Take Your Time: Results from Yoga Practice

by Nina

Horses Grazing by Brad Gibson

It's a running joke in our family that when Brad gets impatient with me—because I often do various household tasks a bit slower than he does—he says to me, "Take your time!" He swears that Bill Murray said this repeatedly in the movie Caddy Shack, but when we watched it again recently, no one actually ever uttered that line. Regardless, I always reply, "You take your time."

But many worthwhile things really do take time. For example, if you want to cook a really good meal instead of eating fast food, you need to shop for fresh ingredients and prepare everything from scratch. And if you want to turn a new acquaintance into a close friend, you need to spend a lot of time together, getting to know and trust each other. The same is true for seeing results from yoga practice. Obviously, one Downward-Facing Dog pose doesn't instantly make your arms stronger, though with regular practice, it definitely will increase your strength. And it also seems obvious that if you want to reduce your stress levels, you'll need to practice stress management regularly over a period of time.

So it was very interesting for me to hear about a recent study at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, that looked at the effect of exercise on insomnia. One of the findings as reported by Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times post How Exercise Can Help Us Sleep Better was:

"After the first two months of their exercise program, the exercising volunteers (all of them women) were sleeping no better than at the start of the study. Only after four months of the program had their insomnia improved."

Yes, it took four whole months of regular exercising to bring improvements. That's quite a bit of time, don't you think? The women in this study were not practicing yoga for exercise, but it's likely that using yoga as a form of exercise to help with insomnia (something I definitely recommend) might take a similar amount of time. And it also makes sense to me that if you are practicing yoga for insomnia (see Yoga for Insomnia, Part 1) by using stress management techniques, you should also give that some time (though some people report that doing breath practices in the middle of the night produces immediate results). So be patient.

In general, the time you invest in your yoga practice—whether you are practicing for your physical health, your emotional health or both—is what brings the payoffs. After all, yoga sutra 1.14 tells us that equanimity is attained only through steady, dedicated, attentive practice:

Long, uninterrupted, alert practice is the firm foundation for restraining the fluctuations of the mind. —trans. by B.K.S. Iyengar

Why You Should Love Your Baroreceptors: Stress Management Made Easy

by Nina

I found this nice little illustration of baroreceptors that I'm excited to share with you. Okay, I admit it, I'm a little obsessed with baroreceptors. But that's because ever since I found out how our baroreceptors help regulate our blood pressure and I understood how we can use this aspect of our anatomy to switch our nervous systems from fight or flight to relaxation mode, I've not only included supported inverted poses in my practice on a regular basis but I've been on a mission to spread the word. Using supported inverted poses for stress management is one of easiest ways—at least for me—to calm yourself down because all you have to do is set yourself in the pose and stay there for a while. The shape of the pose itself causes the baroreceptors to work their magic.

As I wrote in my post Just in Time for the Holidays: Inverted Poses, the reason that inverted poses trigger the relaxation response is due to the pressure sensors called baroreceptors that are connected to the nerves controlling your heart rate and blood pressure. Your baroreceptors are located in the wall of each internal carotid artery at your carotid sinus (the arteries on each side of your neck that carry blood from your heart to your brain).

And in the wall of your aortic arch (just above your heart).

Aortic Arch

These baroreceptors detect any changes in your blood pressure, stretching when your blood pressure is high and shrinking when your blood pressure is low. If your baroreceptors detect a fall in your blood pressure, they send signals via your nerves to increase your heart rate, constrict your blood vessels to raise your blood pressure, and switch your nervous system to fight or flight mode. Likewise, if your baroreceptors detect abnormally elevated blood pressure, they send signals to slow your heart rate, relax your blood vessels to lower your blood pressure, and switch your nervous system to relaxation mode. And now I have a picture to illustrate this!

In an inverted pose, your heart is higher than your head, the opposite of its position when you are upright. With your heart higher than your head, gravity causes more blood to flow in the direction of your head, creating more pressure than usual on your carotid sinus and aortic arch. As the arterial pressure is increased, your baroreceptors are stretched and signals are transmitted to your central nervous system as if your blood pressure was high throughout your body. Feedback signals are then sent back to your body to reduce the arterial pressure, slowing your heart rate, relaxing your blood vessels, and releasing hormones that decrease adrenaline production. This automatically switches your body to relaxation mode.

