How Can Yoga Help with Stress

Yoga has been around for centuries. People have always known that yoga is a great stress reliever. Even when it was first created, practitioners didn’t have modern science to help them figure it out, but they just knew that yoga held the benefit of stress relief. We can now look to science to understand how yoga benefits us when we are stressed, and how it can help to relieve it.

How stress affects us

Stress and cortisol go hand in hand. Cortisol is a hormone that is released by the brain. Normally, cortisol is released at a very slow rate to make your muscles function properly. However, when stress occurs such as being late for an important appointment, an upcoming deadline, a crying baby, what have you, you brain responds as if there is an emergency and floods the body with cortisol.

In the case of a real medical emergency, the cortisol would help your body deal with broken bones, or bleeding, or any other major medical emergency. However, when you are just being stressed by day to day life, all that extra cortisol can cause bodily harm such as ulcers, high blood pressure, bone density loss, and it can weaken your immune system which can lead you to get sick. Weight gain can also happen when we are stressed because the cortisol makes the body believe it is in an emergency so it begins to hold onto fat.

Destressing the body and mind

The nervous system is made up of several branches. One particular branch controls all of your internal organs. It has two separate parts: the sympathetic, which is the “fight or flight” state, and comes into action when you are feeling stressed and releases all the cortisol into your bloodstream, and the parasympathetic, which is the “rest and digest” state. This branch controls the day to day functions of your body. To destress the mind and body, we need to use the parasympathetic branch in our body. However, these are automatic processes that occur in our body based on our current situation and we have no physical control over them.

Yoga can help with this dilemma. The diaphragm which helps us breathe by moving the lungs up and down normally functions automatically. However, humans can also control their breathing when we want to. For example, you can hold your breath if you’re going underwater. Yoga incorporates specific breathing patterns known as pranayama. These breathing patterns can help us move our body into the “rest and digest” state that allows our mind to relax and slow down the release of cortisol that is wreaking havoc on the body.