How Yoga Helps Mental Health
World Mental Health Day
10th October each year is World Mental Health Day. There are many ways you can support your own mental health and that of others.
Openness helps understanding and being aware that the brain can manifest aches and pains in the body, creating physical symptoms that although very real to the person experiencing are created and are best treated by helping the mind.
We are fortunate that these days mental health both ensuring and supporting where there is not a problem for prevention and recognising that mental health problems are very real and should be helped and supported. This mental health awareness is leading to further research and study into helping mental health, supporting mental health through practices such as yoga.
Yoga is proven as one way to reduce anxiety and depression and can actually help you to prevent them. Finding balance through yoga practice is increasingly recognised amongst scholars and clinicians.
Learning and practising yoga with a teacher who recognises the importance of the mind-body-heart connection and incorporates brain and breathe work in classes is a fantastic way to reduce mental health problems whatever they are and even prevent them occurring in the first place.
Practicing yoga frequently and regularly actually helps brain health, but don’t take my word for it. Harvard offer information about MRI scans of people who regularly practice yoga shows a thicker cerebral cortex and hippocampus when compared to those who don’t practice yoga.
‘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.’
(yoga for better mental health, April 24). Read the full article here.
So if you need an excuse to build strength and flexibility in your body, do it for your mental health and brain health.
You probably know that all exercise can help to improve your mood through releasing endorphins and sending more oxygenated blood to your brain, but yoga has increased benefits due to elevating GABA, gamma-aminobutyric acid associated with better mood and decreasing anxiety. Yoga also helps with emotional responses, lowering the stress response to stressful situations. No wonder daily yoga helped me to overcome anxiety!
Yoga is frequently recommended as an alternative and complimentary therapy to medical intervention by clinicians and is increasingly recommended by the NHS as a compliment to or alternative to drug therapy.
Increasing research is backing up small studies that suggest that yoga as an add on therapy helps with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.
The breath work aspect of yoga and the opportunity to meditate at the end of class are crucial aspects of the success of yoga helping to improve and balance mental health.
Whatever your reason for starting or finding out about yoga, something that helps the body and the mind has to be a good routine to get into.
Yoga is not a religion, is not aligned to any particular religion. Different teachers will take different aspects of the philosophy of yoga to their classes and qualified teachers will have studied and proved an understanding of the ancient yoga philosophies. That does not mean that practicing yoga is an indoctrination into any eastern religions, nothing could be further from the truth. Yoga teachers come from many backgrounds and the best yoga teachers love nature, the yoga connection to nature and who crucially are invested in helping others in a non-devotional way.
Practicing with a teacher who understands the mind- body connection will help your mental health. Practising with a teacher who understands the mind-body-heart connection elevates your teacher to a whole new level of offering an all round health supporting practice that you build on week after week to help your psyche, body, heart and bones.
Lyn is such a practitioner.
References: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/yoga-for-better-mental-health