5 Proven Ways Yoga Makes You Less Anxious

You don’t have to be a yoga expert to benefit from this mental health-boosting and body refreshing activity. Here are five proven ways that this 5,000-year-old practice can hold anxiety at bay and give you the chance to thrive…

1. It Counteracts Tension

Sometimes it’s hard to get to the end of a day without feeling tense, and at the same time drained of energy. A common side-effect of everyday anxiety is tension in your body, particularly in the back, neck and shoulders – carrying this around all day can become exhausting.

Things get worse if you have been hunched over a desk at work, and it can even result in tension headaches, cranking up your anxiety all over again.

Practicing yoga can break this cycle of tension by gently lengthening your muscles, unlocking your joints and helping your blood to carry oxygen to where it’s needed, while at the same time reducing your blood pressure, according to a study from the European Society of Cardiology.

2. Yoga Raises Your Stress Threshold

Ever wish you could feel less stressed out? Anxiety is a reaction to stress, but the good news is that none of us are powerless to push back against stress. When you feel threatened, or under pressure, your fight-or-flight stress response is triggered, increasing your heart-rate, speeding up your breathing and narrowing your perspective.

The problem is, your stress response cannot distinguish between an uncomfortable email conversation and a genuine emergency, so it can become overstimulated, and stuck permanently ‘on’. Fortunately, yoga has been scientifically proven to help regulate your stress levels.

Scientists at the University of Utah noticed that stressed out people often had low pain thresholds. So, they ran a study comparing the pain thresholds of experienced yoga practitioners to others, and discovered that doing yoga actually makes you less sensitive to pain, and therefore stress.

One way to activate your calming, sympathetic nervous system is through the controlled breathing that you use in restorative yoga sessions, such as YogaDownload’s Relax and Restore  programme, which can help you to slow down and reset your mind after a stressful day.

3. Asanas Get You Off The Sofa

It’s difficult to play Animal Crossing, or check your Instagram likes and simultaneously hold a yoga pose, so a frequent practice gives you time away from the sofa and sedentary screen-time, and the chance to hit the reset button.

It does your mood no favours to realise your day has been dominated by the highlight reels of others, or a Netflix binge, and the sedentary lifestyle this creates is as bad for your mental health as your body.

A major 2017 study published in Preventive Medicine Reports, found that logging more than six, sedentary hours a day in front of a TV or computer, raises the risk of depression, particularly in women. Bringing yoga into your life, with routines from YogaDownload.com, is a relaxing way to add mind-refreshing activity to your day.

4. It Unites Your Body and Mind

When we think of ourselves, we often imagine that our ‘self’ lives in our brains, and ‘drives’ our bodies around all day. We forget that our body and mind are so interlinked, that they are essentially the same thing.

Practising yoga reminds us of this, by bringing movement together with mental awareness. A yoga session calls on you to express yourself with your body, moving into and holding poses, or asanas, that require all of your mental concentration and physical coordination, without being overly taxing.

This activity actually creates new neural pathways in your brain, making these poses easier to achieve next time you do them, and allowing you to progress. Being reminded that your mind and your body are working together, and watching out for each other, is soothing in times of uncertainty, and nervousness about the future.

5. Yoga Brings You into The Present

Worrying about the future, and endlessly repeating past mistakes in our minds are both features of anxiety. It’s a trap we can all fall into, so much so that we miss out on the only thing that is really tangible: the right here, and right now.

Practicing yoga teaches you to connect with your own body, but at the same time be fully present in your mind, with breathing techniques that ground you in the moment. As Zen Monk Shunmyo Masuno writes in his best-selling book, ‘Zen The Art Of Simple Living’: “We inhale, and then we exhale. The moment when we inhale is the present, but once we exhale, it has already become the past.”

As you train this ‘mental muscle’ with yoga, you will become more and more mindfully present, so much so that its power can liberate you from anxiety, even when you’re not doing yoga. “When something bad happens and you are feeling down, try clapping your hands in front of you – in an instant, you can feel better, having been put in a new frame of mind,” says Shunmyo Masuno.

And Finally, Yoga Is Always for You

If you’ve always wanted to try yoga, but been put off after scrolling Instagram and seeing aggressively fit practitioners in radical poses, then know that yoga isn’t about conforming to an artificial ideal, or stroking your ego with next-level challenges.

It’s about becoming more comfortable with, and at home in, your own mind and body. The asanas that you learn will unlock your sense of physical ease as you encounter new movements and start to enjoy your own progress.

Whatever yoga practice you choose, it will take you on a lifelong journey of stress-busting discovery, motivating you and supporting you all the way.