Yoga is a mind-body practice that produces positive physiological and psychological outcomes. It promotes balance, stability and flexibility, and alleviates physical symptoms related to depression, anxiety and PTSD. Practicing yoga boosts mood, promoting resilience and self-regulation along the way.

Research shows that yoga significantly decreases production of cortisol, the principal stress hormone: it might even help more than some types of psychotherapy.

Reduces Stress and Anxiety

Yoga can have a profound effect on mental health. It does much more than the moderate physical exercise it contains to reduce depression and anxiety. It brings balance between left and right hemispheres of the brain through patterns of activation on each side, teaches various mindfulness and self-compassion practices, and develops connections between the people who practise it.

By lowering cortisol levels and by training your parasympathetic nervous system, yoga helps to dampen your body’s stress response system. In addition, slowing your breathing, especially when doing deep diaphragmatic breaths, can help you to relax, turning on what doctors have called the relaxation response system.

For example, the findings of a wide range of randomised studies improve the evidence that yoga practitioners have reduced levels of both state and trait anxiety, and may therefore assist these individuals in finding ways to relax and gain greater emotional control. Yoga has already been found to show promise as an add-on to medication in the treatment of depression or anxiety disorders, and patients with PTSD have found it to be a potentially beneficial adjunctive treatment inserted into their course of therapy. We still need to see more robust randomised controlled trials done on this topic – if yoga is inserted into already effective treatments for various clinical conditions, many more individuals might see a greater benefit, as well as a better outcome.

Boosts GABA Levels

Yoga helps to relieve stress and depression by stimulating the release of mood-elevating Gamma-AminoButyric Acid (GABA), the principal inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain, which down-regulates neural activity toward calmness, balance, pain relief and sleepiness.

Recently, scientists from the Boston University School of Medicine and McLean Hospital discovered that yoga practice increases GABA, making it a potential intervention for depression and anxiety disorders, both of which are helped when GABA levels go up in the brain. For instance, following a 12-week randomised controlled trial of yoga by major depressive disorder participants, their GABA levels began to even out towards the levels of a health (HC) group.

Yoga breathing and postures stimulate vagal nerves to boost GABA levels, much like many pharmacologic treatments, one class per week might keep GABA levels elevated for PTSD sufferers; studies suggest yoga could be as effective.

Improves Focus and Concentration

Studies also show that yoga can be used to sharpen narrower aspects of attention. This might be due to the way it combines a spontaneous metacognitive thinking with a minute bodily proprioception inherent with every position or stretch. Finally, daily yoga practices can be used to subside negative affective states, such as depression or stress, that typically impair cognitive performance.

Yoga has also been shown to reverse some age-related cognitive declines: in one study, older people showed less shrinkage of the hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus (important for memory and sharpness) and other brain regions compared with non-yoga controls.

More and more therapists are recommending yoga to their clients – and I can see why! Yoga offers powerful yet natural healing capacities such as reducing stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD and improving mental health and wellness. Along with conventional psychotherapeutic interventions, yoga can be used as an adjunct therapy where emotional wounds are healed and self-esteem lifted.

Improves Sleep

Sleep is a basic requirement for good health. Poor sleep is related to weight gain and chronic diseases, such as arthritis. Studies have reported that yoga significantly improves sleep in populations, ranging from children to the elderly – yoga practitioners sleep better and stay asleep longer with less disturbances in sleep patterns.

Because yoga can increase mental clarity and strength and decrease stress by decreasing cortisol secretion (your stress hormone), regular practice actually can train your body to respond healthfully to stressful stimuli by activating the parasympathetic nervous system.

Such is yoga’s affective potency as an antidepressant substitute that psychotherapists are beginning to encourage their clients to engage with yoga in the world beyond the therapy room — based on studies finding that adding a yoga-based programme might curb symptoms while enhancing mood in significant ways.