I couldn’t be less surprised by some new findings published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. According to a study led by Dr Maren Nyer from Harvard Medical School, one or two sessions of hot yoga a week can have a notable impact on depression.
I am not a depressive, but as a longstanding yoga practitioner — 19 years and counting — I regularly give thanks for the positive impact my attempts at pretzeling have on my mental health. I felt the gift of yoga most powerfully during the lockdowns. It was a period when there was often nothing — literally nothing — changing in my life day to day, but I was also having to navigate that maelstrom of uncertainty in which we all resided. What did I do? I bent. I breathed. Whatever happened, my mat was waiting for me. I would go as far as to say that yoga, more than anything, saw me through.
That’s why the results of this eight-week trial of 80 adults make complete sense to me. Half were signed up for hot yoga sessions, the average attendance record being 10.3 classes over the period, while the other half were put on a waiting list.
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By the end of the trial 59 per cent of the yoga practitioners had experienced a decrease in their symptoms of depression of 50 per cent or more, compared with 6 per cent of the control group. What’s more, 44 per cent of the new-found yogis achieved such low scores that their depression was considered to be in remission. Nyer went so far as to conclude that “yoga and heat-based interventions could potentially change the course for treatment for patients with depression”.
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What is going on? So many things, because the ways yoga works on your mind and body are myriad and complex. But let’s start with a few basics.
First, whatever is happening in your head and/or in the world, to show up on a yoga mat, and to keep showing up, is an act of constancy. Surprisingly quickly, your mat becomes a place of calm, a refuge even. It’s somewhere you can feel grounded; it provides a kind of root system, if you will.
Second, in what might seem to be a contradiction, your yoga mat becomes a place of change, of personal development. Whatever your age, whatever your physical condition, your body starts to shift. You become more flexible; you become — if you practise a more dynamic, challenging form, such as hot yoga — stronger. In time the sense of openness you experience first in your body starts inexorably to alter how you feel in your head, how you think.
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Third, yoga shifts your approach to success and failure, to comfort and discomfort. You learn not to stress about what your body can’t do. (Most of the time!) You learn to accept your physical limitations but also to be unbound by them; to work gently, patiently towards changing them. You learn to embrace discomfort in certain poses, observing any tension rather than inhabiting it; breathing into the places in which it resides and, little by little, actually breathing it away.
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If you have never done yoga, this might all sound ludicrous. That certainly would have been my view once upon a time. But it isn’t ludicrous. And what better mind-body training, what better tool for living, than to learn not to mind so much; to learn to be; and also to come to understand that there is potential change, potential newness, always just a few breaths away.