Because there are baroreceptors in your carotid sinus (the arteries on each side of your neck that carry blood from your heart to your brain) inverted or partially inverted poses where your neck is flexed (that is, your chin is pointing toward your chest), as in Shoulderstand, Plow pose, or Bridge pose, puts added stimulation on your baroreceptors, which may enhance the calming effects of the inversion.

Any yoga pose where your heart is above your head is considered to be an inversion. Inverted yoga poses include full inversions, such as Headstand and Shoulderstand, where your heart is directly over your head and the rest of your body is also fully inverted. Partial inversions, such as Downward-Facing Dog pose and Standing Forward Bend, where your heart is less directly over your head and your legs are either not fully or not at all inverted, are also considered inverted poses and will have similar calming effects. As long as you are warm, quiet, and comfortable in the inverted pose, all you have to do is let the baroreceptors work their magic. Naturally, supported versions of the poses (such as Shoulderstand with a chair or Bridge pose on blankets) are more relaxing than the versions of poses in which you must support yourself, so if you’re practicing inversions for stress reduction, choose the supported versions. See Just in Time for the Holidays: Inverted Poses for a complete list of the inverted poses.

I'm such a believer in these poses that I recently had a friend (thank you, Erin Collom) take photographs of me doing all the supported inversions, so I could write in detail about the individual poses. For now, here's a photograph of a Supported Standing Forward Bend, a surprisingly calming pose.

Caution: Inverted poses may be unsafe for those with certain medical conditions (see here).

Balancing Your Emotions with Your Breath

by Nina

Close-Up of the Falls by Melina Meza

As I wrote in Your Breath: The Key to Your Nervous System, while you cannot tell your nervous system directly to slow your heart beat, digest your food more quickly or to start relaxing right this minute, you can control your breath. And because your heart rate tends to speed up on your inhalation and your heart rate tends to slow on your exhalation, this enables you to consciously access your nervous system. By intentionally taking in more air (either by speeding up your breath or by lengthening your inhalation) you can stimulate your nervous system. And by taking in less air (by slowing your breath or lengthening your exhalation), you can calm yourself down.

Last week, I wrote about emotional counter-poses that you can use to balance your emotions. You can use various yogic breath practices in the same way. You can use breath practices when nothing serious is wrong but you’re just feeling slightly hyper (see anxiety or stress) or slightly down (see clinical depression). And you can also use them as a supplement to other treatments if you are suffering from anxiety, agitated depression, clinical depression or chronic stress.

(Note that yogic breath practices have evolved over thousands of years as yogis experimented on themselves and passed on discoveries their students. And while some schools of yoga teach yogic breath practices (pranayama) to beginners, the type of yoga that I’m trained in, Iyengar style, considers breath practices to be so powerful that pranayama is introduced very gradually. So if you start experimenting with breath practices to balance your emotional condition, do take it easy.)

Anxiety and agitated depression. Because anxiety and agitated depression—which is anxiety based—are so often related to an overactive sympathetic nervous system, for these two conditions it’s best to focus on your exhalation. You can simply work on exhaling completely or lengthen your exhalation a beat or two (by pausing after your exhalation is complete). Or, you can try a more formal practice that focuses on lengthening the exhalation, such as Viloma with interrupted exhalation, where you actually pause twice during your exhalation and once at the end. This is the practice that Iyengar himself recommends in Light on Life in his “Asanas for Emotional Stability” practice.

If manipulating your exhalation causes you to feel any agitation whatsoever, stop the practice. In addition, practices that lengthen your inhalation or even that bring your awareness to the inhalation (which can cause you to unintentionally lengthen or deepen your inhalation) may aggravate your condition, so you may want to avoid them.

If you’ve noticed that you are a chest breather—a type of breathing that seems to be associated with anxiety—and it doesn’t make you feel more anxious to work with your inhalation as well as your exhalation, you could practice abdominal breathing. In abdominal breathing, you focus on slowly inhaling into and exhaling from your belly rather than your chest, as you intentionally keep your abdominal area relaxed. You could lie on your back, and place a block or other light weight, such as a 1 pound bag of rice, on your belly to bring awareness to your abdomen, and keep your abdomen relaxed as you slowly inhale and exhale. Or, if lying on your back makes you anxious, you could lie in Crocodile pose (on your belly with your arms out to the sides, elbows bent, and forehead resting on stacked hands) so you can feel your abdomen moving toward and away from the floor as you slowly inhale and exhale.

