Meet Mark: When something stressful happens, he feels energized. His
heart races, his senses heighten—he even feels as though his thoughts
speed up. Mark prides himself on his ability to face problems head-on,
but he admits that it's becoming difficult to turn this intensity off.
Lately he's been feeling more on edge than on top of his game. He's
developed headaches and insomnia, and he's beginning to wonder if
they're related to stress. He'd like to feel better, but he can't
imagine himself changing his full-throttle approach to life. Without
stress, how would he ever get anything done?
Mark's wife, Sue, doesn't feel energized by stress—it exhausts
her. She feels so depleted by stress that she's begun to cut back on the
things that generate the most stress, such as planning big family
gatherings. To maintain her composure, she tries to walk away when
conflicts arise. She's even considering leaving her challenging job to
find something less intense. Sue proudly sees in herself the ability to
"just let things go," which she's been cultivating through her yoga
practice.
But even though she's simplified her life, she's been feeling
depressed. She has a nagging feeling that her attempts to be stress free
are getting in the way of fully living her life.
Mark and Sue are characters based on real people, and are designed
to represent two real responses to stress—one or both of which may seem
familiar to you. As Mark and Sue are discovering, stress is inescapable,
but it is also paradoxical: While excess stress can take a toll on you,
the very things that cause it are often the same things that make life
rewarding and full. Take a moment to think about the pressures in your
life: family, work, having too much to do. Now imagine a life without
those things. Sound ideal? Not likely. Most people don't want an empty
life; they want to possess the skills to handle a busy and, yes, even
complicated life.
The good news is that you can develop ways to navigate through
stress so that it isn't troubling and traumatic at every turn. When a
stressor arises, you don't have to go to extremes the way Mark and Sue
do. You can learn to respond with just the right blend of inner fire and
inner calm. I call this the "challenge response," and you can develop
it through your yoga practice. In fact, studies suggest that yoga may
condition the nervous system to bring you into balance whether you need
more calm, like Mark, or more fire, like Sue. Add to that yoga's ability
to change your mental perception of stress, and you can transform your
entire experience of the dreaded "s" word. Imagine feeling capable of
handling whatever life throws at you, without having to panic,
overreact, or plan your exit strategy.
Stress Lessons
To begin changing the way you react to stress, you'll need to
understand how it typically affects the body. If your mind interprets a
stressful event as an emergency threat, it triggers an immediate
response in the autonomic nervous system. Your stress response kicks in
and activates the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). Your body is flooded
with hormones like cortisol and norepinephrine, which heighten the
senses, increase heart rate and blood pressure, and focus the brain's
activity. The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which is responsible
for physical relaxation and emotional calm, becomes overwhelmed by this
sympathetic response. With the sympathetic nervous system in charge and
the parasympathetic overwhelmed, you are primed to respond with energy
and focus, but also with anger, anxiety, and aggression.
Humans developed this primal reaction, known as fight-or-flight,
so they could effectively fight off or flee from life-threatening
danger. This important survival mechanism is useful when you need to
slam on the brakes to prevent a car accident or run away from an
attacker. But it's overkill for most of the conflicts and challenges we
face day to day.
While it's easy to view life's hassles as a threat to your
expectations, sense of control, or ideals, it's better for your health
to temper that perception and instead see each stressor as a challenge
you can handle. Even if an emergency exists entirely in your
imagination, or if the threat is only to your feelings, it can still
trigger the fight-or-flight stress cycle. Over time chronic stress takes
a toll on the body and brain, leading to all kinds of health problems,
including insomnia, depression, chronic pain, and cardiovascular
disease.
Running Hot and Cold
The alternative to a knock-down, drag-out, fight-or-flight stress
response is the challenge response. The challenge response allows you to
meet a stressful moment with exactly what is needed: first, the ability
to see a situation clearly, and second, the skills to respond without
becoming overwhelmed. If Mark could do this, he wouldn't suffer from
stress-related headaches or insomnia. And if Sue could do this, she
wouldn't feel the need to hide when things get hairy.
