Study shows huge mental health benefits from yoga
A new study has revealed some easy techniques for coping with everyday stress and they could make a big difference to long-term mental and overall health.
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Yoga fanatics have long spruiked its benefits to their mental health.
Now new Melbourne research has confirmed meditation and yoga reduce stress and can help ward off health problems.
Joint research by Victoria University and Queen’s University in Belfast found meditation and yoga influenced brain activity related to stress, anxiety and depression.
Lead research author Michaela Pascoe said the findings highlighted links between the endocrine system — glands that produce hormones regulating metabolism, growth, sleep and mood — and wellbeing.
“It seems that yoga and meditation can decrease stress and have a direct impact on stress as a result of that,’’ she said.
“When people learn meditation or mindfulness skills they learn to do things like metacognition, which is the ability to observe our thoughts and have some distance or separation from them.”
With persistent stress contributing to cardiovascular disease, stroke and mental illness, Dr Pascoe said meditation and yoga had “psychological, physiological, neurobiological’’ changes on brain structure and function.
“One change, for example, is decreasing the activity of this area of the brain … involved in worrying or thinking about the future, remembering the past,’’ she said.
“High activity in this brain region is associated with poor mental health, increases in depression and anxiety.
“And people who meditate show decreased activity in this brain region and that also corresponds with improved mental health outcomes and stress markers.’’
Dr Pascoe said stress could help protect us during “fight or flight’’ situations but too much could damage regions of the brain that regulated our moods and emotions.
“When we have a lot of ongoing stress all the time, those receptors become dysfunctional and don’t work as well and the ability of the brain to stop that stress response decreases,’’ she said.
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She said “increased mindfulness’’ and “treating ourselves a little bit kinder’’ could help combat problems such as depression and anxiety.
“Instead of being really angry and just getting lost and caught up in that feeling and having all the physiological changes that occur with that, you might feel angry but just observe you are feeling angry,’’ she said.
“You might then accept that you’re feeling angry and you might not be as judgmental on yourself and be a little more self compassionate.
“Those things will affect the stress response and what is going on in our brain because it is all connected and all related.’’