Yoga and Your Mental Health

Me, Personally…

Starting with that personal insight I mentioned- I have suffered from anxiety and depression from a young age, roughly about 12 or 13. I believe mine started as part a hormone induced condition, but also I experienced a lot of trauma in my childhood and my young adult years, and it started to just become part of how I identified myself. I recognized the patterns, saw the therapists, tried my hand at self-medicating from a young age, and went on antidepressants. The medications would then either make it worse, or they would seem to help for a little while but would then wear off in effect after a couple of weeks, leaving me to try something new in addition to what I was doing, try something new altogether, or up the dosage. My condition only seemed to get progressively worse through the years. And while I had tried yoga off and on for years I never made it a habit, so, in turn, didn’t notice any significant changes in my mental well-being. Then, in 2018, we lost a lost woman, who had been a sister to my own sister and me throughout our childhood and adult lives, to a brutal incident, and it sent me off the deep end. The worst part was, that it was hard to find solace, as those around me were also grieving, and not in the healthiest ways. A year after her death, I realized that thanks to my self-medicating and lack of actually addressing the trauma I had undergone, I didn’t remember hardly anything from the previous year. I have 2 children that I felt like I’d lost a year with, despite knowing that I had tried to function and smile as though I meant it… and it was obvious in those moments, as it had never been before, that I needed some serious life changes. I needed something that helped me heal, not just from the past year, but from all of the trauma I’d experienced throughout my life… And I turned to yoga. 

The studies are out there, friends, there’s no lack of them- the effects of pranayama (breathing exercises) on the brain, body, and nervous system, the effects of having a regular yoga practice, the positive changes that happen within the brain and body with a regular meditation practice. I have yet to see one that reports any BAD happening from introducing these things into your daily life.

Yoga

The National Library of Medicine reports that “An ever-growing body of research attests to Yoga’s psychological benefits including an increase of overall well-being (Woodyard, 2011; Trulson and Vernon, 2019) possibly because of different aspects of the practice (e.g., physical exertion, breath work, meditation) …” and it’s true- especially since the pandemic, scientists have been delving deeper into the effects of yoga on the mind and body. 

Research at Harvard states specifically that a regular practice can help sharpen the brain, stating “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” (2 things directly affected by depression and anxiety, so I’m sure, dear reader, you can make the connection between this and mental health.) These same studies report an improved mood as a result of a regular practice. It’s common knowledge that exercising lowers stress hormones and increases the production of endorphins, feel-good hormones, so it, in turn, boosts your mood. Yoga has, over the years, pivoted into something of an exercise regimen (more or less vigorous, depending on which practice you partake in) so it naturally has these same effects. It’s not just about the workout though, it’s the inclusion of moving with the breath and focusing your mind on a centralized thought or idea, keeping the mind from wandering into negative, stressful subjects.

Setting an Intention

I’m adding in this part just to hit on how important the intention you set at the beginning of your practice, whether it be your flow or a meditation, is for moving the brain from anxious and depressed to content and happy. We need a point to focus on when we do these things (or really, even if you added it into your workout at the gym it would be beneficial!). 

The brain is LAZY. It’s been shown that turning to the negative is, unfortunately, a lot easier for it, so it wants to automatically shift to that lower vibration a lot more than it wants to focus on the positive. It mimics the vessel it serves in that, because I feel confident in saying most of us don’t want to MAKE something harder than it has to be. No, if we are given the choice, we will take the easiest route almost every time. The only times I’ve come across somebody taking the harder path is when there is something more to gain, and friends, if peace and contentment within oneself isn’t the ultimate gain, I sincerely don’t know what is. This is why I challenge you to challenge your own mind! Work it out! Push it to focus in on the positive, even when it’s fighting you to turn to the negative!

Meditation

According to the same Harvard studies I noted above, “Meditation also reduces activity in the limbic system- the part of the brain dedicated to emotions.” The Limbic system is also responsible for our fight, flight, or fawn instincts, our most primal nature, usually driven by traumatic times in our lives. 

