If you’ve never received advice to just do yoga and meditate for your mental health, congratulations, because you are probably one of only a handful of people who have avoided this suggestion (and maybe you live under a rock?). After experiencing a mental health crisis in my teens, I was told time and again to “do yoga and breathe deeply,” and I found the advice to be annoying and simplistic. If yoga and meditation worked, wouldn’t I have seen some improvement in my symptoms? Little did I know that these practices take years to master, and many people do indeed experience a mental health boost over time. The key may be finding the right kind of practice, because they’re not all equally effective for every individual.
I started my first yoga class at a local community center, during the time of my teenage breakdown. I can’t remember the teacher’s credentials or what flavor of yoga she was teaching, but I know it mostly focused on a single “limb” of yoga called “asana.” This is the physical practice that most people encounter in a typical yoga class in the West, and it includes poses like the downward dog and cat-cow. As I would later discover, the other limbs of yoga are meant to guide the participant down a path to freedom and enlightenment and involve much more than shaping your body into an ideal posture. The roots of the practice extend well beyond the mat to encompass morals and values and wide-ranging practices of health and education.
Yoga and meditation are cultural and religious practices, but in the West, they have also come to serve a growing number of people seeking both fitness and a way to cope with the stress of modern life. In my twenties, I took my first Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, a course created by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a professor of medicine who adapted Buddhist mindfulness teachings for North Americans. Kabat-Zinn has received criticism for Westernizing traditional Eastern practices, but he has always maintained that his program is “anchored in the ethical framework that lies at the very heart of the original teachings of the Buddha.” It also, he contends, provides an important opportunity to address the many sources of pain and suffering in our modern world.
I was told time and again to “do yoga and breathe deeply,” and I found the advice to be annoying and simplistic.
My course was led by a psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher, who collected before-and-after measures of depression and anxiety symptoms. MBSR involves a weekly two-and-a-half-hour group class, daily meditation and yoga practices, and a full-day weekend retreat. I stuck to the program religiously, and after eight weeks, the results that my teacher shared with me were indeed significant—where I had previously rated my mood and functioning as poor, many of those scores had shifted to the more positive end of the scale after completing the program. (Participants’ results have not been published, as they were meant to be shared only with participants and their physicians; however, my teacher, Bill Knight, did share a cost-effectiveness study with me, which showed that MBSR participants had lower health care utilization one year after the program was completed.)
Almost twenty years later, I still feel the positive impact that this course has had on my mental health. MBSR laid a solid foundation for the rebuilding I needed to do, and it was the first time I practiced embodiment—learning how to just be in my body and work with moment-by-moment awareness of my bodily sensations and my thoughts. I consider it my starting point when I look back on my journey of healing.
In my work as a freelance writer, I became interested in the science of mindfulness, which has seen exponential growth since the earliest Western publication in the mid-1960s. The body of literature suggests that mindfulness can be beneficial for a range of physical and mental health outcomes, though the majority of this scientific work comes from the West. In a recent trial comparing a common antidepressant (escitalopram, or Lexapro) to MBSR, the researchers found that mindfulness was just as effective as the drug in reducing anxiety, and came with fewer side effects.
The Gift of GABA: Does Yoga Have Benefits for Anxiety?
The science of yoga has experienced a similar proliferation. Heather Mason, founder of the Minded Institute, a yoga therapy training program for professionals who work with people with mental and physical health conditions, tells me about a study that suggests that yoga can increase GABA levels in the brain and improve mood and anxiety. (GABA is a neurotransmitter that can lessen a nerve cell’s ability to receive or transmit signals to another cell.) Compared to a randomly assigned group who went for a walk three times a week, the people practicing yoga postures over twelve weeks reported greater improvement in mood and a decrease in anxiety. There was also a stronger relationship between the yoga group’s mental health benefits and GABA levels (measured using an imaging technique on one part of the brain), which means they found a correlation between better mood and increased levels of GABA.
Compared to a randomly assigned group who went for a walk three times a week, the people practicing yoga postures over twelve weeks reported greater improvement in mood and a decrease in anxiety.
Mason says that GABA helps to inhibit neural pathways associated with fear, and people with anxiety have low GABA levels (which could be why we have a more fearful response to stressful situations). Other research has assessed possible biomarkers that could predict clinical improvement in people with psychiatric disorders who participate in yoga, and results are promising.
An older meta-analysis from 2011 included ten studies on yoga therapy; the result was significant for yoga-based interventions (compared to a control group) in the treatment of major psychiatric disorders. However, the review did not assess the quality of the trials, and some of the studies included participants who had not been diagnosed with mental illness. The control groups were not well reported, so it’s hard to tease out what yoga was being compared to. A more recent