When stress strikes and you engage the challenge response, your
nervous system will respond differently. To understand how, imagine that
the autonomic nervous system is like a faucet. The knob that controls
the hot water represents the sympathetic nervous system, and the cold
knob represents the parasympathetic. When you go into fight-or-flight
mode, it's as though you crank up the scalding-hot water and turn the
cold water down to a mere trickle. If you develop the challenge
response, the hot water continues to run as it normally would, and you
turn down the cold water just a little bit. In other words, you have
just enough heat to face the stressor, but you haven't completely
removed the cooling influence. Once the challenge is successfully met,
the parasympathetic nervous system reasserts itself (that is, the cold
water increases), bringing you back to your everyday state of balance.
Bradley Appelhans, PhD, an assistant professor at the University
of Arizona College of Medicine who studies how the body responds to
stress, underscores the importance of the parasympathetic nervous system
in guiding the challenge response. "When we aren't stressed, the PNS
acts as a brake on our physiological arousal. In times of challenge, we
rely on our PNS to quickly remove the brake, so that we can achieve the
state of increased emotional and physiological arousal needed to deal
with stress. But we also rely on the PNS to keep that arousal under
control, and not let the fight-or-flight response manifest in full
force."
In other words, if you generally handle stress well, your
parasympathetic nervous system, not your sympathetic, is in charge of
increasing arousal and readying you to face your stressor. That may
sound like a trivial detail, but the consequences for the mind and body
are significant. It's like the difference between a dog walker extending
the leash of her dog to allow for more freedom and the dog breaking
free from the leash and running amok. When the PNS pulls back, allowing
for just enough SNS engagement to sufficiently cope with the challenge,
you have the ability to act without an exaggerated, unhealthy
fight-or-flight response. The mind focuses, but it also stays open
enough to see alternative solutions and opportunities.
The Heart of the Challenge
There is a method for measuring how well one's autonomic nervous
system responds to everyday, nonemergency stress. It's called heart-rate
variability, and it reveals whether the SNS or the PNS is in charge of
how a person responds to stress.
Scientists have long known that with every inhalation, the nervous
system shifts a bit toward sympathetic activation, and the heart beats
faster. With every exhalation, it shifts toward parasympathetic
-activation, and the heart beats more slowly. People whose heart rate
differs widely between inhalation and exhalation are said to have high
heart-rate -variability—which is a good thing. It means that the nervous
system has the flexibility to go from an engaged or aroused state to a
relaxed state quickly, and that the SNS does not have unhealthy control
over the body. High heart-rate variability—both at rest and in the face
of stress—is considered an indicator of a person's physical and
emotional resilience. Low heart-rate variability is associated with an
increased risk of stress-related disorders such as cardiovascular
disease and depression.
Mark is a classic example of someone who has low heart-rate
variability. He is stuck in a state of chronic sympathetic activation in
his everyday life, which reduces the flexibility of his heart rate.
When he experiences stress, his SNS goes even further into overdrive, in
part because it is unbalanced and unchecked by the PNS. For someone
like Mark, building the challenge response will mean retraining his mind
and body to let the parasympathetic system be in charge while he's at
rest, and eventually when he responds to stress, too.
Sue is able to relax—but only if she disengages from life's
stressors. She needs to develop the ability to get fired up enough to
meet a challenge without feeling completely overwhelmed by it.
A growing body of research on heart-rate variability and yoga
provides evidence that the practice can help people like Mark and Sue in
their quest for healthier stress responses. One of the first studies
was conducted at Newcastle University in England and published in 1997
in the
European Journal of Clinical Investigation. Researchers
found that six weeks of practicing hatha yoga increased the activation
of the parasympathetic nervous system (the calming side) without
decreasing the influence of the sympathetic (the arousing side).
Researchers took 26 healthy but sedentary adults and randomly split them
into two groups. One group was given an aerobic exercise program, the
other a yoga regimen that included two 90-minute sessions per week with
breathing, poses, and relaxation. In the week following the six-week
intervention, the yoga participants were reported to have higher
heart-rate variability (and a lower resting heart rate, another
indicator of well-being) after the study than before. The aerobics group
showed no significant changes.
