• Google CEO Sundar Pichai uses something called non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) to relax.

• NSDR is often achieved through a practice called yoga nidra, according to the Stanford professor who coined non-sleep deep rest.

• I tried yoga nidra for a week and got pretty mixed results.

Picture a person doing yoga, and your first image might be something like the downward-facing dog or wheel poses, where your hands and feet touch the floor while your torso is in the air.

Yoga nidra is different. It's commonly used to achieve a state called non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR, according to Stanford neuroscience professor Dr. Andrew Huberman, who coined the acronym. NSDR has been hailed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai as his trusty relaxation method.

"While I find it difficult to meditate, I can go to YouTube, find an NSDR video," Pichai recently told The Wall Street Journal. "They're available in 10, 20, or 30 minutes, so I do that occasionally."

Unlike traditional yoga, the practice of yoga nidra is stationary. You lie on your back on the ground and follow guided instructions like focusing on your breathing or bringing attention to various parts of the body. You're meant to fall into "a liminal space between being awake and falling asleep," yoga nidra instructor Tracee Stanley previously told Insider.

Yoga nidra was popularized by Swami Satyananda Saraswati, who called it a kind of "conscious sleep," in the 1960s.

It has been said to produce a variety of benefits. One study of more than 700 people from September 2020 found that those who tried yoga nidra "showed lower stress, higher well-being, and improved sleep quality" compared to their peers in the control group.

NSDR can also help reduce anxiety, ease pain, and even accelerate learning, according to Huberman.

After learning more about it, I tried yoga nidra for a week.

It was pretty hit or miss for me

On my first day of trying it, I eased into it with a 10-minute yoga nidra that Huberman includes on his website. The guidance was highly specific: At one point, while asking listeners to focus on various parts of the body, the instructor listed each finger and toe individually. I hadn't expected this level of specificity, but I found the instructions throughout the week were generally just as granular.