We had the extreme pleasure of interviewing Naomi Annand, founder of local Hackney yoga studio Yoga On the Lane about her recently launched booked Yoga: A Manual for Life, a culmination of her experience and expanding philosophy from teaching and practicing yoga for twenty years.
Here Naomi's thoughts and instructions for the Yoga for Better Sleep sequence outlined her book!
Yoga for Better Sleep
Winter is coming. As well as the depleting winds and long nights, it’s a time of parties, too many plans, too much alcohol, too many late nights. All of which is potentially disastrous for your sleep just as you should be hunkering down to hibernate and see out the cold months and the dark days.
This sequence is taken from my book Yoga: a Manual for Life and it’s perfect for this time of year as it helps your body get into the right place to allow you to drop deep into sleep. You don’t need to do it before bed – any time of day will work. It involves sidebends to help deepen your breath, twists to improve digestion, self-massage to increase interoceptive awareness and restorative poses to help downregulate the nervous system.
A lovely add on to this is to end the day with your heart above your head. Sit as close to the wall as you can and swing your legs up to the wall so that you can rest on your back, with your hands on your belly and breathe deeply for 2-5 minutes. This is such a simple but very effective pose to lower stress and improve sleep.