You can also use any of these techniques if you're just feeling mildly hyper and want to calm down.

Clinical depression. For clinical depression, which tends to make people feel heavy and lifeless, focusing on your inhalation or breathing more quickly can stimulate your nervous system and bring you out of your lethargy. This is one reason why an active vinyasa practice, such as the Ashtanga series or Sun Salutations, can be helpful to those with clinical depression because when you move with your breath, you tend to breathe more quickly and take in more oxygen. So for you, it may be helpful to focus on your inhalation. You can simply work with inhaling more completely or lengthen your inhalation by holding it for a beat or two. Or, you can try a more formal practice that focuses on lengthening the inhalation, such as Viloma with interrupted inhalation, where you actually pause twice during your inhalation and once after. In Yoga As Medicine, Timothy McCall recommends Ujjayi breathing, which tends to lengthen both the inhalation and exhalation, as well as the version of Viloma with interrupted inhalation

Some people who are depressed tend to have a slumped posture, with a collapsed chest, so focusing on opening your chest and inhaling into that area can be beneficial. In Yoga As Medicine, Timothy quotes Patricia Walden, who herself has suffered from clinical depression, saying:

“When you start focusing on your breath, and taking the breath into your chest and breathing deeply, you begin to feel the presence of your breath. What comes with that is a feeling of life returning, a feeling of warm that percolates throughout your chest at the beginning, but then throughout your entire body.”

You can also use any of these techniques if you're just feeling mildly depressed or blue.

Because stress is often a trigger for clinical depression, it’s possible that working with your exhalation as described for anxiety rather than your inhalation, could be helpful for you. So don’t hesitate to give it a try if you feel so inclined. As I said in my post Anxiety, Yoga and the Front Body, when it comes to emotional balance, anything that makes you feel better is working.

Stress. Because chronic stress is the result of an overactive sympathetic nervous system, it makes sense to focus on pacifying your nervous system by working with your exhalation as I described for anxiety. However, from my observations of people doing pranayama, some people find any kind of pranayama relaxing (I, myself, do not, by the way). If you do find all breath work relaxing, go ahead and do whichever breath practice quiets your mind and relaxes you. Simply slowing your breath in general, with long, slow inhalations as well as exhalations, could be helpful in reducing stress. Practices where you speed up your breath will no doubt stimulate your nervous system. So if you are doing an active vinyasa practice to burn off your excess energy, end your yoga practice with a calming breath practice or an emotional counter-pose (see Balancing Your Emotional Body With Counter-Poses) that triggers the relaxation response.

Balancing Your Emotional Body With Counter-Poses

by Nina

Last week in my posts about anxiety Anxiety, Yoga and the Front Body and Soothing Yourself With Supported Forward Bends, I discussed yoga poses to rely on when you’re feeling anxious (supported inversions and forward bends) and yoga poses to avoid when you’re in that state (backbends, twists, and Sun Salutations).

It makes sense if you’re in a crisis period to practice the poses that calm you down and avoid stimulating poses that might exacerbate your condition. However, if you’re in a state of chronic anxiety, avoiding backbends, twists, and many of the active poses for a long period of time will move your body toward imbalance. The same is true if your practice is focused on any emotion-based condition, such as agitated depression, clinical depression, or even just chronic stress.

In this case, I feel it is better to return to a more well-rounded yoga practice (see A Week of Yoga Practice) but consider how you end your practices. By choosing an appropriate counter-pose to end your practice, you can counteract any negative emotional effects of your practice without negating the beneficial physical ones. That way, you can move on to the rest of your day with your nervous system and emotions more in balance. Some people with anxiety or agitated depression even find that beginning with a very active practice can help burn off excess energy, which makes the soothing or relaxing counter-poses at the end of the sequence more effective (or even possible, as it can be hard to stay still when you’re feeling very anxious).

