How Yoga Can Help With Anxiety
Yoga has been catching fire in the wellness world as a tool for stress reduction, but what kinds of yoga can actually help with anxiety and how does it work?
The first important designation to point out is that there are tons of different styles of yoga out there! This can be a beautiful thing because it can reach audiences who are looking for different types of support in their physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual lives. However, it takes discernment to know and choose the right style for you. If you are looking for a type of yoga to help calm anxiety, you’ll want to look for a type of yoga that calms you down. That sounds silly to say, but not all yoga is calming. To get a better understanding of this, let’s take a super brief overview of the nervous system. If you’re ready to get started already, click here to download my favorite 4 poses to soothe anxiety.
You may have heard of rest and digest vs. fight and flight mode? These are related to your Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) and Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) respectively. When the SNS is activated it is characterized by stress, blood constriction, inflammation, and increased heart rate in the body. This can be super helpful if you need to run away from something, react quickly, or get out of danger. However, many of us live in a society that is constantly igniting our SNS as we feel the same urgent stress from hitting deadlines, answering text messages, getting dinner ready, working out, watching the news etc. Some yoga can be very activating for the SNS - think loud music, sweat, moving quickly, heart rate pumping. That can be a blast. However, If you are approaching yoga to soothe anxious thoughts and patterns, you will want to find a style that is calming and activates the PNS.
The PNS is responsible for lowered blood pressure, decreased heart rate, increased circulation and digestion, memory, immune function, and muscle recovery. In yoga it is acknowledged that it takes about 20 minutes to fully activate the PNS so if you are constantly living in a state of doing, and going, and moving, this may never get fully turned on during the day. If a practice has you feeling like you can take longer, slower breaths, feel your feet on the floor, talk more slowly, and move around with a sense of ease, you’ve activated your PNS.
One style created especially for targeting this is Restorative Yoga. Practicing supported poses for 5+ minutes, paired with long slow breaths, focusing on the exhalations can strengthen the neuro-networks in the body to bring the PNS back on cue.
Additionally, in yoga, there are 5 different ways that energy moves through the body, known as Vayus. The directions are up, down, forward, absorbing, and expanding. Anxiety is ruled by the upward movement. If you think of feeling anxious, many people experience it as a heat or tingling moving upwards. To counteract this in yoga we use poses that enhance the downward or grounding energy. If you’d like a guide and example of some poses to try, I’ve created an e-book with poses and descriptions for practices to decrease anxiety. Find it here and see how these poses feel in your body. In addition, if you’d like to try a restorative class, you can take a free one here.
Happy soothing!
