How Yoga and Meditation Benefit Your Mental Health
American Psychological Association researchers explains that yoga can help reduce stress, relieve anxiety, depression, insomnia, and PTSD symptoms.
Several recent studies suggest that yoga may help strengthen social attachments, reduce stress, and relieve anxiety, depression, and insomnia. Researchers are also starting to claim some success in using yoga and yoga-based treatments to help active-duty military and veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, explains the American Psychological Association.
What is Yoga?
Yoga is an ancient practice that involves moving the body into different poses and exercises that help to promote balance. This practice originated in India, and it means "to unite," referring to the alignment of the mind, body, and spirit. Yoga helps to release stagnant energy in the body, cultivating renewed energy between the body and mind and having notable implications for our physical and mental health.
Yoga helps us be more mindful of our breathing pattern, or Pranayama, which positively affects our body and mind. By bringing awareness to our breath, we can help to slow down the body, enabling us to focus our energy on renewing and restoring.
What is Meditation?
Meditation involves focused awareness on a particular activity, like our breath, a mantra, our environment, or any activity that engages our five senses. The effects of meditation are regulated largely by the nervous and endocrine systems. A significant component of meditation is mindfulness. Mindfulness is bringing non-judgmental awareness to the present moment. It has also been referred to as “paying attention on purpose” and has been found to improve self-regulation and functioning among various brain circuits that influence brain health.
Mental Health Benefits of Yoga and Meditation
With its emphasis on breathing practices and meditation—both of which help calm and center the mind— it’s hardly surprising that yoga also brings mental benefits, such as reduced anxiety and depression. What may be more surprising is that it actually makes your brain work better.
When you lift weights, your muscles get stronger and bigger. When you do yoga, your brain cells develop new connections, and changes occur in brain structure as well as function, resulting in improved cognitive skills, such as learning and memory. Yoga strengthens parts of the brain that play a key role in memory, attention, awareness, thought, and language. Think of it as weightlifting for the brain.
Studies using MRI scans and other brain imaging technology have shown that people who regularly did yoga had a thicker cerebral cortex (the area of the brain responsible for information processing) and hippocampus (the area of the brain involved in learning and memory) compared with nonpractitioners. These areas of the brain typically shrink as you age, but the older yoga practitioners showed less shrinkage than those who did no yoga. This suggests that yoga may counteract age-related declines in memory and other cognitive skills.
Improved mood
All exercise can boost your mood by lowering levels of stress hormones, increasing the production of feel-good chemicals known as endorphins, and bringing more oxygenated blood to your brain. But yoga may have additional benefits. It can affect mood by elevating levels of a brain chemical called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which is associated with better mood and decreased anxiety.
Yoga and Meditation practices have been found to exert physiological effects on both the body and mind. This could be primarily due to their significant role in modulating stress on a physiological level, having vast implications for our health in terms of immunity, inflammation, and mental health. Yoga and Meditation help our bodies get into a restful and restorative state by promoting Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) dominance, reduced cortisol, and increased activity in certain areas of the brain that all impact how we feel in our body and mind.
Meditation practices work on improving the default mode network (DMN) in the brain, an interconnected group of brain structures working synergistically. Improvements in the DMN can help shift the amount of time we spend on specific thoughts. For example, meditation can reduce the rumination of thoughts and even the stress response. Meditation also reduces activity in the limbic system—the part of the brain dedicated to emotions. As your emotional reactivity diminishes, you have a more tempered response when faced with stressful situations.
A number of studies highlight the mental health benefits of meditation and yoga. In this 2014 study, a significant decrease in state anxiety and the somatization of stress was observed, among improvements in sleep and quality of life in 70 participants that engaged in yoga for stress reduction. In this 2020 study, yoga-based interventions improved attention, memory, and executive functions among the elderly. Finally, in this 2015 study, mental health professionals that participated in yoga reported a significant reduction in work-related stress and significant improvement in their adaptation to stress as evidenced by measurements in heart rate variability (HRV).
Psychologists are also examining the use of yoga with survivors of trauma and finding it may even be more effective than some psychotherapy techniques. In a pilot study at the Trauma Center at the Justice Resource Institute in Brookline, Mass., women with PTSD who took part in eight sessions of a 75-minute Hatha yoga class experienced significantly reduced PTSD symptoms compared with those participating in a dialectical behavior therapy group. The center recently received a grant from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine to conduct a randomized, single-blind, controlled study to further examine whether, as compared with a 10-week health class, yoga improves the frequency and severity of PTSD symptoms and other somatic complaints as well as social and occupational impairments among female trauma survivors.
"When people experience trauma, they may experience not only a sense of emotional disregulation, but also a feeling of being physically immobilized," says Ritu Sharma, PhD, project coordinator of the center's yoga program, who only began practicing yoga when she started leading the program. "Body-oriented techniques such as yoga help them increase awareness of sensations in the body, stay more focused on the present moment and hopefully empower them to take effective actions."
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Thanks for reading! -Gabi