My post Yoga and Your Emotions describes the emotional effects different types of poses have on most people. So if you’re interested in practicing for balancing your emotions, take a look at that and consider how a given practice (standing pose, Sun Salutation, twist, backbend, forward bend, restorative) might affect your current emotional state. Then choose one or more counter-poses—especially passive poses that can be held for long periods of time—that you can add on to the end of your practice to counteract the poses that were the main focus of the practice. For example, if you’re already feeling anxious or hyper yet need to practice backbends for the health of your body, you can end your backbend sequence with a long supported inversion, such as a Chair Shoulderstand or Legs Up the Wall pose, to calm yourself down. 

Anxiety and Agitated Depression. We’ve already said that supported inverted poses and supported forward bends are the best poses to counteract anxiety. These may also be helpful for agitated depression as that is anxiety based. So at the end of a more active sequence, try resting in Supported Child’s pose for a few minutes and then practice Legs Up the Wall pose (Viparita Karani) for 10 minutes or more. If Child’s pose is uncomfortable for you or you can’t kneel for some reason, try a Supported Seated Forward Bend with a chair (see Soothing Yourself With Supported Forward Bends), with a straight back. If Legs Up the Wall pose doesn’t work well for you, try Easy Inverted Pose (Featured Pose: Easy Inverted Pose). If having your front body exposed makes you feel vulnerable, try covering yourself with a blanket. 

Clinical Depression. On the other hand, for people who are suffering from clinical depression, forward bends, with their inward turning quality, can cause you to brood. For you, therefore, a couple of mild, active backbends, such as Purvottanasana (Reverse Plank pose) or Bridge pose, would be good counter poses after practicing a forward bend sequence. Generally speaking, an active practice is best for those with clinical depression, especially one that includes backbends, because that helps counteract feelings of lethargy. But if you are tired and want to practice restorative poses, focus on passive backbends rather than forward bending poses, and be sure to end your sequence with a backbending position, rather than a forward bending one. Rather than doing Savasana flat on your back, try doing it with your torso supported by a bolster or stack of blankets, so your chest is open and your back is in a slight backbend. Or, maybe even reverse the typical pattern of a practice, begin your sequence with resting poses and moving slowly onto more active ones so you are left feeling a bit energized. Often I'll end a restorative sequence by standing in Mountain pose and inhaling as I raise my arms overhead into a slight backbend and exhaling as I return my arms to my sides. 

Stress. For people who are suffering from chronic stress, standing poses, Sun Salutations, backbends, and twists can be over stimulating. So try to end a sequence that is focused on any of those types of poses with any long supported inversion, such as Legs Up the Wall pose or Easy Inverted pose, or any restorative pose that you enjoy.

Even a long Savasana of 10 minutes or more, with a mental focus, such as your breath, would be helpful as an emotional counter-pose (see Savasana Variations) or any form of yoga nidra (see Audio Tracks tab above). Stressed out people tend to skip these ending poses because they think they don’t have time and that restorative poses are not “productive.” However, when you’re suffering from chronic stress, the most beneficial practice for you is some type of conscious relaxation (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga). As with anxiety, you may need to first burn off excess energy with a more active practice, but always leave time for conscious relaxation at the end of your sequence.

 I, myself, have been practicing like this for many years, with focused, nervous-system pacifying sequences during particularly challenging times, and balanced sequences with emotional counter-poses the rest of the time. But what if you, like many other people, do not practice often at home and do most of your yoga practice in classes or with videos? In this case, there is no reason why you can’t do just the counter-pose after the class or video. For example, if an evening backbend practice has left you feeling agitated or even just hyper (I can’t tell you how many people have told me that backbends at night cause insomnia), there’s no reason why you can’t just practice a supported inverted pose or conscious relaxation on your own before bed. This will help pacify your nervous system and may even lead to better sleep.

Supported Forward Bends: Peaceful Poses for Stress, Anxiety, Neck Pain and Headache Prevention

by Nina

We finally took some new photographs, and now I’ve got a portfolio of my favorite poses for stress management and anxiety! So I thought that today I’d introduce you to some of favorite quieting poses: supported forward bends. A supported forward bend is one where you use a prop, such as a bolster, stack of blankets or a chair seat to support your head and arms as you stay in the pose. Relaxing onto the support helps remove straining from the pose and enhances the quieting quality of the forward bend. These are gentle, inward-turning poses that both calming and nurturing.

You can do supported forward bends in two forms: standing and seated. Standing supported forward bends are particularly good for stress as they are partial inversions. See Just in Time for the Holidays: Inverted Poses for information about why inverted poses, including partial inversions, are so beneficial for stress management.

