7 Ways Yoga Helps Mental Health
May is Mental Health Awareness month. As a certified yoga therapist, I’m a firm believer in the power of yoga for mental health.
Yoga therapy takes a holistic view of wellness, meaning we’re focused on supporting your whole self – mind, body and lifestyle. Yoga therapy uses yoga principles to help you get to a place where your whole person feels better.
That said, yoga therapy should NOT be your primary form of health care. It exists to complement other types of care, not replace them. If you’re struggling with your mental or physical health, please talk to a licensed health care provider first. From there, if you’d like to add a yoga therapist to your care team, please seek out a knowledgeable yoga therapist who can assist in your healing journey and help you figure out which yoga practices will work best for you.
Here are 7 Ways Yoga Helps Mental Health
Yoga teaches you to be present with yourself.
One of the biggest things yoga does to support mental health is helps you grow mindful awareness of how you actually feel mentally, and then how those feelings show up in your body. By tuning into what your body is telling you, you can develop curiosity and create a feeling of safety around what you feel. As a result, you can begin to respond differently, rewiring your patterns of thought and behavior. This is so vital, and can be done through any aspect of a yoga practice – from asana, to meditation and breathwork – with the guidance of a knowledgeable yoga professional.
Yoga is great for nervous system health.
When you’re doing yoga, you’re often learning to find a sense of calm and improving how you respond to stress. This can help reduce some of the actual stressors in your life – which isn’t just helpful if you’re struggling with your mental health. We all experience stress, so we can all grow from working with our nervous systems.
Yoga therapy can help you sleep better.
Better sleep is another important way yoga helps mental health. A yoga therapist can help with sleep using movement, meditation, breathwork, and more. A yoga therapist trained in Ayurvedic principles and sleep-supporting yoga practices can help you troubleshoot your routines and sleep environment. We can also teach you tools that you can use to help you fall asleep more easily, get better quality sleep, and return to sleep after waking.
Build a positive relationship with your body by doing yoga.
Changing your relationship with your body is another reason to do yoga for mental health. By moving in ways that feel good, you can develop a more positive relationship with your own body. A yoga therapy practice allows you to let you tell your brain, “It’s all good. I’m ok in here.” As well as improving your self-image and self-esteem, this can help reduce symptoms like pain and tension that can contribute to poor mental health.
Yoga helps you break out of autopilot mode.
Much of yoga therapy involves feeling what’s happening in your body. When you become more aware of your breath, movement, emotions, and sensations, you’re using the sensing part of your brain to connect to the present moment. This can help your brain shift out of “autopilot mode”, allowing you to be more exploratory and create healthy changes. Studies have shown that people struggling with mental health often have a less robust connection to their sensing brain, so this aspect of yoga can be particularly helpful.
Yoga nurtures your ability to feel good.
Human brains are wired with a negativity bias, meaning we instinctively pay more attention to unpleasant experiences. This makes sense because negative experiences require us to change something or to learn from our mistakes. However, it does mean that we need to be more intentional about noticing and creating opportunities to feel good, especially when we’re using yoga for mental health reasons.
Through yoga, we can start to teach ourselves to pay attention to the positive experiences more often, and to do things in a way that feels pleasant. Yoga helps us feel good in body and mind. Now, this doesn’t mean to ignore the hard stuff – but rather to expand your capacity to feel the good things alongside the bad.
Yoga empowers you to change how you feel.
This might be the most important way yoga helps mental health. When you pay attention to how you feel before, during and after a yoga practice, you’re growing your felt experience that you can actually influence how you feel. You can then start to take action towards feeling better, one moment at a time.
Growing a sense of empowerment is one of the biggest ways in which yoga therapy makes a difference. Even when you’re struggling with mental or physical health, it’s still possible to notice small changes in response to your actions. These small shifts can be powerful if we let them, because they show up in choices we make daily, from how we breathe and move to how we rest. And they do make a difference.
Want to know more about yoga for mental health?
If you’re curious about how yoga therapy might support your mental health, I hope this post has given you a helpful starting point. Whether you’re just beginning or deepening your practice, know that yoga offers gentle, powerful tools to support your wellbeing.
If you’re considering adding yoga to your care routine, I encourage you to connect with an experienced teacher or yoga therapist—someone who understands the nuances of the practice and can support you with compassion and insight.
Take really, really good care—this month and always.
May we all be balanced and well.
