Managing Your Stress and Anxiety with Yoga: What Does the Research Say?

Managing Your Stress and Anxiety with Yoga

Have you ever felt like you could run and hide when you first started giving presentations at school? Or felt butterflies in your stomach before going out with someone you like? What about that heart-pounding feeling as your friend creeps up on you as a joke?

Contrary to popular belief, stress is not just in your head and anxiety is not the minor everyday jitters; they go much, much deeper.

Human beings are highly complex creatures, and our neuro-psychological systems are deeply tied to our regular bodily functions; so isolating mental and physical health from each other is pointless. (Neil Schneiderman)

Stress is physical as much as it is psychological. And so is its cure.

Yoga: The No-Hassle Remedy for Everyday Stress

Dating back to over five millennia, Yoga is the practice of bridging the gap between your inner self and the outer world through an aspect of your body that intimately ties them together – breathing.

Yoga helps you connect your inner self with the outer world through your breaths – And it works!

Don’t Believe Us? Here’s Some Science

There have been various studies on the effects of yoga on psychological stress, and here is a summary.

1. Thirty-eight people officially diagnosed with depression underwent 8 weeks of Yoga and they reduced their levels of depression by a clinically significant amount. None of the participants in this study were on any antidepressants or herbal treatments for their illness.
2. Yoga helps regulate cognition, emotions, peripheral psychology, behaviors and increases self-regulatory skills, consequentially improving health and well-being of the individual. (Tim Gard)
3. A review analyzing 124 trials found that all the research studies linking yoga with effective treatment of depression, insomnia, and other psychological stress stand valid (Meera Balasubramaniam).

Conclusion:

If you are struggling with stress management, and find it hard to balance your inner world with your outer one, maybe it is time to sign up for a yoga class.

Works Cited
1. medicine.net. Medical Definitions of Stress.
2. Meera Balasubramaniam, 1, Shirley Telles,2 and P. Murali Doraiswamy1,3. “Yoga and your mind: A Systematic Review of Yoga for Neuropsychiatric Disorders.” Front Psychiatry (2012; 3: 117): 117.
3. Neil Schneiderman, Gail Ironson, and Scott D. Siegel. “STRESS AND HEALTH: Psychological, Behavioral, and Biological Determinants.” Annu Rev Clin Psychol. -1 ( 2008 Oct 16.): 607–628.
4. Sudha Prathikanti, 1,* Renee Rivera,2 Ashly Cochran,3 Jose Gabriel Tungol,4 Nima Fayazmanesh,5 and Eva Weinmann. “Treating major depression with yoga: A prospective, randomized, controlled pilot trial.” PLoS One (2017 Mar 16. ): 12(3).
5. Tim Gard, 1,2,3,† Jessica J. Noggle,4,† Crystal L. Park,5,† David R. Vago,6,*† and Angela Wilson7, “Potential self-regulatory mechanisms of yoga for psychological health.” Front Hum Neurosci. (2014 Sep 30): 770.