Because the supported seated forward bends are less active than the standing versions, they are more quieting. And because you’re resting the weight of your head and relaxing your neck, these poses may also help with neck pain and headache prevention. I love supported seated forward bends, especially when I’m feeling anxious, however, some people do not enjoy supported seated forward bends, finding them rather too quieting, in other words, sort of deadening. And they’re probably not the right poses for people suffering from depression. So you’ll have to try for yourself and see what you think.

In general, when setting up for these poses, it’s important to be honest with yourself about how many props you need to be truly comfortable. The aim here isn’t to feel a stretch, much less any pain, but to use the pose to quiet yourself physically and emotionally.

As you come into the pose, bend from your hip joints and keep your back straight. This will help prevent back strain that comes from rounding your back. If you need to sit on a folded blanket to encourage the bend from your hips—most of us do—then add that prop as well (see photo).

When you bring your head onto the prop, do not force your head down. If your head doesn’t reach easily, you need a higher prop. For the Standing Forward Bend, you can stack two blocks, with one on the lowest height and the second on the highest. Stacking two blocks end on end, however, is unstable, so be honest with yourself and get your chair! (Besides, if you compare, most chair seats are lower than two blocks end on end, anyway—check it out and see.)

If you want to sequence these poses, I recommend starting with the standing versions first—they are better for warming up your legs and hips, and are more active—and then moving onto the seated ones. Of course, any of these can be done alone, or as part of any restorative or stress management sequence (we’ll have some of those coming in the near future). And there’s no reason at all why you can’t end an active practice with a supported seated forward bend of your choice, followed by Savasana.

1. Standing Forward Bend (Uttanasana), with your head on a block or chair
2. Widespread Standing Forward Bend (Prasarita Padottanasana), with your head on the floor or on a block or chair
3. Wide Angle Pose (Upavista Konasana) or Seated Crossed Legs, with your head on a bolster or chair
4. Seated Forward Bend (Paschimottanasana), with your head on a bolster or chair

I hope these poses bring you peace.

Update: Wondering where those photos are? It turns out, they're not quite ready yet. We took them, but I don't have access to them this afternoon. I'll add them to this post as soon as I get them, so check back again.

Preventing Migraines (and Other Headaches), Part 1

by Nina

Supported Child's Pose

A dear friend of mine, with whom I’ve stayed on many vacations and have traveled with, suffers from terrible migraines; the kind where all you can do is curl up on the fetal position for 24 hours in a dark room. So even though I don’t have migraines myself, I’ve witnessed first hand how awful they can be. Baxter had some good suggestions yesterday (see Yoga for Migraine Headaches) for how to use yoga to get through a migraine headache. But wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to get a migraine in the first place?

Unfortunately, since there are many different triggers for migraines, including different types of food,  it is impossible for us to give you any guaranteed solutions. However, we do have some recommendations for yoga practices you can try. Suffering from a migraine is such a miserable experience and these yoga practices will benefit you in many other ways, so it really seems worth giving them a shot. And everything we’re going to suggest here applies to ordinary tension headaches as well as to migraines, so listen up, everyone!

In his book Yoga As Medicine, Timothy McCall identifies two possible triggers for migraines and other headaches that we can address with yoga: stress and muscle tension in the head, neck and back areas. Today I’m going to talk stress and tomorrow I’ll post something about muscle tension (see Preventing Migraines and Other Headaches, Part 2).

Okay, now to address stress. In his book, Timothy says, “Since stress is a major factor in both tension headaches and in migraines, yoga can certainly play a role in prevention.” And he goes on to say that “There is scientific evidence that relaxation techniques and biofeedback can be effective for both tension and migraine headaches, lessening the duration as well as the frequency of attacks.” That sounds pretty promising to me!

I’ve been ranting about the subject of chronic stress and the importance of stress management since we started the blog (see Chronic Stress: An Introduction  and The Relaxation Response and Yoga), but as a reminder, I’ll simply reiterate that yoga provides a huge selection of possibilities for stress management and you can pick and choose from amongst them according to your experience level, temperament, schedule, and/or personal preference. All of the following yoga techniques reduce your stress levels by switching your nervous system from stress mode (Flight or Fight) to relaxation mode (Rest and Digest). This type of relaxation is something you cannot achieve with a nap or even a full-night’s sleep (see Conscious Relaxation vs. Sleep).

