Can You Practice Yoga in Your Sleep?

By Faye Martins

Let's get straight to the point, everyone knows that a gentle and therapeutic form of yoga will give each of us extraordinary health benefits. The restorative style and yoga nidra seem like a good blend, but nidra is not just sleeping. So, let's look at this from the angle of a student who wants to sleep, has plenty of pillows, and wants a healthy restorative yoga sleep session. Is it really possible?

Yoga is meant to relax not only the body, but the mind as well. Is there a better way to help get a restorative sleep than by practicing this ancient art we know as "Yoga?" Yoga works to bring the central nervous system into optimal alignment and works to calm the nerves and release tension in the muscles surrounding this area. The end result is a peaceful night’s sleep, which lasts the entire night. Some ask if they can practice yoga while sleeping, the answer is yes!

So many people turn to sleeping medications, when, in fact, they can use the beauty of breathing techniques and certain poses to achieve what medications can’t. It is easy to build up resistance to medications, but yoga retrains the body to sleep peacefully. There are many restorative poses that can help a person learn to kick the sleeping pills and sleep naturally. While this usually won’t happen overnight, many have cured their insomnia by simply using restorative yoga techniques.

What does yoga do that is so beneficial to the body? For starters, yoga relieves all the tension built up in the muscles from the day. Whether it’s home or the office, a body holds all the anxiety and tension and the muscles react to the stimuli and tighten. Yoga also allows the heart rate to slow down. A slower heart rate is also advantageous for deep and restful sleep.

Most yoga instructors will tell an individual to have a regular bedtime. This will help to get the body in a rhythm and to allow it to have a certain time of day when the circadian rhythms slow down. The body is very much a system that likes to keep a schedule. If a person starts a routine, it won’t be long till at that particular time of day, the body will automatically know what is expected of it. For instance, if at 10 pm it is time to calm down and start getting ready for sleep, the bodies’ biorhythmic clock will already begin to do so. Whether a person is ready to settle down or not, their body will force them too.

Yoga worked well in early civilizations, without television, videos, video games or computers, the body tends to wind down around dusk and then the body wants to rise around dawn. Fast forward to the present and most people go to bed anywhere from 11 to 12 and find themselves getting up at 7 or 8 and the rest of the day they feel groggy and tired. This again has something to do with how the body is naturally programmed and when the internal schedule is out of sync, the whole person feels off.

By practicing the proper breathing exercises and poses, it is possible to train the body to do yoga before and during sleep. Keeping in perfect alignment, the restorative phases of yoga can work for insomnia. 

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