A second study, done by researchers at the University of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany and published in 2007 in the journal
Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine,
suggests that even a single session of yoga practice can encourage the
nervous system to find flexibility and balance. Researchers hooked up 11
healthy yoga practitioners to instruments that recorded their
heart-rate variability over 24 hours. During that time, participants did
60 minutes of active Iyengar Yoga poses and 30 minutes of restorative
poses. Heart-rate variability increased during the yoga session, and—as
in the previous study—this change was driven by the increased influence
of the parasympathetic nervous system, not by changes to the sympathetic
system.
In other words, after yoga practice, participants weren't just more
relaxed; they were in a state of autonomic balance and flexibility
driven by the parasympathetic—which is exactly the type of balance and
flexibility that predicts greater resilience to stress. This study
provides promising evidence that a yoga practice can prepare you to meet
life's challenges, not just recover from them.
Tapping into Calm
How do we explain why participants in the aerobics group didn't
derive the same benefit as the participants who learned yoga? Better
yet, how do we explain the results from the study that was based on a
single session of Iyengar Yoga?
Kerstin Khattab, MD, an Iyengar Yoga teacher and one of the
researchers in the Schleswig-Holstein study, believes that the key is
yoga's dual demands on body and mind. "Some of the poses in our study,
such as
Dhanurasana (Bow Pose) or
Sirsasana (
Headstand),
are likely to cause a strong sympathetic nervous system reaction. But
as you learn to hold these poses with a calm mind, focusing on the
breath, the poses become a training in how to remain calm in stressful
situations."
In other words, the physical challenge of a pose becomes the
equivalent of a stressor. If you do aerobics, which has no direct
breathing or mindfulness component, the physical challenge can trigger a
full-fledged stress response in the body. But when physical demands are
met with mindfulness and steady breathing, as they are in yoga, the
nervous system responds differently: It maintains activation while
keeping an underlying sense of calm. It remains skillfully engaged but
without going into full-fledged fight-or-flight mode.
The great sage and codifier of yoga,
Patanjali, must have been aware of the power of asana when he wrote sutra 2:46,
Sthira sukham asanam:
Postures should embody steadiness and ease. If you can find both
elements in the midst of a stressful arm balance, you're not just
training your mind. You're enabling your autonomic nervous system to
imprint that response and therefore allow you to return to it during
everyday stress.
At first, you will need to very consciously tap into this response
during your yoga practice by focusing on your breathing and thoughts.
But with enough conscious practice, the rehearsed challenge response can
become an ingrained automatic response—on and off the mat.
Yoga also trains the nervous system to return to balance quickly
after a challenge response. By alternating strenuous poses with gentler
ones, yoga conditions you to move easily between states of challenge and
rest. Letting go of all effort in
Savasana (Corpse
Pose), for example, seals in this flexibility, because the pose teaches
the nervous system to let go once the challenges of your practice have
been met.
Leave your Comfort Zone
Just showing up to any yoga class is not enough. If your stress style
tends toward fight-or-flight, and you huff and puff your way through
Power Yoga classes and leave before Savasana, you probably won't
transform your stress response. Practicing that way just makes yoga
another arena where you engage in your usual stress-response style. For
people who move through life in full emergency mode, the starting place
to learn balance is typically Savasana. This pose teaches you how to put
the usually suppressed parasympathetic nervous system in charge and
give the hypercharged sympathetic nervous system a rest.
When one of my students, Monica Hanson, first came to yoga, she was a
self-described type-A executive in her early 30s. The idea of
relaxation was terrifying, and she could not imagine how relaxing could
possibly help her handle real-world stress. "I was afraid that if I let
go of the tension, I would fall apart," she says. "Tension was the glue
that held me together."
Her first experience in Savasana was anything but relaxing. Her
emergency response fought to stay in control. "I was sweating and
shaking. My heart was racing. I wanted to run away," she says. But
underneath the anxiety was a sense of being fully alive and yet
calm—something that Hanson had never felt before. This taste of how her
mind and body could hold such opposites was the beginning of her stress
transformation.
