How Yoga can Help with Anxiety

Photo by Kristopher Allison on Unsplash

During the pandemic, loads more people struggled with their mental health. Health concerns, worrying about your loved ones, financial worries, fear and feeling a lack of control can all make you feel more anxious than perhaps you might normally be.

Even though I’m usually quite happy spending time at home, I still found lock-down to be mentally challenging. Not being able to go to the places I might normally go, not able to spend time with family and friends, cancelled trips and more reasons to clean — yuk!

After a few weeks of trying to get used to the changes, I fell back in love with something that I’ve always done on and off since my mid twenties — yoga. I have tried lots of different weekly yoga classes over the years and occasionally I used to practice a bit at home but I’ve never managed to establish a daily yoga practice. It rocks, it is totally helping me get through all this current weirdness.

Why is Yoga so good for Anxiety?

Yoga incorporates three relaxation techniques; breathing exercises; progressive muscle relaxation and visualisation.

1. Breathing Exercises

Taking fuller breaths allows you to feel calmer and in control when faced with panic and anxiety. Focussing on your breath can help to clear your mind of anxious, fearful and negative thoughts. Many yoga classes start with breathing exercises and as you progress with your yoga and get more used to the asanas (positions) then you learn to focus more on your breathing throughout the whole class.

2. Progressive Muscle Relaxation

This is a technique developed by the American physician, Edmund Jacobson, in the 1920’s. He developed a sequence of steps for tightening and then relaxing groups of muscles. The idea being that by relaxing the physical tension in the body you can elicit the relaxation response and lower the heart rate and calm the mind. Most yoga classes end in the asana, Shavasana or Corpse Pose. It is the practice of gradually relaxing one body part at a time, one muscle at a time, and one thought at a time. It sounds really simple, just lying down and relaxing, but it’s actually quite challenging to relax your body completely with your mind still being aware. Sometimes it’s quite a challenge to lie still for 5 minutes! Once you get used it, Shavasana is the best part of the class, the treat to look forward to at the end.

“Shavasana is the essence of yoga made simple: going within and experiencing yourself” — Erich Shiffman

3. Visualisation

This involves using mental imagery to achieve a more relaxed state of mind. When you are really anxious or experiencing a panic attack your mind may focus on the worry, you think of only the worst that could happen. Visualisation works by expanding your ability to rest and relax by focussing your mind on more calming and serene images. It is a form of meditation, you just sit quietly and imagine a scenario like a rainstorm coming and think about what you can hear and smell and see to help calm your racing thoughts and distract yourself.

Visualisation can also be used in yoga to help you achieve difficult poses. Just like an athlete might use visualisation to imagine running faster or jumping higher, you can visualise what the perfect pose would look like before trying to achieve it.

Yoga Nidra is a form of guided visualisation and body awareness. Nidra being the Sanskrit word for “sleep”. In this technique, a teacher takes you through a wide range of images while you lie in Shavasana or Corpse Pose. The idea is that the body relaxes deeply while the mind remains alert and aware. I use Yoga Nidra to relax and reduce stress, but I also use it to help me feel refreshed if I get in from work and I’m really flagging.

I’ve also heard that some yogis stand on their head to make them feel more awake (who knows maybe after a few years of practice, one day that’ll be me!!), for now though, I find that a guided Yoga Nidra session that focusses on relaxing and refreshing rather than sleep is better than a “nanna nap” that can make you feel groggy afterwards. Sometimes I fall asleep, which you’re not really supposed to do, but I always wake up hearing the final “ding” and I always do feel really refreshed, I totally swear by it.

This technique is especially useful if you suffer from anxiety or depression because it helps you stop getting lost in your own thoughts as you follow the instructions. Apparently 30 minutes of Yoga Nidra is the equivalent of two hours of deep sleep — bargain!

What the Science Says…

A quote from Harvard Medical School (updated in 2018) says “by reducing perceived stress and anxiety, yoga appears to modulate stress response systems. This in turn, decreases physiological arousal, for example, reducing the heart rate, lowering blood pressure, and easing respiration. There is also evidence that yoga practices help increase heart rate variability, an indicator of the body’s ability to respond to stress more flexibly”.

