Anyone who has been to one of my yoga classes, will know that I do like to wax lyrical about the benefits of each of the poses. Then one of my clients called me on this, saying, “How do you actually know inversions slow the aging process?” Hmmmm, good question, so I began some research.
Firstly, yoga is ancient practice thousands of years old. Yoga is derived from the Sanskrit ‘Yuji’ which means union. By uniting the body with the breath, we can help to clear the mind. Since yoga incorporates breathing exercises (pranayama) with physical poses (asanas) with relaxation techniques this can have significant physical, mental, emotional & spiritual benefits.
But what we who practice yoga ‘know’, science is just beginning to confirm. Michael de Manincour, a Psychologist at the Yoga Institute quotes a study done with a group of people suffering from clinical depression & anxiety who practiced yoga everyday for 6 weeks versus the control group, also suffering with their mental health but not practicing yoga.
The yoga group recorded a 33% reduction in depression & anxiety, reduced emotional & mental distress, increased resilience & an increase in the number of positive experiences they recorded along with a reduction in the negative experiences. The control group did not record the same benefits. What is even more staggering, is that those who practiced yoga did so for only an average of 12 minutes a day.
And this is not the only study. Type scientific benefits of yoga into google & you will come across scores of studies reporting similar results.
But we are not only are we beginning to understand the enormous benefits from yoga but where they come from.
Dr Loren Fishman says, ”It (yoga) thickens the layer of the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain associated with higher leaving & increase neuroplasticity, which helps us learn new things & change the way we do things.”
Yoga helps us manage stress. There is no doubt we are living in increasingly stressful times. Our neuro-endocrine system has inbuilt mechanisms to help us fight stress. But if we are constantly triggered & not given the opportunity to reset ourselves, then stress hormones flood our system affecting our physical & mental health significantly.
Our automatic nervous system has 2 parts: the sympathetic nervous system which is responsible for our fight, flight or freeze response & the parasympathetic nervous system which controls the activities our body does whilst at rest, digestion, sleep, sex.
When these complimentary systems work in harmony, we feel great, when the sympathetic system is overused, the balance is upset which creates illness. Yoga helps us restore balance.
By working with our body & our breath we can help restore calm in our minds. This works on many levels. First the breath. It is one of the most powerful ways to impact stress. Longer smoother breaths send a powerful message to the brain & balance our automatic nervous system. We can also reduce our blood pressure by slowing the rate of our breath.
But yoga also works from the physical perspective. Our mind ultimately controls our wellness. Yoga helps to bring our mind into focus. Try standing on 1 leg if you are thinking about something else. Indeed, you can often tell how much someone has going on in their mind, by how easily they can stand on one leg. Try balancing on your hands and arms, which is almost impossible if your mind is wandering or ruminating. By focusing on what we are doing physically, this focuses our mind & this helps to change our brains. It’s called neuroplasticity.
Advances in science & the advent of MRI scanners have enables us to see how meditative practices (& yes yoga is a meditative practice) can change the structure & activity within the brain.
By using MRI scans, we can monitor the activity in our prefrontal cortex. When we are balancing, we can see on MRI scans that redirecting our thought patterns helps to create new circuits in the prefrontal cortex, which helps us access these in times of stress.
Not only are we beginning to be able to actually see the changes in the brain from practicing yoga & meditation but advancements in molecular & cellular biology & science are beginning to show biomedical changes in our neurons & the functioning of the body at both cellular & molecular levels. Almost every week there is a new body of evidence being published about how yoga impacts our body at this micro level.
Relaxation occurs when our body & our mind is in a state of balance. Yoga helps create space in both our body & our mind which encourages the flow of energy.
Yoga has such a positive effect by increasing inner peace, contentment, happiness & self awareness. It helps to reduce blood pressure & heart rate, increase oxygen utilization, improve digestion, the immune system, hormone balance & better neuro-muscular coordination.
