The Neuroscience Behind How Yoga Reduces Stress

Psychology Today recently featured an interesting article called "Yoga: Changing the Brain's Stressful Habits". The writer, Alex Korb Ph.D., discusses his experience with yoga and how neuroscience fits into yoga. It turns out all the benefits of practicing yoga are not just new age hand waviness, but are backed up by science. 

Korb is extremely effective at simplifying the complexity of neuroscience in ways that most readers can understand. Korb explains how the mind and work together in the following passage: 

"The fascinating thing about the mind-body interaction is that it works both ways.  For example, if you're stressed, your muscles will tense (preparing to run away from a lion), and this will lead to more negative thinking.  Relaxing those muscles, particularly the facial muscles, will push the brain in the other direction, away from stress, and toward more relaxed thoughts.  Similarly, under stress, your breathing rate increases.  Slowing down your breathing pushes the brain away from the stress response, and again toward more relaxed thinking."

By practicing yoga we learn to manage stress caused by physical poses. The hope is to have this lesson transcends to the rest of our lives too. When that stressful meeting comes up or little Johnny spills the milk, our reactions can be calm instead of stressed. Honestly, that meeting or cleaning up milk are small things, but unfortunately, we tend to blow things out of proportion. Or as the kids put it "have a cow". Having a cow too often leads to problem like heart attacks, strokes, depression and the list goes on.    

I hate to say yoga or die, but there is no doubt in our desk-ridden, stressed out world yoga is a good thing. In yoga your body may be learning new ways to stretch, but it is more significant that your brain learns new ways to move.