Yoga can change your brain!

Many people have their own experience of how yoga reduces stress, improves posture, and boosts flexibility. A combination of breathing exercises, meditation, and physical exercises helps to create calm and focus and reduce stress hormones. The health benefits of yoga, such as relieving depression and reducing stress and anxiety, are well documented.

Regular yoga can reduce pain

Psychologist Catherine Bushnell at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health in Maryland, USA has conducted several studies on people who regularly practise yoga. Her findings are very exciting. Research indicates that regularly practising yoga can counteract the ageing of the brain. Studies indicate that communication between brain cells improves and that more new brain cells are formed in several different areas of the brain by way of neurogenesis. Bushnell and her colleagues have demonstrated that people who practise yoga have more grey matter in the insular cortex – the area that regulates how much pain we tolerate. This means that yoga can be a tool for managing chronic pain. Yoga has been shown to have the opposite effect on how pain affects the brain. The changes in the brain that chronic pain can result in seem to be reversed by practising yoga regularly.

Yoga activates your calming parasympathetic nervous system

In one study, Bushnell compared the brain with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in those who practised yoga with those who did not actively practise yoga. Those who practised yoga did so according to Western methods with the primary focus being on body positions, some meditation, and breathing exercises. The findings of the study are exciting and show that yoga performed weekly contributed to greater brain volume in areas that control awareness and regulate stress. It was also found that people who regularly practise yoga have greater activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, which explains the stress-reducing effect of yoga.