•    Meditation. See How to Meditate for information on how to meditate.

•    Breath practices (pranayama). See Your Key to Your Nervous System for information your nervous system and your breath. For stress reduction and headache prevention, be sure to avoid stimulating and/or overly complex breath practices and focus on simple, calming practices.

•    Restorative poses with a focus for the mind (such as your breath or the relaxation of your muscles).

•    Inverted poses. Studies by Dr. Roger Cole proved that inverted and semi-inverted poses, where your heart is higher than your head, trigger the relaxation response through the mechanisms that control your blood pressure. This is why supported inversions, such Legs Up the Wall pose and Easy Inverted Pose (legs on a chair), are so effective for stress management (See Just in Time for the Holidays: Inverted Poses).

•    Corpse pose (Savasana) with a focus for your mind (such as your breath, the relaxation of your muscles, or peaceful imagery). See Savasana for information.

•    Yoga nidra (yogic sleep), a long, structured form of Savasana. See What is Yoga Nidra? for information about yoga nidra and the Audio Tracks tab at the top of the page for a mini version of yoga nidra that you can stream or download.
 
If you find it difficult to settle in and relax because you’re too restless or anxious when you lie down, first try any active asana practice to burn off steam (although you might want to be careful with backbends—I’ll address that tomorrow) and then move on to relaxation practices.

If you are interested in practicing a combination of inverted and restorative poses, you might like to check the headache sequence in Yoga As Medicine, which includes the following poses:

1. Legs Up the Wall pose
2. Supported Reclined Cobbler’s pose
3. Chair Shoulderstand
4. Half Plow Pose (with chair)
5. One-Legged Forward Bend with head support
6. Full Seated Forward Bend with head support
7. Breath Awareness

Note that this sequence was designed for an experienced practitioner, and if you aren’t familiar yet with or can’t get comfortable in Chair Shoulderstand and Half Plow pose, you may want to skip over those two poses. An easier alternative to those two poses would be to do a Supported Straight Leg Bridge pose (must photograph that for our blog one of these days!). The teacher who designed this sequence also recommended his student use a head wrap (a large bandage that is wrapped around the head to relax the eyes) while practicing, so that may be something you could experiment with. Start wrapping the bandage clockwise at your forehead, go down to your eyes, and then come back up again. Tuck the loose end to secure the bandage.

If the sequence from Yoga As Medicine is too long or complicated for you, any simple restorative sequence could be very effective. Try our Mini Restorative Sequence, which includes three classic restorative poses that almost everyone can enjoy.

So how often should you do these stress reduction practices? I think that if you are chronically stressed out and suffering from debilitating headaches, you should practice six or seven days a week for at least 15 minutes (keep in mind that could be 15 minutes of meditation or 15 minutes in Legs Up the Wall pose). I realize that sounds like a lot. It will take some work—if you can call relaxing “work”—to bring your overall stress levels down. Keep in mind that the payoffs could be huge, as stress management can result in many additional health benefits besides reduced headaches, such as lower blood pressure and a stronger immune system, as well as quality of life benefits, such as increased equanimity and maybe even happiness. And if any of you take up this headache reduction challenge, I’d love to hear back from you about the results.

Check back tomorrow for tips about how to use yoga poses to release neck, shoulder and back tension that can trigger headaches.

Yoga to Reduce Suffering

by Nina 

II.16 Suffering that has yet to manifest is to be avoided. —Yoga Sutras, trans. by Edwin Byrant

Melitta's post Aging, Diabetes and Yoga  and Shari’s post Ruminations on Health reminded us that although yoga can be helpful for many conditions, it is far from a cure all. Melitta’s life is sustained through western medicine (that is, insulin), without which she would have died. And as Shari said:

My own personal pet peeve is the often unspoken allegation within alternative healthcare communities of “healthy living” that if you lived a more “pure and holistic life,” this illness or health problem wouldn’t be happening to you. Too many women I have known with breast cancer have felt the twinge of anxiety that they were the cause of their own cancers. But how much do we owe to our own genetic predispositions rather than to emotional and environmental stresses?

On the other hand, I think all three of us believe that yoga has something important to offer to people suffering from chronic and even terminal diseases or conditions: the reduction of suffering.

