In a recent interview with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, The Wall Street Journal got down to brass tacks on productivity, discussing weekend Peloton workouts, having Google employees come into the office three days a week, making compromises when it comes to meeting daily goals, and a meditation technique known as non-sleep deep rest (NSDR). The interview with Pichai was part of the Journal’s My Monday Morning series—chats with “self-motivated” individuals about how they kick off their week. Recent guests have included sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, model Bella Hadid, and actor Tracee Ellis Ross.
When asked about meditation or journaling, Pichai responded: “Meditation is something I see the value of, but I struggle to do that.” The CEO, who first joined Google in 2004 as a project manager, noted that he instead prefers a more active form of meditation: walking. “Walking is very helpful to me. I find it much easier to think when I’m walking or pacing. Through the pandemic, sometimes it’s been helpful to take my dog out for a walk, and I can relax by listening to podcasts,” he told the Journal. His go-to podcasts for relaxation include ones based on NSDR, which essentially involves lying in place, unmoving, and directing your awareness to the rise and fall of your breath and the sensations in different parts of the body. It also often involves a guided imagery aspect. “While I find it difficult to meditate, I can go to YouTube [and] find an NSDR video,” Pichai told the Journal.
The goal of NSDR is to achieve an extremely deep, recuperative level of rest—and not necessarily through sleep. (Although it can sometimes lead to sleep as a natural side effect.) Andrew D. Huberman, MD, was reportedly the first to coin the term NSDR in a bid to attract people who were not familiar with the practices of meditation or mindfulness, and who might have felt alienated by these wellness concepts. Dr. Huberman leads the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Huberman Lab, which investigates how the brain works and how to repair neural circuits damaged by injury or disease.
Dr. Huberman is a long-term practitioner of NSDR. “I personally have been using NSDR daily for ~10 years and find [it] to be among the more powerful tools out there for recovering lost sleep, focus (after) & neuroplasticity,” he wrote on Twitter. Neuroplasticity, he explains, is the brain’s ability to change in response to experience.
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Dr. Huberman spoke at length about NSDR on the podcast The Tim Ferriss Show in 2021, saying it is a way to “deliberately access states of deep rest for the sake of, again, falling asleep more easily and reducing stress, but also for enhancing rates of learning.”
For those new to the practice, Dr. Huberman recommends following Kamini Desai and Liam Gillen, two teachers of yoga nidra, a type of guided meditation whose name means “yogic sleep” in Sanskrit. Videos and audio tracks like theirs can help you to get started. “Self-inducing a state of calm through respiration and vision is the hallmark of yoga nidra,” Dr. Huberman said on the podcast. “Our thoughts follow our vision and breathing.”
In the Wall Street Journal interview, Pichai also touched on the most traditional version of rest: sleep. The Google CEO noted that he typically gets six and a half to seven hours of sleep each night and rises between 6:45 and 7:30 a.m. He’s also spent the better part of 15 years having the same breakfast of eggs on toast with a hot chai. “It’s the only time where I get to step back and reflect. Normally I have a quiet breakfast; reading the news is very important to me,” he told the Journal.
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Source: SELF
