by josie
A new study shows that yoga benefits overall mental health as well as helping alleviate depression, sleep problems and ADHD symptoms.
On most days, studios and gyms across the country are packed wall-to-wall with yoga enthusiasts. Bending, twisting, stretching — Americans of all ages love the elegant, 5,000-year-old Indian practice. Between 2004 and 2008, the number of American adults practicing yoga tripled.
Enthusiasts list different reasons for the pleasure they get from yoga. Many mention the physical effects on their bodies, such as flexibility and pain reduction. Others say the practice calms them.
Now, however, researchers suggest that yoga may be an effective treatment for several mental disorders as well as sleep and attention problems. The first study to systematically review published research examining yoga’s mental effects found that yoga improves symptoms of mild depression and sleep complaints, even among those who are not taking medications for those conditions.
Yoga also was found to tame some symptoms linked to schizophrenia, a severe mental disorder that typically involves hallucinations and disordered thought processes, as well as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In addition, the research suggests yoga helps prevent stress-related mental illness.
While more research is needed, yoga may be one of the easiest, cheapest and safest therapies to recommend to people battling a mental illness or cognitive or sleep problems, say the authors of the report, published recently in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.
“People practice yoga because: one, they feel better; second, it’s hip; and third, it has a socially transformative effect,” says P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and medicine at Duke University Medical Center and the lead author of the study.
But yoga doesn’t get enough credit as a bona fide psychiatric treatment, he says. “In fact,” Doraiswamy says, “yoga is being underutilized as a strategy to help people with mental health issues.”
Doraiswamy and his colleagues decided to look at published studies of yoga because, they wrote, “Yoga has also become such a cultural phenomenon that it has been difficult for physicians and consumers to differentiate legitimate claims from hype.” The researchers reviewed more than 100 studies, but based their conclusions on only 16 studies because those studies represented the highest quality research comparing people practicing yoga to similar people who were not doing yoga.
In addition to finding that yoga improves the symptoms of several kinds of mental illnesses, some of the studies reviewed also hinted at how yoga has an impact on overall mental health. For example, antidepressants work by altering some types of brain chemicals, called neurotransmitters. Yoga does the same, increasing neurotransmitters that are linked to good mood: GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), serotonin and acetylcholine.
Studies show yoga also lowers cortisol, the hormone produced by stress, and decreases dopamine and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters linked to stress and anxiety. Yoga boosts a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which has been called “Miracle-Gro for the brain,” by exercise expert and Harvard psychiatrist John J. Ratey, M.D. BDNF is a protein that helps with production of feel-good chemicals like serotonin and that promotes the growth of nerve cells.
Finally, evidence shows yoga strengthens the immune system.
The results, says Doraiswamy, mean less depression, anxiety and negativity and better concentration, attention and sound sleep. “Yoga seems most helpful for stress-related disorders such as anxiety, depression or insomnia,” Doraiswamy says. “But it might also have some benefits in more serious conditions, such as schizophrenia.”
These results gain significance when you considered the toll mental illness and stress-related conditions takes on American adults — and the widespread dissatisfaction with current treatments. Look at the statistics:
- More than one-quarter of all U.S. adults are battling a psychiatric condition in any given year.
- From 9–21 percent of the population has insomnia and suffers serious daytime consequences of poor sleep, such as chronic fatigue, low mood, memory problems and frayed relationships.
- About 25 percent of adults take sleep medications at some point in a given year.
- About 18 percent of adults have an anxiety disorder.
Meanwhile, treatment for mental conditions can be difficult or inadequate. Studies show only one-third of people with major depression gain relief from their first attempt at using an antidepressant, and they have even worse response rates with subsequent medication attempts.
Moreover, many psychiatric medications have side effects that cause people to quit treatment. Almost 75 percent of people taking anti-psychotic medications discontinue their medications within 18 months, Doraiswamy says. Medications are also costly.
Talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and other forms of counseling, can relieve the symptoms of milder forms of mental illness, such as mild depression or anxiety. However, many Americans have no insurance coverage for those therapies and cannot afford many weeks or months of counseling.
Yoga, meanwhile, is inexpensive, and it appears to help. “We are not suggesting people with mental illnesses throw away their antidepressants or anti-psychotics and replace it with yoga,” Doraiswamy says. “What we are saying is that the initial, preliminary data on yoga are so promising that it should be a national priority to conduct large multicenter studies to more rigorously test the benefits of yoga as a therapeutic.”
Yoga could do for mental health what exercise has done for heart disease and obesity, he says. Large, government-funded studies in the 1970s and 1980s showed that exercise could dramatically reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes and obesity-related conditions. Since then, federal health authorities have repeatedly urged Americans to get at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise most days of the week.
It’s not far-fetched to think that yoga might do the same for mental health. “Today, yoga is in much the same place and is ripe for larger studies,” Doraiswamy says.
The problem is that there isn’t much money to be made from proving scientifically that yoga alleviates some aspects of mental illness or prevents mental problems, he says. “The money spent on all studies of yoga in the United States to date is probably less than the cost of a single, large drug study,” Doraiswamy says. “We need a Surgeon General who is a yogi.”
Photo credit: Zee Wendell