This message came home to me in a very powerful way when I attended a therapeutic workshop on yoga for cancer, taught by Bonnie Maeda, RN. As a nurse, Bonnie has a clear-eyed understanding that yoga cannot cure cancer and, indeed, that even western medicine cannot always do the job. So what she has been offering her students, along with a chance to move and regain strength, is the reduction of suffering. This was especially evident when she led us through a sequence that she had designed specifically for this particular set of yoga practitioners. The sequence—which was unlike any I’d ever seen before—was a gentle Vinyasa series that used the wall for support. Bonnie explained that she felt this particular group needed to engage their minds by moving mindfully from one pose to another as they followed their breath, but, because they were often weak from illness or treatments, the wall was necessary for support and safety. To be honest, I thought the sequence was brilliant! It was providing gentle exercise for people who needed to build up their strength, while at same time functioning as a mindfulness practice to help focus minds on the present and distract from worries about the future.

After the movement came supported poses and relaxation. Stress management is also invaluable for people with chronic illnesses as it can help reduce both physical and emotional pain, as well as supporting healing. As we’ve mentioned before on this blog, yoga provides such a wide range of stress management tools (meditation, breath awareness, pranayama, conscious relaxation practices, restorative poses, supported inverted poses, and active practice to release physical tension) that there is something suitable for almost everyone.

For those of us who are teachers, it is important for us to remind ourselves both of the limitations of what we can offer and of the simple but powerful solutions that we can provide. Both mindful movement and stress management techniques are safe practices that can help reduce the suffering of people enduring great challenges.

And as human beings, it is heartening to remember that there are powerful practices we can rely on when difficulty arises.

Healthy Eating, Stress and Self Control

by Nina

One of the most important things you can do to support healthy eating is to practice stress management. Thought the reasons for this weren’t immediately obvious to me, the more I’ve looked into this topic, the more compelling those reasons become. Recently I wrote a post Yoga, Stress and Weight Management about how chronic stress causes weight gain by stimulating your appetite. As if increased hunger isn’t bad enough, it turns out that being stressed out can pose an even bigger challenge to your commitment to eating right: it weakens your willpower and causes you to be more impulsive. Say you had a long, traffic-jammed commute on the way to the office, there’s a critical meeting with a client that you make with a minute to spare, and someone’s left a big, pink box of fresh donuts glistening there on the table. Then, even though you planned a day of healthy eating, with a homemade lunch and a healthy snack, before you have time to stop yourself, you somehow you find yourself with a half-eaten donut in your hand.... Does this sound familiar to anyone? According to The Willpower Instinct by Dr. Kelly McGonigal, you’re more likely to cave in to temptation when you’re experiencing the stress response than you are when you are in a state of relaxation.

“While your body was getting ready to defend your life, the alarm system in your brain was busy trying to make sure you didn’t get in the body’s way. It focused your attention on the saber-toothed tiger and your surroundings, making sure no stray thoughts distracted you from the threat at hand. That’s right, the fight-or-flight response wants to make you more impulsive.”

As is often the case, a response that makes sense when your life is actually in danger (a time when over-thinking is probably not a good idea) can backfire on you in modern times. The traffic jams and the meeting with the client that were stressing you out weren’t exactly life threatening, so not being “distracted” by your plans for healthy eating won’t improve the situation (and might even make you feel worse after you come down from your sugar high).

Line of Moss by Brad Gibson

Fortunately, yoga has a few solutions to offer, both for the short term and the long term, to help you reduce the impulsive behavior that can accompany chronic stress. For the short term, Dr. McGonigal recommends slowing down your breathing to four to six breaths per minute, which she says helps shift your body from a state of stress to “self-control mode.” This is obviously something you could do discretely at your desk or even in that conference room where the donuts lay glistening at you. (Your meeting might even go better if you stopped for a minute to “center” yourself this way before it begins.) And since lengthening your exhalation is also a good way to turn down the stress response, I’d add that you could practice any form of pranayama that emphasizes the exhalation over the inhalation.

For the longer term, Dr. McGonigal recommends that you spend some time practicing conscious relaxation to “restore your willpower reserve.” She suggests lying down and breathing deeply, which sounds like Savasana (Relaxation pose) to me! Besides this, of course, yoga has a huge repertoire of ways you can de-stress, including meditation, yoga nidra, restorative yoga, supported inverted poses, and active asana poses practiced with mindfulness (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga for further information).

