Clearing Misconceptions in Yoga: Mood

How does yoga impact its practitioner’s lives? What is the science behind it?

1. Trained relaxation by closing eyes and relaxing body part eliminate everything from headaches and insomnia to stuttering and depression
Edmund Jacobson, the author of Progressive relaxation (1929) and You must relax (1934) initiated the development of electromyograph, a medical instrument that records the electrical waves of skeletal muscles. One woman who benefitted from this machine suffered a skull fracture that made her excessively emotional. Jacobson observed that her muscles exhibit electrical spikes when she tried to relax. The waves vanished later after learning how to stay calm.

2. Slow Breathing that refresh the spirit and improve “our normal intellectual faculties”
Kovoor T. Behanan was born in India but studied religion, philosophy, and psychology at Yale.He conducted psychological testing for 36 days. He would evaluate before and after the breathing exercises and observe the mental states.The tests “consisted of adding numbers, breaking codes, identifying colors, doing puzzles, and performing little exercises in physical coordination”.The result was published in his book, Yoga: A Scientific Evaluation(1937) at Yale. He found out that deep relaxation causing a drop in mental activity and producing “an extremely pleasant feeling of quietude.” On the other hand, he had believed on the myth of oxygen consumption.

3. Cutting their heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen consumption, and blood pressure
Herbert Benson and colleagues at Harvard studied the effects of Yoga and published The Relaxation Response in 1975. He showed that a relaxed practioner entered a state known as hypometabolism- —a wakeful cousin of sleep that exhibits low energy expenditures. He called the relaxation response “an inducible physiologic state of quietude” that healed and revitalized.

4. Yoga practice that cut basal metabolic rate
Mayasandra Chaya was an Indian physiologist in Bangalore who led a team that studied more than one hundred men and women. They prescribed a diverse Hatha routine sure to press both the metabolic brake and accelerator.The result of the study that Yoga can “cut the basal metabolic rate by an average of 13 percent… The men on average cut their resting energy by 8 percent. But the women achieved reductions of 18 percent—more than double the metabolic declines of their male counterparts.”

5. Significant for Treating Depression
Many reports had linked Depression to low gamma-aminobutyric acid or GABA rate.Chris C Streeter and her team selected 8 who practiced a number of diverse styles: Ashtanga, Bikram, Hatha, Iyengar, Kripalu, Kundalini, Power, and Vinyasa. The team measured GABA levels before and after
an hour-long yoga session. The results were published in 2007 and found that the brains of yoga practitioners “showed an average GABA rise of 27 percent… Yoga practitioners… who practiced the most during the week tended to have real GABA surges… the practitioner who had done yoga for a decade experienced a GABA rise of 47 percent. One participant who practiced yoga five times a week had an increase of 80 percent”.

References

1. Broad, William J. The Science of Yoga: the Risks and Rewards. London: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
2. Esguerra, Ria. “How This Pinoy Dancing Queen Found Himself And His True Calling.” COSMO.PH. Cosmopolitan Philippines, October 12, 2018. https://www.cosmo.ph/lifestyle/jan-cerezo-gay-games-2018-a1028-20181012-lfrm