Four Benefits Of Yoga That You Probably Didn’t Know About

As we all attempt to navigate the ongoing disruption and emotional impact caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have turned to online yoga tutorials to keep active and reduce our stress levels.

But while yoga’s benefits of increased flexibility, relieved anxiety and improved muscle strength are well known, research points to a variety of ways that yoga can help us which are a little more surprising.

There has been extensive scientific investigation into the impact of yoga on a huge range of physical and mental health problems (alongside how it can contribute to a generally healthy lifestyle), and the results have been encouraging.

To determine exactly the extent of these improvements and how yoga achieves them will take more research, but if you wanted to take on yoga as a positive lifestyle change, the evidence suggests that you can expect to see positive outcomes in many areas of your life, including:

Promoting Immunity

The fact that stress can make us feel under the weather is something we all intuitively know.  Things like colds, mouth ulcers and cold sores all seemingly descending at exactly the wrong time. But there is also a strong physiological basis for extra stress impacting our immune system’s ability to ward off niggly illnesses.

Stressful events and even worried thoughts can activate our sympathetic nervous system (SNS) into “fight or flight” mode, gearing our body up for emergency functioning.  This means increasing heart rate, releasing cortisol (a stress hormone), pumping blood to the muscles and focusing our attention to the matter in hand (this is known as tunnel vision).

All this serves a purpose and is harmless on the odd occasion.  However when we are chronically stressed, the body rarely enters “rest and repair” mode and neglects physiological functions which don’t serve us in an emergency, such as our digestion and immune system.

Yoga has been found to directly promote rest and repair mode, calming our SNS and making us far less reactive to stress.  A study from the Frontiers of Immunology suggesting that mind body practices like yoga actually reduce stress-induced inflammation (which can cause and exacerbate ill health).

This means we are no longer so profoundly impacted by stressful events and worry, and our immune system can function as it should.

Reducing Migraines

A newly published study in Neurology has found that when yoga is added to a conventional treatment plan, people living with migraines experience significantly fewer headaches, have less intense headaches, and consume fewer pills.

This follows a 2014 study which found the frequency and intensity of headaches decreased when yoga was added to people’s usual therapeutic and pharmaceutical options in the treatment of migraines.

It’s theorized that yoga’s effect on the parasympathetic nervous system (which is what puts us into “rest and repair” mode) helps us to recover from the experience of pain.  It  also reduces the disturbances in our nervous system which have been linked to migraines.

It appears, therefore, that yoga may well help with both the potential cause of migraines and their emotional impact.  Thus reducing both the headaches themselves as well as the distress associated with them.

Improving Asthma

The fact that breathing exercises are an integral part of yoga (known within yoga as pranayama – the formal practice of controlling the breath) may feel at first like an impediment to people with asthma. However, Asthma UK reports that yoga is beneficial to asthma sufferers, and leads to improvements both in symptoms and quality of life.

With asanas and coherent breathing, yoga is a great way for people with asthma to learn how to breathe deeply, comfortably and find a natural breathing pattern, even when they are under physical strain (as any newbie to yoga can attest, holding certain poses isn’t always easy!). With regular practice, this can lung capacity and breathing control.

Stress can also be a key trigger in asthma attacks.  And as breathing problems very naturally cause huge anxiety in people, this can be something of a cyclical problem.

Yoga can act as a circuit breaker in the negative spiral of stress, asthma attacks and heightened anxiety.  It can reduce the frequency of attacks while also helping people to stay calm when they do strike.

Stopping Addictive Behaviours

Whether we want to quit smoking, knock that nightly glass of wine on the head or ease an over reliance on sugary lattes, yoga is a fantastic tool for helping us to put an end to addictive behaviours.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, American Addiction Centers advise that yoga is often beneficial when used in tandem with other traditional substance abuse treatment methods.  However the factors which make yoga useful in this context apply across all addictive behaviours.

There are physical brain changes that happen in our minds when we become addicted to something.  With substances like nicotine essentially hijacking our reward pathways and making it extremely difficult to resist them once the addiction has become established.

Yoga helps to engender brain changes which loosen these associations and strengthen areas of the brain undermined by addiction.  With larger brain volume in areas of the brain associated with regulating stress and self-awareness in those who practice yoga.

The mindful aspect of yoga appears to be particularly useful in this regard.  Addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist Jud Brewer explains that (in the case of smoking) mindfulness “the reinforcement process in two ways: It updates the reward value of smoking in the brain, and it helps people ride out their cravings instead of acting on them.”

But these benefits aren’t confined to problems such as smoking. Any behaviours we find it hard to stop (even if they aren’t truly an addiction) often work in the same way neurologically – even emotional patterns such as repeating a negative relationship style.

Yoga gently unwinds the neural pathways we’ve reinforced through a lifetime of repetitions.  And it allows us to form others – helping us to replace old, negative habits with positive new ones.

Bio

This post was written by Heather Mason of The Minded Institute, which offers yoga therapy training to yoga and health professionals. Heather became interested in the potential of yoga to relieve a variety of physical and mental health conditions after spending three years in South East Asian monasteries.  She went on to study psychology and neurology and create The Minded Institute as a culmination of her professional work.