Resetting Your Nervous System with Yoga Nidra in a Time of Overload
by Nimisha Gandhi
Lately, many of us are feeling overwhelmed. Whether it’s the weight of the world, personal transitions, or the relentless pace of daily life, there’s a collective sense that our systems are under strain.
Your nervous system is designed to help you navigate both calm and chaos. It helps regulate your heartbeat, breathing, digestion, sleep, and immune responses. When it senses threat or overstimulation, it shifts into protective modes like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. These states are essential for survival, but when they stay turned on too long, they can wear us down. Over time, this can lead to fatigue, hormone imbalances, digestive symptoms, insomnia, and a general sense of disconnection.
So how do we regulate when the outside world feels dysregulating? This is where Yoga Nidra becomes an essential practice.
What Happens During Yoga Nidra?
Yoga Nidra is a guided, meditative practice done lying down in stillness. The body remains in a relaxed posture while the mind follows a specific sequence of cues such as body awareness, breath, intention, imagery, and spaciousness.
What makes it unique is the way it shifts brainwaves. During most of our waking days, we operate in beta brainwave states, which are alert, focused, and sometimes anxious. During Yoga Nidra, the brain gradually drops into alpha and theta waves, the same states seen in deep meditation and early stages of sleep. These states support healing, memory processing, creativity, and nervous system recalibration.
At the same time, the parasympathetic nervous system becomes dominant. This is the part of your system responsible for rest, digestion, immune repair, and hormone balance. With regular practice, Yoga Nidra has been shown to reduce cortisol levels, improve heart rate variability, ease symptoms of anxiety and depression, and increase resilience.
Incorporating Rest into Daily Life
You don’t need to change everything about your routine to benefit from this practice. In fact, one of the most healing parts of Yoga Nidra is how accessible it is. You are invited to be, not do.
Here are two simple ways to begin:
1. Weekly Practice:
Choose one day each week to do a full Yoga Nidra practice. This could be 20 to 40 minutes. You can do this lying in bed, on a yoga mat, or even on your couch with a blanket. Use a guided recording or drop into a Yoga Nidra class at your favorite studio.
2. Daily Nervous System Touchpoints:
In between deeper practices, incorporate shorter moments of regulation into your day. A few minutes can go a long way.
Some ideas:
Pause and take 10 slow breaths, focusing on a longer exhale.
Step outside and place your feet on the earth. Look at the sky or a tree.
Do a gentle body scan and soften one area at a time: jaw, shoulders, belly, hips.
Sit with your hand on your heart and notice the rise and fall of your breath.
These moments help the body feel safe. They signal to your system that you can shift out of high alert.
The Invitation
There is a lot we cannot control right now. But we can create spaces to reconnect with our inner rhythm. Yoga Nidra doesn’t solve the problems of the world, but it helps us meet them with more clarity and capacity.
It gives your body the signal it needs to rest. It gives your mind a break from processing. It allows you to return to the wisdom underneath all the stimulation.
Yoga Nidra can offer a doorway into something softer. Something more regulated. Something that remembers your wholeness.
You don’t have to earn this kind of rest. It’s already yours.
Nimisha Gandhi is an Ayurvedic and Functional Medicine nutritionist, conscious parenting coach, and Yoga Nidra teacher. She teaches Yoga Nidra on Mondays and Wednesdays weekly at 1:15pm at Metta Yoga San Rafael, as well as a monthly Yoga Nidra and Sound Bath offering.
© 2024 Metta Yoga LLC