I want to look into yoga’s take on stress today. Can yoga be used as stress relief and how does it work?
We all know all too well what stress is. It can have many faces and names – irritation, impatience, anxiety, fear, nervousness, depression, overexcitement, dread, worry, loneliness. Events and feelings come and go and we all experience them in a different way and have different strategies to cope with them.
Is stress always bad?
Generally some degree of stress is a good thing. Research shows that moderate, short-lived stress can improve alertness and performance. Stress can also boost memory and enhance motivation, build resilience and encourage growth. When something potentially threatening happens, our stress response helps us react, deal with it and learn from it.
So why do we always think about stress in negative terms?
Mostly because we are unable to slow down and shake it off or it is too much and too often. Author Sarah St. Pierre explains in her book “Why we are in pain”:
When our stress response is activated repeatedly, blood pressure stays elevated, breathing is shallow, levels of certain hormones are increased, cells atrophy and our neuromuscular responses to stress become learned and automatic to the point that they continue to occur subconsciously even when the stressful stimulus is no longer present.
Yoga’s take on stress
Timothy McCall, M.D. talks about yoga’s take on stress in “Yoga as medicine”. According to him, whatever the external causes, stress is often fuelled by our thoughts. The mind can even produce stress worrying about problems that almost certainly won’t occur, says Dr. McCall.
The good news is that healing and just plain feeling good about your life can also be facilitated by your thoughts. Yoga is a technique that teaches you how to stop your mind from working against you.
By turning down the volume on our worrying, we can get in touch with a more peaceful place inside.
At first you may only notice it toward the end of a yoga session, but if you maintain the practice, you become more and more aware of a calm place at your core throughout the course of the day.
Do we know how it works?
Eddie Stern is a world renowned yoga teacher who’s also been increasingly involved into scientific research into the yoga practices. His suggestion in the book “One simple thing” is that yoga, through postures, breathing, and focused attention, effectively balances the brain functions and nervous system. Through homeostasis, the nervous system knows what needs to be balanced or corrected at any given time.
If stress levels are high, yoga practice will down-regulate, particularly through breathing, the parts of the brain and endocrine system that are responsible for hormonal release of adrenaline and cortisol.
Yoga acts as an internal balancing act for our brain, nervous system, and cellular mechanisms, says Stern. It restores the functions that are out of alignment toward a state of balance. The body is intelligent; it knows what it needs to do. If we behave and live in such a way that we support that intelligence, the body will re store itself to balance.
If you want to experience the positive effect of yoga on your stress levels, join me for a 30-minute special class on Fridays at 6:30 pm.
Related posts:
New yoga courses – De-stress with yoga and Yoga for strength
Our body’s adaptations to life challenges can result in pain
Image by Pedro Figueras from Pixabay
