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Non-sleep deep rest, 20 minutes
A longer lie-down that keeps you just the right side of awake: body scan, a little breath work, then a stretch of doing nothing at all. Twenty minutes in the afternoon, or a first-aid session on a day after a bad night.
There are no recordings on this page yet. TempoLife does not host narrated audio for these sessions, so rather than show a player with nothing behind it, every session is published in full as a script you can read, follow or record yourself. Audio versions are planned; when a recording exists, a player appears here automatically.
When to use it
Early afternoon is the natural slot, when most people get a genuine dip in alertness. Also useful after a broken night when a real nap would wreck the following night, and on a day when you cannot concentrate and have already tried more coffee.
When not to
Not a substitute for sleep, and not a treatment for a sleep problem. If you need one of these every day to get through the afternoon, the thing to look at is the night, not the afternoon — and if that does not improve, a clinician rather than another rest session.
The session
Read it through once before you start, so you are not reading while you are doing it. The times on the left are where each instruction lands if you keep an unhurried pace; they are a guide and nothing goes wrong if you are a minute out.
| Time | What to do |
|---|---|
| 0:00 | Lie down somewhere flat, ideally not your bed if you do not want to sleep. Set an alarm for twenty-five minutes so you are not half-listening for the time. Arms by your sides, legs uncrossed, eyes closed. |
| 1:00 | Breathing first, briefly. Two slow breaths, then two double inhales: breathe in through the nose, and when you think you are full, take a short extra sip of air on top, then let it all out slowly through the mouth. It is a big sigh, done deliberately. Two is plenty. |
| 2:30 | Let the breath go back to its own rhythm and leave it there. Do not pace it for the rest of the session. |
| 3:00 | Scan downwards, not up. Start at the top of your head and work down: scalp, forehead, the space between the eyebrows, eyes, jaw, throat. About twenty seconds each, and no attempt to change anything. |
| 5:00 | Shoulders, arms, hands. Then chest, stomach, lower back, hips. Then legs and finally the feet. If your attention wanders — and it will, more than in a shorter session — pick up wherever you can remember being and carry on downwards. |
| 9:00 | Now the part that makes this different from a body scan: stop scanning. Let your attention become wide instead of narrow. Rather than a place in the body, hold the whole outline of yourself, and the sounds in the room, all at once and loosely. |
| 11:00 | Notice the pressure of the surface underneath you at three points: the back of the head, the shoulder blades, the heels. Then let even that go. |
| 13:00 | Nothing to do now. Not sleep, not concentration. If thoughts arrive, let them run and do not follow them. If you drift off, no harm is done; if you stay awake the whole time, no harm is done either. Both count. |
| 18:00 | Start coming back gently. Deepen one breath. Move your fingers and toes. |
| 19:00 | Move your ankles and wrists, then stretch your arms overhead if you want to. Roll onto your right side and stay there for a few breaths before sitting up — going straight from flat to standing after twenty minutes is how people get a head rush. |
| 20:00 | Sit for a moment before you go back to whatever you were doing. Expect to feel slightly slow for a few minutes; that passes and is not a reason to lie down again. |
Notes
The name is newer than the practice. Structured deep-rest sessions of this shape have existed under other names for decades; the useful, uncontroversial part is that lying still with your eyes closed for twenty minutes without falling properly asleep is restorative and does not eat into the following night the way a long nap does.
Keep it under thirty minutes. Past that you are much more likely to drop into deep sleep, and waking out of deep sleep is what makes people feel worse after a nap than before it.
Recording it yourself
Since there is no narration here, the most useful thing many people do with this page is record it. It takes one pass on a phone voice recorder and it works better than you expect, for a reason worth knowing: a familiar voice is less interesting than a stranger's, and less interesting is exactly what you want at bedtime. Read at about two-thirds of your normal speaking speed, leave the pauses longer than feels comfortable, and do not re-record it because you stumbled — the stumble will not matter to you at 23:00.
These are relaxation practices, not treatment, and nothing here diagnoses anything. Do them sitting or lying down — never while driving, cycling or in water. Stop if you feel light-headed. Breath holds in particular are worth checking with a clinician first if you have a heart or lung condition or you are pregnant. Persistent trouble sleeping, loud snoring with pauses, or sleepiness that does not lift after a full night are reasons to see a doctor rather than to try another breathing pattern.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take?
About 20 minutes as written. The timings in the left column are a guide, not a metronome — running two minutes over is not a mistake.
Do I need the recording?
There is no recording of this session and the page does not pretend otherwise. Read the script once before you start so you are not reading during it, or record it in your own voice, which many people find works better than a stranger's.
When should I do it?
Early afternoon is the natural slot, when most people get a genuine dip in alertness. Also useful after a broken night when a real nap would wreck the following night, and on a day when you cannot concentrate and have already tried more coffee.
Other sessions
Coherent breathing, 5.5 breaths a minute
The plainest of the paced-breathing patterns: in for five and a half seconds, out for five and a half, for ten minutes. No holds, no counting past six, nothing to get wrong.
4-7-8 breathing
In for four, hold for seven, out for eight, four times through. A short, deliberately lopsided pattern for the ten minutes after you get into bed and find your mind still running.
Box breathing, four by four
Four seconds in, four held, four out, four held. A square, symmetrical pattern that is easier to hold on to than an uneven one when your attention keeps sliding away.
Body scan
Fifteen minutes of moving attention slowly from your feet to your head, without trying to change anything on the way. The oldest and most reliable of the wind-down practices, and the one that most often ends before it finishes because the person doing it fell asleep.
Sleep story: the night train
A slow, deliberately uneventful story to read — or have read to you — in bed. Nothing happens in it, which is the point: it gives the part of your mind that wants a narrative something dull and pleasant to hold while the rest of you stops.
All sessions · Chronotype questionnaire · Sleep calculator · Sleep results
Source: Zaccaro A, et al. How breath-control can change your life: a systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2018;12:353 · checked 2026-09-02
Source: NHS — Breathing exercises for stress · checked 2026-09-02
See whether the wind-down changes the night
TempoLife reads sleep from Health Connect, so a fortnight of doing this before bed becomes a measurable change in when you fall asleep.