Yoga for Emotional Wellbeing: Why It Helps
Yoga for Emotional Wellbeing: Why It Helps
by Seerita Sankar, BASc
Yoga is known to have many benefits, and one of those benefits include your emotional being. This practice is great for coping with stressors, lowering negative emotions and improving your positive emotions (Park et al., 2020). Beyond reducing stress, yoga has been proven to lower symptoms of PTSD, anxiety and depression. By implementing this practice, you can lower cortisol levels and regulate your mood (Field, 2016). Emotions of anger, feeling overwhelmed and neurotic tendencies can be lowered through this exercise (Shapiro et al., 2007). Yoga is a holistic approach that supports emotional stability, self-awareness and peace of mind. The goal of yoga is not to strive for perfection but to foster a mindset of acceptance and non-judgement. (Garfinkel & Schumacher, 2000). This element of yoga promotes mindfulness by encouraging individuals to be present in the moment rather than worrying about past or future stressors.
Let’s look at what science has to say about yoga:
The practice of yoga has been shown to reduce overthinking (Tripathi & Bharadwaj, 2021). Quieting the mind is a crucial part of yoga and it helps to reduce worrying, which promotes emotional wellbeing. It also helps with fostering neuroplasticity which is the brain’s ability to form new connections and reorganize information to learn new skills, form memories and adjust to change. This neuroplasticity happens in the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex in the brain. These parts of the brain are important for decision making and emotion regulation (Tripathi & Bharadwaj, 2021). Long term practice of yoga can help to protect the loss of gray matter in different areas of the brain that are affected from aging. This means the more gray matter, the more self-control, language processing, emotional awareness and decision making (Villemure et al., 2015).
Yoga helps to support the body’s nervous system, more specifically, the autonomic nervous system (Sullivan et al., 2018). This practice improves vagal tone and autonomic balance which impacts digestion, relaxation and mood stability.
• Breathing: Stimulates vagus nerve and supports parasympathetic activity (Sullivan et al., 2018)
• Postures: Body awareness, movement coordination and sensory processing (Sullivan et al., 2018)
• Chanting: Impacts heart rate and ventral vagal complex (Sullivan et al., 2018)
• Meditation: Calms neural activity and supports self-regulation (Sullivan et al., 2018)
The movement, chanting, breathing and meditation components of yoga activates the ventral vagal complex which is important for emotional balance and relaxation. Overall, yoga strengthens vagal tone, parasympathetic activity and emotional regulation (Sullivan et al., 2018).
Who can practice yoga?
Yoga may seem like a hard practice to get involved in with concerns about flexibility, expenses and just feeling awkward about learning new poses. The advantage of yoga is it can be practiced regardless of your flexibility, age, body type or other characteristics that can limit inclusion from mainstream yoga. For example, gentle and chair yoga have positive outcomes for older adults, for individuals managing chronic pain, and for those with mobility limitations (Park et al., 2014). Online or home-based yoga practices can remove barriers related to transportation, cost and body image concerns which make this practice more inclusive. Even very short practices of yoga can improve stress and anxiety (Telles et al., 2012). From chair yoga, beginner to advanced levels, home practice and yoga classes, there’s a practice for everyone! Practicing this for a few minutes each day or once a week can benefit your well-being.
Key takeaways:
Finding the yoga sequence that works for you can be beneficial for your mental health. Yoga can help manage symptoms of depression, anxiety and PTSD. This practice can help support aging, neuroplasticity and our ability to self-regulate. It strengthens your parasympathetic activity, the vagal tone and your emotion regulation. Yoga is accessible for those of all ages, abilities and body types. Yoga can contribute to emotional stability, inner peace and self-awareness.
The benefits of this practice can be experienced regardless of how you practice it. The most important part of yoga is to enjoy and reconnect with yourself.
Seerita Sankar, BASc.
References
Field, T. (2016). Yoga research review. Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 24, 145–161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctcp.2016.06.005
Garfinkel, M., & Schumacher, H. R. (2000). Yoga. Rheumatic Disease Clinics of North America, 26(1), 125–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0889-857x(05)70126-5
Park, C. L., Finkelstein-Fox, L., Groessl, E. J., Elwy, A. R., & Lee, S. Y. (2020). Exploring how different types of yoga change psychological resources and emotional well-being across a single session. Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 49(1), 102354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctim.2020.102354
Park, C. L., Groessl, E., Maiya, M., Sarkin, A., Eisen, S. V., Riley, K., & Elwy, A. R. (2014). Comparison groups in yoga research: A systematic review and critical evaluation of the literature. Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 22(5), 920–929. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctim.2014.08.008
Shapiro, D., Cook, I. A., Davydov, D. M., Ottaviani, C., Leuchter, A. F., & Abrams, M. (2007). Yoga as a Complementary Treatment of Depression: Effects of Traits and Moods on Treatment Outcome. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 4(4), 493–502. https://doi.org/10.1093/ecam/nel114
Sullivan, M. B., Erb, M., Schmalzl, L., Moonaz, S., Noggle Taylor, J., & Porges, S. W. (2018). Yoga Therapy and Polyvagal Theory: The Convergence of Traditional Wisdom and Contemporary Neuroscience for Self-Regulation and Resilience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12(67). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00067
Telles, S., Singh, N., & Balkrishna, A. (2012). Managing Mental Health Disorders Resulting from Trauma through Yoga: A Review. Depression Research and Treatment, 2012, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/401513
Tripathi, V., & Bharadwaj, P. (2021). Neuroscience of the yogic theory of consciousness. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2021(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niab030
Villemure, C., ÄŒeko, M., Cotton, V. A., & Bushnell, M. C. (2015). Neuroprotective effects of yoga practice: age-, experience-, and frequency-dependent plasticity. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00281
*This information is not intended to replace psychotherapeutic and/or medical advice or practices. They are for educational purposes only.