Eight Months with the Rest & Restore Protocol
by Nicola-Jane le Breton
When I began the Rest & Restore Protocol, my body showed me an image I have never forgotten. During a Focusing session that first week, it told me, very clearly, that it wanted to be a cat curled up in a dark, safe, quiet little basket, away from other people. Not just for an afternoon. For as long as it took.
I didn't realize yet just how much I needed that rest.
For years I had been running on adrenaline—busy, capable, useful, always a little ahead of myself. I thought of that buzz as energy. It turned out to be the opposite: a nervous system in a constant state of low-grade alarm, masking an exhaustion so old and so deep that I’d stopped being able to feel it. My iron levels were low. My sleep was disrupted. My neck and head ached. And underneath it all was a weariness I had been trying to outrun for most of my adult life. The RRP asked me to stop running and let it surface.
What I remember most vividly from those early weeks is the feeling of brakes kicking in within my nervous system. It was as though someone had slammed on the brake pedal of a car that had been going very fast for a very long time—not a complete stop, but a dramatic deceleration, down to almost a standstill. For a couple of weeks, I pretty much just coasted. I dropped the ball on a lot of things; I let myself get sick. Luckily, it coincided with a two-week vacation in Thailand, and that’s exactly what I did—allowing myself whole days of doing almost nothing. There was simply no way forward until I had rested.
And as I rested, the image grew more vivid. The cat became a turtle—a giant, ancient turtle—and I was held inside it, carried in its slow, viscous, protective darkness. The feeling wasn’t numbness, exactly. It was closer to being shielded from the pressures that had driven me for so long: soothed, held, reassured. It was, my body told me, like being put on bed rest: I didn’t have to do any of the things I usually did; I only had to rest and let myself be cared for. There was a part of me on that bed rest, and my job was to be gentle with her—to give her the time she needed to recover, not to push her along as I always had. So I let the turtle hold me, and thanked it for slowing me right down.
What RRP Actually Is
The Rest & Restore Protocol is a guided listening program—five hours of music in all—from Unyte, developed based on the work of neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges (whose name you may recognize from the Safe & Sound Protocol) in collaboration with audio innovator Anthony Gorry. While the SSP works with the ventral vagal pathway—associated with social connection and safety—the RRP works with the oldest branch of the nervous system, the dorsal vagal pathway, whose gift is the capacity to rest, repair, and recover. Its music isn’t filtered so much as composed around the body’s own slow rhythms—heartbeat, breath, digestion—gently inviting the whole system to settle.
I’m not a scientist, and this is a personal story, not a clinical trial—so I won’t try to explain why it works, or promise that it will do for you what it did for me. I’ll simply tell you what happened in my body. I kept a daily journal throughout my first experience with the protocol, and I’ve drawn on those notes here. (For transparency: BrainArts—William Bolle’s practice—gave me a free year’s access to the RRP in exchange for writing this. The experience and opinions shared here are entirely my own.) My first run through the program took a little over two months.
The Discipline of Less
The most surprising thing about the RRP is how little of it you actually do. You don’t put on headphones and listen to five hours of music. You start with one minute. Then a rest day. Then two minutes. Then a rest day. I built up over the course of weeks—ten seconds at a time in some cases—from one minute to two, four, six, eight, ten. The instruction that kept coming up, both from William and from the protocol itself, was: Less is more. It's better to go too slow than too fast.
This goes against my conditioning—and I suspect against most people’s as well: we want the full dose, the quick result, the box checked. The RRP calls for the opposite—small sips, long pauses, a day of rest between each listening session so the body can integrate. Learning to honor that pace was itself part of the healing process. It taught me, on a small scale, the very thing my whole life had been trying to teach me: that rest isn’t something you earn after the work is done.
What Changed
The changes came so gradually, so incrementally, that within any given week I could barely notice them—and yet, looking back over eight months, they are unmistakable. This has been a quiet, gradual kind of transformation, not a dramatic one.
The clearest example is sleep. I listen to the RRP most nights before bed, while I do some gentle yin yoga, and over the course of these months, my sleep has transformed. I fall asleep within about fifteen minutes now, whereas it used to take much longer; I wake up less often, and when I do, I feel more refreshed. Early on, I also discovered that I could doze off again—slip into a gentle afternoon nap, something I hadn’t been able to do in years. It all happened so gradually, night by night, that I almost didn’t notice—until something put it to the test. Recently I had to stay up late several nights in a row, working on the computer, and still fell easily into a deep, sound sleep. The old me, wired and wide awake after a late night in front of a screen, simply couldn’t have done that. (One thing to keep in mind: the RRP can make you dream more, and more vividly. If you listen to it right before bed and don’t like that, try listening to it earlier in the day.)
Something shifted, too, in how I come into my own body. I used to wake up not quite present in myself, as though there were a membrane I had to push through each morning—an hour or more of yoga, meditation, and exercise just to clear enough space to feel present in my body and connected to the earth. Now, most mornings, I can simply get up and be here. It’s as though the RRP has given me back my body—dissolved some old separation, harmonized something that used to feel split off and bottled up.