After seven years of consistent yoga practice, Hanson says tension is
no longer what holds her together in stressful situations. Instead, she
can feel the calm beneath the storm even if she still she gets the urge
to fight or run. "Yoga has taught me a whole new way of being. In
stressful situations, I have literally heard my teacher's voice in my
head say, "Be present. Breathe into the tension. And I do."
Stay in your Experience
For someone like Sue, who easily finds bliss in relaxation but avoids
stress, developing the ability to stay present in the midst of
difficult situations—but without trying to fight against or escape from
them—is key. Rather than trying to hide from challenges, Sue has to
learn to believe she can handle them. As Amy Weintraub, founder of
LifeForce Yoga Healing Institute and the author of
Yoga for Depression,
puts it, "Sometimes it's important to not simply remove ourselves from
the stressful situation, but to feel it in our bodies. Acknowledge
stress. Meet it. We can stay present without being controlled by it."
For one of my students, Julie Good, a 38-year-old physician and mother of two young girls, the great teacher was
Eka Pada Rajakapotasana
(One-Legged King Pigeon Pose). When she first started yoga, it was her
least favorite pose. "My strategy was to grit my teeth and tolerate it,
tense my whole body, and try to hold myself up off the floor." Although
her resistance was an attempt to avoid the intense sensation in her hip,
the effect was quite different. "It was agonizing."
One day, when Good explained why she hated Pigeon Pose, I encouraged
her to stop fighting it. Good says, "I had been trying to protect myself
by resisting. I thought, 'If I let go, it's going to get worse.' But I
let go, and it got better. When I wasn't resisting, I learned to breathe
into the discomfort." By staying with the pose, she learned that she
could choose to stay in a difficult situation and the discomfort would
dissipate.
Find Your Fire
To feel empowered to deal with stress head-on, Sue also needs backup
from her nervous system. She needs more participation from the
sympathetic nervous system; she needs the energy and drive that the
arousing side provides. A new pilot study published in
Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine shows that yoga may help facilitate this type of response.
Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles found that
a regular yoga practice decreased the dominance of the parasympathetic
system for some people. But there was an important difference in this
study: The 17 adult participants were all clinically depressed. The
participants practiced Iyengar Yoga three times a week for eight weeks.
At the end of the study, 11 participants were in remission from
depression. The 6 others did not fully recover.
When researchers compared the participants' heart-rate variability
before and after the eight-week intervention, those who had recovered
showed a small increase in sympathetic activation and a decrease in
parasympathetic influence. Researchers believe it's possible that yoga
practice helped the participants shift from a withdrawal from life to
active engagement. This shift was reflected in—and may have been caused
by—the change in the nervous system's balance.
The point of all of these studies? According to David Shapiro, a
professor of psychology at UCLA, "Yoga helps balance the two systems as
needed by each individual." That means that if you go through life in
emergency mode, yoga will actually awaken your relaxation system. But if
you have a tendency to become paralyzed in the face of challenges, yoga
can work to shift your body and mind toward active engagement.
Study Yourself
Keep in mind that no matter how well you condition your nervous
system, you also need to change the way you perceive stress. You can
start this process by practicing
svadhyaya, or self-observation.
"There is a connection between how you experience a forward bend and how
you react to the world," says Elissa Cobb, a Phoenix Rising Yoga
practitioner and the author of
The Forgotten Body. Take
Paschimottanasana (Seated Forward Bend), a pose that can produce strong sensations in even the most flexible practitioners.
One common response is to ignore sensations and force yourself
forward, fighting against your tight hamstrings. Another is to come out
of the pose to avoid the challenge entirely. Both strategies are
variations on the same theme: fight-or-flight. In all likelihood, they
create tense muscles and rapid or held breathing—not to mention a total
lack of joy.
Paying attention to how your body and mind react to the "stress" of
Paschimottanasana or any pose offers clues about how you typically react
to stress in your life. By training yourself to actively observe while
staying calm in poses, you'll be able to do the same thing when
difficult sensations, thoughts, or emotions arise in the face of stress.
