What Yoga Means to Your Overall Health

Three Part Series – Part 1: Stress

Stress kills. Literally. (I know that’s a downer, but it’s that serious)
Chronic emotional stress makes plaque buildup twice as fast in the coronary arteries that feed the heart. Stress also causes the coronary arteries to constrict, reducing blood flow to the heart. It makes platelets stickier and more likely to form blood clots that may precipitate a heart attack. Yoga is perhaps the most effective stress-reduction method ever invented. Yoga increases your resiliency to stress and, by extension, to heart disease.

Yoga helps balance emotions. Studies suggest that yoga helps diffuse emotions such as anger, hostility and impatience—all linked to heart attacks. A regular yoga practice helps introduce the tools to manage these feelings by increasing the length of time between stimulation and response. Many times a situation will arise that upsets you, the time between the upsetting instance and your response is critical. It means the difference between a “reaction” and a “response”. Managing your emotions between the stimulus and response has a direct link to reducing stress and negative feelings. Not to mention how beneficial this skill is to your interpersonal relationships! The more awareness you cultivate in your yoga practice; the better you will respond to those around you.

The reason yoga helps in this way versus an aerobic workout is the connection between mind and body. Some poses are likely to cause a strong sympathetic nervous system reaction, but as you learn to hold the poses with a calm mind, focused on the breath, the poses becomes the training in how to remain calm in stressful situations. Yoga also trains the nervous system to return to balance quickly after a challenge response. In other words, the physical challenge of a pose becomes the equivalent of a stressor. If you do aerobic exercise, which has no direct breathing or mindfulness component, the physical challenge can trigger a full-fledged stress response in the body.

By alternating strenuous poses with gentler ones, yoga conditions you to move easily between states of challenge and rest. Letting go of all effort in Savasana (corpse pose), for example, seals in this flexibility, because the pose teaches the nervous system to let go once the challenges of your practice have been met.