Then came the changes I really didn't expect from a collection of songs.
My reactivity began to ease. One day, early in the protocol, I witnessed a car accident outside our home, and my entire system went into hyper-alert—old trauma flooding back. Later that night, I listened to a short RRP track and felt myself finally settle down. Another time, I received a message from a friend that, in the past, would have thrown me off balance for days: chest tight, body braced, thoughts looping. I noticed it, practiced listening, sat with the activated parts of myself—and by evening I had moved from a highly reactive state to something I can only call equanimity, where I could see the whole situation rather than just the threat.
I want to be careful here, because this is important: the RRP didn't do that for me. As I wrote in my journal that day, I had to do the work—the listening, the Focusing, the turning toward those frightened parts. What the RRP seemed to do was reduce the hypervigilance enough to make the work possible. It widened the doorway. I still had to walk through it.
My boundaries became more firmly established, naturally. I found myself able to say no—to a friend in crisis whom I genuinely couldn’t save, to pressure I would once have crumbled under—without the usual storm of guilt. A friend who’d completed the protocol described the same thing: feeling more resilient, less vulnerable. For me, it feels like a sense of stability deep down, a feeling of being held from within that simply wasn’t there before.
The longer arc
What I’m most grateful for is that this hasn’t faded. Unlike the usual rush of enthusiasm that wears off once something stops being new, this has felt sustained and deep-rooted—an ongoing source of strength rather than a fleeting respite. To my own quiet astonishment, I am so much more resilient than I used to be; things that would once have knocked me off balance now simply roll right past me. I feel more balanced, more consistently myself—and when I do slip into a state of imbalance, it no longer feels like my identity the way it once did. I know now that it’s temporary, and that there are ways back.
I should say that I have rarely used the RRP entirely on its own. For the past six months, I have combined it with occasional doses of its companion, the Safe & Sound Protocol, which focuses not on rest but on social connection and safety. If the RRP is the shell I can retreat into, the SSP is the door I can open to step back out into the world—and together they’ve given me a sense of balance I’ve never known. (I’ve written about the SSP, and what it did for a lifelong outsider in groups, in a companion review.)
Because, as I learned, there is such a thing as going too far down. About two months in, the deep rest turned into something too slow and too inward. I felt so withdrawn from the world, and so deeply challenged by any social interaction, that the turtle’s depths had become a place I couldn’t easily rise from. That’s when I reached out to William to restart the SSP—which immediately seemed to bring me back into a healthier balance. I used it regularly until I felt steady between the two poles again, and now I might turn to it only once or twice a fortnight, whereas I use the RRP almost daily.
Somewhere during those eight months, I stopped being carried by the turtle and became it—learning to dive down into the depths on my own, and to rise again when it’s time to face the world.
A few precautions
This isn’t a magic pill, and it shouldn’t be marketed as one. There were rough patches. During one particularly low, sick week, I genuinely wondered whether the RRP was stirring things up rather than soothing them, and whether I’d slipped too far into shutdown. Those moments are, I think, part of the unwinding—old exhaustion and old grief surfacing so they can finally move on—but they’re real, and they’re why the protocol’s emphasis on slowness, rest days, and a guide who knows what they’re doing matters so much. William was always available, always steady, and that mattered more than I can say.
I should be honest, too, about what it hasn’t done. I’m still someone who tends toward busyness and overwhelm—a deeply ingrained pattern I may well be working with for the rest of my life. What’s different now is that there are more pauses, more rest, woven through the busyness. Only eight months in, I’m still in the early stages of letting that spaciousness take root; the RRP has diluted an old pattern, not erased it. I wouldn’t want you to expect it to fix or change you—this is a journey, not a cure.
I’d recommend: don’t do this in a hurry, or alone in the dark without any support. Have someone you trust and can reach. If you can, pair it with a practice that helps you listen to what comes up—for me, that’s Focusing, but it could be anything that lets you turn toward your inner experience with kindness rather than trying to fix it. And take the “less is more” instruction seriously, even when every busy cell in you wants to push ahead. It’s worth remembering, too, that the RRP is a listening program, not a medical treatment—something to complement other care, not to replace it.
Would I recommend it?
Yes—sincerely and warmly. I can’t promise it will do for you what it did for me; every nervous system is unique. I can only tell you that the RRP helped my body remember how to rest, softened a reactivity I’d carried my whole life, and left me more grounded than I’ve ever been. It taught me, slowly, that I am allowed to be the turtle—to descend into the deep sea within when I need to—and that resting, far from being the end of my strength, turns out to be its source.
Nicola-Jane le Breton is a writer, Focusing trainer, and practitioner based in Rockingham, Western Australia. She works as a Community Story Weaver with Befriend, helping to build more inclusive and connected communities.
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