Yoga has evolved from being a niche practice that basically used no equipment to a global industry worth billions of dollars. It’s understandable that some people may be cynical about the countless mental health claims attributed to the highly accessible practice.
However, profiteering over mats and pants notwithstanding, the decades of scientific scrutiny heaped on yoga has shown it to have a wide variety of benefits to mental health.
This has led to yoga becoming an almost mainstream practice in mental healthcare, receiving government funding in many instances. Boston Drug Treatment Centers, a network of Massachusetts rehabs, reports yoga being one of the most widely used supplemental therapies for substance use disorders today.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the many proven benefits of regular yoga practice. Here, we’ll outline some of the key mental health benefits shown by decades of meta-studies.
Mental Health Benefits of Yoga
Different analyses of yoga studies consistently show the benefits below:
- Better emotional regulation. Yoga incorporates both physical and meditative exercises as part of its practice. Similar to conventional exercise and purely meditative practice like mindfulness, yoga has been associated with the production of hormones that produce a “leveling out” effect on one’s mood. Regular practice has been associated with an improvement in emotional regulation and a better ability to handle stress.
- Improved sleep patterns. Better emotional regulation is also associated with better sleep onset and quality, which in turn, keeps yoga practitioners from being especially susceptible to stressful events. Additionally, some studies show that yoga helps individuals produce melatonin and GABA, two chemicals associated with restful sleep. This makes regular yoga practice worth considering over pharmacological interventions which could be habit-forming and have negative effects on mental health over time.
- Helps maintain mobility and quality of life as we age. Regularly performing challenging yoga poses can help maintain flexibility and even improve bone strength, due to the poses exerting a healthy amount of strain on bones. This means better mobility for regular practitioners, as they can better offset the worst effects associated with aging. Ultimately, this means more opportunities to lead a better quality of life as one grows older.
- Reduces anxiety, trauma, and depression symptoms. Yoga is a commonly recommended supplemental therapy for these specific mental health conditions, and dozens of studies show yoga’s ability to take the edge off symptoms by flooding the body with natural “feel-good” hormones.
- Stimulates brain growth. Regular yoga practice has been linked to the growth of new brain cells and connections in adult brains, a process called neurogenesis. Highly focused activities like yoga have been found to speed up this process over passive activities. This neurogenesis can be key to achieving a full recovery from a wide range of mental health issues, including substance use disorder.
- Improves concentration. The mental health conditions mentioned above have been associated with difficulty concentrating, which in turn, can adversely impact personal and professional productivity. Regular yoga practice has been associated with an increased ability to concentrate, likely because of the release of hormones that eases anxiety, depression, and trauma symptoms. Yoga practitioners, overall, report an improved sense of focus and a better ability to productively handle negative emotions.
- Reduces the need for psychiatric medication. While not a substitute for medication or psychotherapy, regular yoga practice can be key to needing pharmacological intervention far less often. Yoga’s mood-leveling benefits can be comparable to antidepressants for some people. In practical terms, it can mean the difference between needing to take psychiatric medication daily to just needing it during emergencies. This, in turn, can help avoid some of the side effects commonly associated with psychiatric drugs.
Should I Try Yoga?
It’s something most people should consider. Starting with a beginner class may be a good way to find out if yoga is for you. Typically, you should be able to tell after just a few classes whether or not you will want to continue. Most people report an improvement in their mood almost immediately and more improvements after a few weekly sessions.
One word of caution though, if you’ve never done yoga before, it can be a lot tougher than you think. You may want to hold off jumping into a regular class or especially strenuous types of yoga such as hot yoga. These can be just as strenuous as any other moderate exercise type, so it may be a good idea to do some research if you have a serious heart problem or heat intolerance.
In any case, yoga is not the only way you can improve your mental health. You may also want to look into approaches to conventional exercises that implement some form of meditative practice as an alternative. Good luck, and be well!
