Yoga Nidra shortened the time to fall asleep across six small trials

Poor sleep is common and the options for addressing it without medication are limited, which is why low-cost practices attract attention. Yoga Nidra is a guided meditative practice done lying down, and it has been proposed as one such option for improving sleep quality. The question is whether the enthusiasm rests on measured outcomes or on plausibility alone, and whether any benefit holds up against relaxation techniques and therapies that are already established. This review set out to gather the randomised evidence in one place and judge how reliable it is.

The authors searched PubMed, the Cochrane Library, PsycINFO and Scopus for randomised controlled trials of Yoga Nidra reporting sleep-related outcomes, published up to 31 March 2025. Six trials with 244 participants in total met the criteria, covering people with chronic insomnia, people with hypertension, people with acute insomnia, health care workers during COVID-19 and sportspersons. Control conditions differed between trials and included cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, progressive muscle relaxation and music-based relaxation. Risk of bias was assessed with the Cochrane tool across seven domains, and the findings were synthesised narratively rather than pooled.

Most of the included trials reported significant improvements in core sleep measures for those practising Yoga Nidra, specifically sleep onset latency, total sleep time and sleep efficiency, alongside related psychological outcomes. Those improvements appeared against a mix of comparison conditions rather than a single common control. However, the trials varied considerably in how the practice was delivered, which outcomes were measured and how long the intervention ran. Most were rated at moderate to high risk of bias, largely because participants and assessors were not blinded and outcome reporting was incomplete. Adverse events and safety information were not reported accurately across the studies.

This sits alongside a broader literature on relaxation and mindfulness-based approaches to sleep, where small trials often look favourable and larger, better-controlled ones tend to shrink the effect. The fact that the comparison groups included cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia is interesting, but with so few trials and such varied designs, no ranking against established treatments can be drawn from this evidence. Key questions remain: what dose and duration matter, whether benefits persist after the practice stops, and whether the effects hold in people without a diagnosed sleep problem. Larger, better-reported trials are the obvious next step.

The honest reading is that Yoga Nidra looks like a plausible, low-risk addition to a wind-down routine, with early evidence pointing towards falling asleep faster and sleeping more efficiently. It is not evidence that it outperforms cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, which remains the better-tested route for persistent insomnia. Because the trials were small and mostly at risk of bias, the size of any benefit is genuinely unknown. If you are curious, nothing here suggests a downside, though the reviewers noted that safety data was not properly reported either.