If you practice yoga, you will know this just from stepping onto your yoga mat: a sense of peace & calm begins before you even start practicing as your body & mind are aware of what is to come.
The physical poses (asanas) all have different benefits, stimulating different systems in the body: standing poses strengthen leg muscles, open the hip, flex the back & improve circulation; forward bends are calming & restorative; backbends increase flexibility in the spine, stimulate the central nervous system & may help deal with negative emotions (possibly because we are opening the heart chakra…but scientific advancements have not quite reached the stage where we can confirm the energy centres, the chakras or the flow of energy between them, so let’s not delve into that right now!).
So this brings us neatly back to inversions & the scientific research to support the claims behind the benefits of inversions. Dr Fishman notes that inversions improve bone density which he attributes to the muscles working against gravity.
Reversing the effects of gravity on the body has a profound physiological effect on the body. In 2000 Nasa reported that when humans enter zero gravity it causes severe biomedical problems: the sense of balance is destroyed, blood floods upwards speeding up the heart, muscles waste & bone mass drops.
On earth, gravity weighs us down & as the year’s progress so does the damage: varicose veins & hemorrhoids, the heart falters & more. The ancient yogis called gravity ‘the silent enemy’.
So by upending ourselves, we reverse the effects of gravity. Our body is made up of 60% water, when we upend ourselves, the tissue fluids of our lower body drain more effectively than during sleep, helping to clear congestion. David Coulter who taught anatomy at the University of Minnesota said, “If you can remain in an inverted posture for just 3-5 minutes, the blood will not only drain quickly to the heart, but tissue fluids will flow more efficiently into the veins & lymph channels of the lower extremities & of the abdominal & pelvic organs, facilitating a healthier exchange of nutrients & wastes between cells & capillaries” Couldn’t have said it better myself!
There are 4 major systems in the body: cardiovascular, lymphatic, nervous & endocrine. Inversions give the heart a break & are a healthier way, as we age, of getting benefits to the circulatory system because you don’t have to run really hard to get the heart pumping circulating blood down to the feet & back again.
We used to believe inversions flooded the brain with freshly oxygenated blood but we are now beginning to understand that the brain is protected from an influx of blood which would overwhelm its delicate structures. However, we are beginning to understand inversions could affect the movement & production of cerebrospinal fluid which is the juice of the nervous system.
The lymph system, like the heart relies on muscular movement & gravity to facilitate its performance. When you are upside down the lymph system is stimulated which strengthens your immune system.
The effect of inversions on the endocrine system is the least well documented or understood. Some believe shoulder stand helps regulate the thyroid gland but it has not been proven; whilst the benefits to the pineal & pituitary glands from headstands have also not been confirmed.
At the end of the day, a lot can be gained from being upside down, simply because by having a different physical view of the world can change our mental & emotional viewpoint too.
I think the important thing with inversions, whether you believe in their physiological effects or not, is not to rush into them. Take your time & only work with a good teacher who can guide you safely into & out of the poses. There are plenty of other ways you can practice inversions: legs up the wall (viparita karini) is deeply restorative & doesn’t tax the spine or the neck. Same with bridge pose (setu bada), downward dog, standing forward fold.
So there you have it, the science (in very lay-man’s terms!) behind the enormous positive effects practicing yoga can have on your body, brain, nervous system & immune system. Whilst we may not have ‘proved’ that yoga slows the aging process, if you stack up all the positive impact it does have it certainly suggests it could very well do so.
Check out this Uplift video for more information:
https://uplift.tv/2017/watch-science-behind-yoga/
Or these articles for more science based facts:
https://www.yogajournal.com/practice/everybody-upside-down
https://www.gaiam.com/blogs/discover/the-science-behind-yoga
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/13-benefits-of-yoga#section13
And if you want to try inversions in a safe environment check out my inversion & backbend workshops which will be coming soon – see www.myananda.co.uk for more information or email me at alex@myananda.co.uk.