servants for those people that depend on us no matter what branch of emergency services you're in. So thanks for listening to the Firefighter Crasmanship podcast, a super quick hitter episode, just full of resources and show notes for you.
Please reach out if you have any questions, if you have any topics or any guests that you'd like to see on the Firefighter Crasmanship podcast, you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, or you can find me on LinkedIn, which is Kevin Housley on LinkedIn. You can find lots of different training resources. You can check out our Pre-Zilliance for the Emergency Seen Online class. All that can be found at firefightercrasmanship.com. Stay smart.