A discontinuous reception method, a terminal, and a network device are provided. The method includes: obtaining, by a terminal, discontinuous reception DRX parameter information corresponding to configuration parameter information supported by the terminal; and enabling DRX by using the obtained DRX parameter information. The method is applied to a communications system, the communications system supports N groups of configuration parameters, and each group of configuration parameters is corresponding to a group of discontinuous reception DRX parameters. A DRX parameter is corresponding to a configuration parameter, and the DRX parameter is adaptively and flexibly adjusted when the configuration parameter is flexibly adjusted based on a service in a network, so that the terminal is better balanced between a latency and power consumption, and the terminal can better adapt to a communications network with a larger system capacity, a lower latency, higher network reliability, and better network availability.