This article is one of my favorite pieces of literature that combines two of my favorite things: psychology and yoga. Author and neuroscientist Alex Korb begins by detailing his father’s seemingly foreign yoga classes. His father is a regular practitioner, but before coming to understand yoga better, Korb finds these classes seem bizarre and not exactly worth it. Looking deeper into it, Korb begins to notice the scientific benefits that accompany yoga, things like decreased depressive symptoms, chronic pain, stress, and blood pressure. And if you didn’t believe me before that yoga is beneficial, take it from this neurobiologist. Korb explains that by practicing yoga, you are essentially training your brain to relax despite the inherently un-relaxing poses that we are instructed to take. In the discomfort of the poses, our brain naturally reacts with a stress response, which triggers anxiety. No matter the stressful situation, whether its yoga or escaping a lion, the brain pattern and physiological reaction look the same. But Korb notes that it also works the other way; that relaxing your muscles will pull the brain away from stress and towards relaxation, and one of the main goals of yoga is to train the brain to stop automatically invoking the stress response, or at least do it less.
How cool is that??
I’ve never thought about yoga being inherently stressful. But it makes sense— a lot of those poses are hard. Or scary. Or frustrating. It’s an incredible testament to the power that yoga has that despite the challenge, practitioners continue to return to yoga class after yoga class. Personally, that’s actually one of the reasons why I love yoga so much: it’s a challenge. When I first started practicing yoga it was to show off the flexibility that I had built up from many years of dance classes. Mentally, I didn’t get much out of it except the superficial satisfaction that I can do the splits better than a lot of people in the class. Later, I saw yoga as a fitness class— a way to get physically fit. It took a battle with anxiety and being forced to take it easy through an injury for me to realize there is so much more to this practice. Today, my favorite classes are the hardest ones, not because they make me sweat the most or because I get to do the splits, but because I learn about poses that are terrifying or seemingly impossible and I get to work on them. Fail at them. Make progress with them. The progress that I see is not only my body getting stronger and twistier, but also my brain being taught that it is okay to relax in this situation. The power yoga holds is so holistic for each practitioner, and this PsychologyToday article demonstrates that our brains get to reap a large benefit.
Take a read of Dr. Alex Korb’s article here and learn for yourself the neurobiology behind this stress/relaxation dichotomy.