YogaTo Your Brain For Stress Relax

                 Yoga seems to bestow mental benefits, such as a calmer, more relaxed mind. Now research by Chantal Villemure and Catherine Bushnell of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Bethesda, Md., may explain how.

                  Using MRI scans, Villemure detected more gray matter—brain cells—in certain brain areas in people who regularly practiced yoga, as compared with control subjects. “We found that with more hours of practice per week, certain areas were more enlarged,” Villemure says, a finding that hints that yoga was a contributing factor to the brain gains.

 

              You read a lot about stress and its attendant health hazards (inflammation, disease, poor sleep, and more). But your body has a built-in mechanism to counteract stress. It’s called the “relaxation response,” and yoga is a great way to fire it up, shows a study from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. 

            At the same time, those 15 minutes of yoga practice also switched off some genes related to inflammation and other stress responses, the study authors found. (They linked similar benefits to related practices like meditation, Tai Chi, and focused breathing exercises.) These benefits help explain why a large review study from Germany linked yoga to lower rates of anxiety, fatigue, and depression.

               All these brain areas could be engaged by elements of yoga practice, Villemure says. The yogis dedicated on average about 70 percent of their practice to physical postures, about 20 percent to meditation and 10 percent to breath work, typical of most Western yoga routines. Villemure presented the work in November 2013 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.