When we experience trauma, the rest of the brain SHUTS DOWN and allows the limbic system to take over (Think of it like the brain seeing the limbic system as a type of specialist- this part will know what to do best.) As children and young adults who’s brains are still growing and developing, this is detrimental to our growth process, as we lose the ability for growth in the frontal lobe (the part of the brain responsible for a persons regular thinking, personality, self-control, memory, and more). It shuts down and that primal part of the brain in the limbic system turns on and grows instead of the frontal lobe. This is why you sometimes see people who experience exorbitant amounts of trauma as a child act more ‘animalistic’ in nature. They’ve lived a lot of their life in survival mode, aka in the limbic system’s domain, and this, unfortunately, encourages the person to live continuously in survival mode, despite there being any immediate danger or no.

Now, while I could go on for days about the ways in which we hit that low frequency, I’m going to more allow it to take us back to our initial point. In meditation we set a mantra in place for ourselves (a positive word or phrase that we bring the brain back to any time it starts to stray and wander toward other, less desirable thoughts) or we set an intention (another positive thought to return to, with the difference being that it offers a broader range for you to bring the brain back to, focused on a specific subject or goal.) As I stated before, the brain is lazy and wants to stay in the easier space of low vibrations. Like any muscle in the body, we have to exercise the brain to wander, more naturally in time, toward the positive. When we force the brain to stay focused on these centralized thoughts in our mantra or intention, we are slowly working that muscle memory to stop drifting to the negative and with time we are encouraging it to automatically move to the positive or higher frequencies. You could also compare this to any sort of manual labor or even playing an instrument- the more you do it, the more unconscious the shift becomes.

Pranayama

The final tool I’ll give you for now is a regular pranayama, breathing exercise, practice. This is so easy to incorporate into your yoga journey, too! Just taking a few minutes before or after a flow or meditation makes this one of the easiest lifestyle changes to implement into your daily life.

While I had trouble finding studies of the effects of pranayama on mental health as a singularity, there are plenty of sources that agree that a regular pranayama practice can improve sleep, decrease stress, and increase mindfulness, all vital for caring for one’s mental health. There are other benefits as well, but none that I found directly related to this article, so I’ll leave it here for now.

In Conclusion

According the the National Institute of Health, in a study published in 2022, researchers took a group of 105 med school females (shown to be more affected by the intense and rigorous training of med school) around the same age, weight, and height, and put them all under a 12 week experiment. The control group didn’t do anything different, continued as they had, while the rest practiced a designated program for their group, six days a week for 12 weeks. Anxiety, depression, anger, and sense of well-being were measured by taking a validated self-administered questionnaire developed by the Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences, New Delhi before starting the study, at six weeks, and at 12 weeks after the intervention. Inter-group levels of anxiety, depression, anger, and well-being were then also compared by the Kruskal-Wallis test with Dunn’s posthoc test, and Intra-group baselines were measured at six weeks, and at 12 weeks after the intervention was tested by Friedman’s test.

During the experiment, anxiety, depression, and anger significantly decreased after six weeks in all three intervention groups. However, a further decrement was seen after 12 weeks of meditation, pranayama, and yoga with the maximum effect seen in the yoga group. A sense of well-being was improved after practicing all types of interventions with meditation found to increase a sense of well-being to the highest level compared to pranayama and yoga.

So take it from me, or take it from science. I’m not saying that other forms of addressing mental illness are completely unacceptable by any means. In fact, I’m a firm believer in that Eastern medicine and Modern medicine should be working hand in hand. My problem with modern medicine is that it is seen as an immediate fix, with the problem being that it turns out to be a permanent band aide, if you will, never addressing the core issue. You have a problem? Take a pill about it. Oh, and never mind that that pill will have to increase in size and dosage as your body builds a tolerance… and then that pill might have side effects that have you needing another pill to function… might even need a pill for that pill to counteract the side effects it’s going to have on you, and so on and so forth. I’m not a doctor, just somebody passionate about mental well-being who has been trained in clinical settings. But, I believe that if we started utilizing that antidepressant as the band aide it is, using it to help us get over that initial hump, and then did the WORK that will allow us to eventually not need that pill anymore, that the number of victims to poor mental health  would plummet. And we’d see the beginning of the fall of the Big Pharma empire… but that’s a soapbox best left for another day…

I send you love and light, friends, and hope this helped those like me that just want to know “Why”, I’m forever your spiritual servant- Sonja