Instead of going into your habitual reaction mode, you'll notice what's
happening while staying present enough to choose an appropriate
response.
When it comes to transforming your own response to stress, it's
tempting to search for that one pose or breathing exercise that will
work its magic. But there isn't one magic pose. The process is a gradual
exploration rather than an easy solution. "If you're practicing yoga
every day, you're preparing for what life brings. You don't have to have
a strategy for what yoga technique you'll use in a difficult
situation." According to Weintraub, when challenges arrive, they will
begin to flow through you but not overwhelm you. "When life hits, it
doesn't explode or roll over us. We're not so caught up in the stress of
it, but we're present for it."
This is the real story of how yoga can help you manage stress. It
doesn't just provide ways to burn through stress or escape from it. It
doesn't only offer stress-reduction techniques for anxious moments. It
goes deeper, transforming how the mind and body intuitively respond to
stress. Just as the body can learn a new standing posture that
eventually becomes ingrained, so the mind can learn new thought
patterns, and the nervous system can learn new ways of reacting to
stress. The result: When you roll up your mat and walk out the door, you
can more skillfully take on whatever life brings.
Begin on all fours, with your knees directly below your hips, and
your hands slightly ahead of your shoulders. Slide your right knee
forward to the back of your right wrist; at the same time angle your
right shin under your torso and bring your right foot to the front of
your left knee. The outside of your right shin will now rest on the
floor. Slowly slide your left leg back, straightening the knee and
descending the front of the thigh to the floor. Lower the outside of
your right buttock to the floor. Position the right heel just in front
of the left hip.
The right knee can angle slightly to the right, outside the line of the
hip. Look back at your left leg. It should extend straight out of the
hip (and not be angled off to the left), and rotated slightly inwardly,
so its midline presses against the floor. Exhale and lay your torso down
on the inner right thigh for a few breaths. Stretch your arms forward.
Then slide your hands back toward the front shin and push your
fingertips firmly to the floor. Lift your torso away from the thigh.
Lengthen the lower back by pressing your tailbone down and forward; at
the same time, and lift your pubis toward the navel. Roll your left hip
point toward the right heel, and lengthen the left front groin.
If you can maintain the upright position of your pelvis without the
support of your hands on the floor, bring your hands to the top rim of
your pelvis. Push heavily down. Against this pressure, lift the lower
rim of your rib cage. The back ribs should lift a little faster than the
front. Without shortening the back of your neck, drop your head back.
To lift your chest, push the top of your sternum (at the manubrium)
straight up toward the ceiling.
Stay in this position for a minute. Then, with your hands back on the
floor, carefully slide the left knee forward, then exhale and lift up
and back into Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog Pose).
Take a few breaths, drop the knees to all-fours on another exhalation,
and repeat with the legs reversed for the same length of time.
We all know how good it feels to get our tootsies rubbed. But foot
massage as a facial? Yes, says Melanie Sachs, an Ayurvedic lifestyle
counselor and the author of 
Our eyes both perceive and reveal our beauty. A regular eye-washing
practice can leave them clear and bright, says Dr. Geetha S. R.
Harigeetham, the house doctor at Rasa Ayurveda, a women's clinic in
Kerala, India (full disclosure: I founded and direct Rasa Ayurveda).
Also, she notes, bathing the eyes can help rejuvenate tiny muscles that
have been taxed by hours of computer use or driving.
For thousands of years, Indian women have kept their tresses lovely with
sumptuous scalp oils made from coconuts, herbs, flowers, and spices.
Scalp oils promote thick, lustrous, healthy hair. But they're also used
to ward off colds and flu, relieve headaches, keep you cool in hot
weather, and repair frayed nerves. Rubbing warm oil into the sensitive
and receptive scalp area is a deliciously calming experience that helps
protect the mind from the overstimulation of daily life.
Our skin keeps us in constant connection with the textures and energies
of our world—so it's no wonder our faces reveal so much about our
mental, emotional, and physical status. "When we care for ourselves
well, our authentic beauty reflects in our skin," says Ayurvedic
aesthetician Evan Healy, founder of the eponymous all-natural skin care
line.
