There's an Off-Switch for Stress. Here's How to Build It | Kelly Boys
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2026
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The simple practice and surprising benefits of yoga nidra, a guided lying-down meditation. Plus: parts work, core beliefs, and the blind spot effect.
This episode originally aired in December 2022.
Kelly Boys is a mindfulness trainer and coach. She has helped design and deliver mindfulness and resilience programs for the UN, Google, and San Quentin State Prison. She is also the author of The Blind Spot Effect: How to Stop Missing What's Right in Front of You.
Today we're going to talk specifically about a type of meditation that Kelly teaches called Yoga Nidra, which has been shown to help you sleep, improve your working memory, and decrease cravings.
In this episode we talk about:
- The difference between Yoga Nidra and mindfulness meditation, and how Kelly seeks to combine them
- The value of being able to both observe and high-five your demons
- Working with our "core beliefs" about ourselves and the world
- The calming power of drawing your attention to the back side of your body throughout the day
- Working with "opposites" as a way to get unstuck in difficult moments
- What Kelly means by the blind spot effect
- Setting intentions
Join Dan and Emmy Award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert at 92NY on May 17th for a live conversation about how mindfulness can deepen connection and combat loneliness, available in person and via streaming. Register here.
Join Dan, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren for Meditation Party, a 3-day immersive retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, October 16–18. Grab your in-person spot here, or sign up to livestream here!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:18.2 | Hey, hey, how we doing, everybody? Today we're going to take another run at something that is simultaneously a contemplative cliche and also a deeply desired psychological outcome, getting out of your head and into your body. So many of us want an escape route from the spinning, looping, fizzing stories in our head. |
| 0:39.6 | And my guest today has some deeply practical suggestions. |
| 0:43.2 | Said guest is Kelly Boys. |
| 0:44.8 | She's a mindfulness trainer and coach. |
| 0:47.0 | She has helped design and deliver mindfulness and resilience programs at the UN, Google, |
| 0:52.2 | and the San Quentin State Prison. |
| 0:56.5 | She's also the author of a book called The Blind Spot Effect. Today we're going to talk specifically about a type of meditation that |
| 1:00.8 | Kelly teaches called Yoga Nidra, which has been shown to help you sleep, improve your working |
| 1:06.0 | memory, and decrease cravings. I will let Kelly describe the practice, but just to say from the outset, you don't have to actually do the whole practice in order to benefit from what you're about to hear. Kelly does a great job, as you will hear, of extracting the active ingredients of Yoga Nidra in ways that you can integrate into your life immediately. I don't love adding stuff to your to do list. So we won't. |
| 1:28.4 | Just to say, this episode originally aired back in December of 2022, but we're bringing it back, |
| 1:33.5 | A, because it's awesome, and B, because we are in the middle in the 10% happier cinematic universe |
| 1:39.1 | of what we're calling Sleep Week. Specifically on the 10% app, we just added 10 new sleep meditations to the library. |
| 1:47.3 | Sleep is so important if you want to do life better. And we're really excited because we think this |
| 1:52.6 | new content can really help you up your sleep game. Also, by the way, if you sign up for the app on |
| 1:58.3 | Dan Harris.com, you can get this podcast without ads. So head on over to Dan Harris.com and sign up. While I'm at it, I should say that you can now actually give gift subscriptions to the app. If that's your kind of thing, you can just send an email to support at Dan Harris with the subject line gift. And you can give the gift of sanity. Oh, one more thing. If you're in New York City on May 17th, I'm going to be doing a live talk at the 92nd Street-Wye. I'll guide a meditation, take your questions. It'll be fun. There's a link in the show notes if you want to get a ticket. All right. We'll get started with Kelly Boys right after this. Kelly Boys, welcome to the show. |
| 2:36.1 | Great to be here. Thank you. |
| 2:37.7 | Thank you. |
| 2:38.9 | All right, so let's start at a very, very basic level, which is Yoga Nidra. |
| 2:43.1 | What is it? |
| 2:44.8 | Yoga Nidra is a lying down guided meditation, and it comes from the non-dual yoga tradition. It was formed as a practice, |
| 2:54.7 | not until the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but the philosophy is rooted in kind of the Indian yoga teachings. |
... |
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