If you’re still not sure then Meera Watts on www.thebestbrainpossible.com states 5 ways that science shows yoga reduces anxiety:

1. Yoga eases the physical symptoms of anxiety. The yoga poses teach your brain and body to relax even when feeling stressed. Studies have shown that certain yoga poses help calm the nervous system and reduce cortisol levels.
2. Practising yoga encourages the production and release of GABA (Gamma-Amniobutyric Acid) in the brain. It’s principal role is reducing neuronal excitability throughout the nervous system. GABA relaxes your brain and body and counteracts the fight or flight response caused by anxiety.
3. Yogic breathing reduces anxiety immediately. Pranayama breathing, as taught in yoga, teaches you to breathe deeply into the lungs and the belly. Slow breathing is the fastest way to calm your brain and body. When you practice deep breathing routinely, it becomes easier to use breathing as a tool to manage moments of emotional turmoil.
4. Because yoga reduces stress and cortisol production, yoga can aid in restoring adrenal balance. When your adrenal glands aren’t performing optimally, you can experience weight gain, fatigue, depression, rashes, cravings, anxiety and a weakened immune system.
5. Through the practice of yoga, you learn to be mindful. Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judge-mentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment. Science has found mindfulness to be an effective practice to reduce chronic anxiety and stress. Mindless mental activity for most people can be repetitive ruminative thoughts. Through the meditative yoga practices you can train your brain to break free of negative or anxious thought loops and orient itself in the present moment.

“Pranayama is the link between the mental and physical disciplines. While the action is physical, the effect is to make the mind calm, lucid and steady.” — Swami Vishnu Devananda

If you’d like to try a breathing exercise, have a go at alternate nostril breathing and see the difference in how it makes you feel. Start by practicing three rounds and build up slowly to twenty rounds:

1. Breathe in through your left nostril, closing the right with your thumb (to a count of 2);
2. Hold the breath, closing both nostrils (to a count of 8);
3. Breathe out through the right nostril, keeping the left nostril closed with your ring and little finger (to a count of 4);
4. Breathe in through your right nostril; keeping the left nostril closed (for a count of 2);
5. Hold the breath, closing both nostrils (count of 8);
6. Breathe out through the left nostril; keeping the right closed with your thumb (to a count of 4 again). This completes one round of Anuloma Viloma (alternate nostril breathing).

Coleen Saidman Yee in her book Yoga for Life, dedicates a whole chapter to trauma and dealing with anxiety. She says “that anxiety and PTSD create tension in the back, neck and shoulders as well as tightness in the hips and hamstrings. There are days when the body is flooded with stress hormones cortisol and epinephrine; activities such as mediation or yoga are known to reduce stress and quiet anxiety and trauma, one breath and one posture at a time. Even practicing something as simple as pausing after your exhalation for ten minutes a day can add up to substantial period of relief from grief, fear or anxiety. It also can empower you to realise that there’s something you can do to help yourself. None of us is powerless”.

Establishing a daily yoga practice has been a really positive outcome for me from the lock-down experience, and it’s one that I have taken forward with me now it is all over. It’s given me a toolkit and solutions for a whole host of ailments and problems.

Uncurling my mat, and getting on it every day has made me feel more in control with my life off the mat (which was no mean feat when there was a pandemic going on!); it’s made me feel physically stronger and improved my flexibility no end; it’s made me feel much more in tune with my own body; it’s helped me to sleep better and to be a calmer person (well most of the time and for the odd occasion when I’m not there’s still always gin or red wine!).

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” — Ancient Chinese Proverb

Useful Resources:

You Tube — Yoga with Adrienne (she is brilliant and the fuss the whole world is making is well deserved, she’s a great online teacher for beginners and more experienced yogis and she has a lovely dog called Benji — she also has videos especially for anxiety and stress)

You Tube — Mary Beth Yoga (also brilliant, very informative, calm and relaxing and she does great morning yoga videos)

You Tube — Fightmaster (again excellent teacher, some classes are a lot harder and she does some lovely flow classes; currently trying her 90 day fix series)

Book — Yoga for Life — Coleen Saidman Yee

The Book of Yoga — The Complete Step by Step Guide — 1983 — Sivananda Yoga Centre

Website — www.thebestbrainpossible.com