So if you’re having trouble sticking to your healthy eating plans for the new year, why not experiment by trying one or more of these relaxation techniques and see if they strengthen your willpower. I’d love to hear back about any results. (Besides, if worse comes to worst, you’ll at least be less stressed out!)

Stress, Your Health, and Yoga

by Timothy

As I travel around the globe teaching workshops on yoga therapy—the use of yogic tools from postures to meditation to help people heal—I am struck by what an enormous problem stress-related illness is.  Everywhere I go, from ultra-modern cities like Stockholm where I've spent the last week, to less developed nations, people young and old are suffering the health consequences of their increasingly busy schedules and sometimes even busier minds.

Surprisingly, in this time of widespread tension, unrest and economic insecurity, most doctors still seem not to fully appreciate the deadly consequences of out-of-control stress or how much something like yoga can help. In medical school we were taught about the connection of stress to such health problems as duodenal ulcers, migraine headaches and irritable bowel syndrome. But scientific evidence is increasing indicating that stress can be a factor in life-threatening conditions from heart attacks to depression to hip fractures. Ironically, doctors may be among the most at-risk members of our society, due to their endemic stress and lack of understanding of simple non-drug tools like yoga that can fight it.

When scientists talk about the stress-response system, they are referring to a complex web of events that ramp the body up to deal with an acute crisis. The sympathetic nervous system—the so-called “fight or flight” system—kicks in, which among other things increases blood flow to the large muscles that help you defend yourself or run away from a physical threat. Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol are also released. In response, blood pressure and heart rate go up and breathing quickens. Blood sugar and other energy stores are mobilized to fuel whatever challenge you are about to face. In case you are injured, your blood begins to clot more easily. In crisis mode, the body shunts energy away from restorative functions like digestion and reproduction, mediated by the parasympathetic nervous system, which you can think of as the “rest and digest” system.

Arctic Landscape by Michele Macartney-Filgate

This built-in stress-response system is well-adapted to acute crises but can lead to all kinds of problems if it doesn’t gets switched off after the acute crisis passes. Blood clots increase the risk of a heart attack or a stroke, as does the high blood pressure and elevated blood lipids that stress contributes to. Elevated levels of cortisol are associated with everything from major depression to osteoporosis to overeating and weight gain (and the many problems that result from that). And while the immune system initially gets stronger during an acutely stressful event, it starts functioning less well if the stress goes on too long, raising the risk of serious infections and, as at least some evidence suggests, autoimmune diseases.

The problem is that the ancient human stress-response system isn’t so well adapted to mostly non-physical modern world stressors like work deadlines, traffic jams, and even abstract ideas about whether you are happy or fulfilled. If you repeatedly mull these problems over, the chemical and physical changes that were designed to deal with an acute threat to physical health—and which are then supposed to shut off when the threat is removed—remain activated. Such mental tape loops can thus turn abstract worries into concrete threats to health and even to life itself.

Yoga is arguably the best overall system of stress reduction ever invented. More and more evidence suggests the practice can help treat and prevent a wide range of health problems (for details see my web site). Beyond the harmful effects on the body, feeling stressed is a drag. It can make you feel anxious, preoccupied, full of dread.

Yoga can—sometimes within minutes—quiet down an overactive stress-response system. One of the great insights of the ancient yoga masters is that when you move and breathe with awareness, it calms your nervous system and slows down the tape loops in your mind. When your inner monologue slows, most people experience a sense of peace, relaxation and a feeling of being centered.

At first, this only happens when you are doing yoga and perhaps for a short time afterwards. But if you maintain a steady practice, more and more you become aware of and can tap into the tranquility you find in yoga throughout the rest of your day. Over time, you can actually make your nervous system less reactive to minor stressors, and less likely to get knocked off balance by life's inevitable ups and downs. You learn that you can be in a difficult situation, but nonetheless keep the breath slow and deep, and the mind both relaxed and attentive.

This sense of inner calm can make you feel more grateful for what you have, appreciate the beauty around you (which you otherwise might not have noticed) and help you realize that some of the stuff you're getting bent out of shape about may, ultimately, not be very important. And that may be one of the best stress reducers of all.