How To Create An Anti-Anxiety Yoga Practice

Anxiety is very common state of being for the modern person, especially in these unstable and chaotic times.

Most of the time, anxiety originates from our thoughts and feelings, as we try to cope with our personal experiences or the world at large. Thoughts and feelings that — over a period of time — become trapped in the body and throw the body systems off balance as the body tries to address to them.

But anxiety can also originate from the body, if we aren’t eating healthily, not exercising, not breathing well, not getting enough sunlight and vitamin D, for example. But either way, anxiety is best addressed on both the psycho-spiritual level and the physical level in order to be remedied, because the mind and body are interactive and reciprocal. One effects the other.

Of course, there are also cases in which anxiety can originate primarily at the chemical level and needs to be addressed at that level, at least in part. But even in those more rare cases, the ideas offered here will still be quite helpful.

The good news is, there are many natural things — and often quite simple things — that we can do to help keep ourselves in a healthy body with a healthy mind. Modifying our yoga practice to accommodate these states is one of them. So in this article, I’d like to give you specific ways to modify your yoga practice to mitigate anxiety. (For how to modify for depression, please read this article.)

THE NATURE OF ANXIETY & HOW IT EFFECTS THE BODY, MIND, & SPIRIT

Anxiety is a state of being characterized by feelings of worry, nervousness, fear, unease, or even terror. It’s mostly associated with the future and a fear of the future.

In this state, we feel overwhelmed. We have a hard time focusing, and a hard time making decisions. Anxiety can arise from a lost sense of power, leading to fear. From a general fear of the unknown. From overstimulation. Or from a lost sense of belonging to either your fellow human beings or to the Earth, or both, leaving you feeling ungrounded and unrooted.

Anxiety — especially prolonged periods in this state — compromises all the major systems of the body, including the immune system, the nervous system, the endocrine system, the circulatory system, and the digestive system.

Anxiety weakens the immune system because the body’s stress responders get overused. Extended periods of anxiety also affect our sleep quality, which further compromises the immune system as well as our ability to think clearly.

Because anxiety also impacts our eating habits, it taxes the digestive system and impairs our ability to digest food and absorb nutrients. For example, it’s common to overeat when we’re anxious because when we eat, the body’s energy and attention is moved away from the brain and into the digestive system — a process that rather quickly lowers the heart rate and slows down the mind. That’s why we do it. But once the body is done digesting, the mind starts spinning again. Then we stress-eat again, and so on and so forth, putting the body into a constant state of extremes and taxing the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our calming nervous system.

Because anxiety frays the nervous system, not only do our thoughts spin even more as anxiety becomes a body event, we also start to feel quite sensitive to visual and auditory stimulation. This can cause us to feel more and more isolated in our need to avoid such stimulants.

And lastly, because anxiety increases our blood pressure and our metabolism, and shallows our breath, it begins to create a feeling of panic in the body itself.

All of these physiological events collide with the anxious mind state, and trap us in a negative, escalating cycle.

HOW TO APPROACH AN ANTI-ANXIETY YOGA PRACTICE

Our beautiful yoga practice can help with all of the above. It can be used to soothe and rebalance the nervous system, rebalance the endocrine system, fortify the immune system, aid digestion and nutrient absorption, and create the inner strength, discipline, self-care and self-awareness that will help us approach our thoughts and feelings in healthier ways.

When practicing yoga to mitigate anxiety, you want to do three things primarily. You want to:

• cultivate a grounding focus
• deepen your breath
• and activate the parasympathetic nervous system

As a general strategy or approach, anxiety may need to first be met at its level of tension with vigorous work that will help drain the body of that tension and allow for deep restorative work in the latter phase of your practice. It’s also possible that you may respond immediately to very deep restorative work first, followed by a mid-phase of stronger work and full relaxation at the end.

As a yogi or yogini, your commitment to self-awareness will help you come to know which approach you need, but those are a couple of strategies to consider. Pay attention to what’s working and what’s not working and adjust your strategy as needed. In other words, if you try to approach your practice with restorative poses first and you can’t relax or can’t focus, try some rigorous work first instead to drain the excess energy.

Most importantly, accept where you are and work from where you are on any given day. That is self-love and self care, and will help you make your way back to center.

PRACTICAL MODIFICATIONS FOR AN ANTI-ANXIETY YOGA PRACTICE

1. Since focus is a challenge in the anxious state, make the one breath in front of you the primary focus of your practice. More so than the poses themselves if necessary.

2. Consider starting your practice in a child’s pose, possibly a child’s pose over a bolster. This quieting, humble pose begins to release tension in back, neck, and shoulders — areas where tension tends to accumulate when we’re stressed or anxious. Child’s pose also encourages deeper breathing by pushing more air into the back lungs, where the majority of our lung tissue resides. As I mentioned, anxiety shallows the breath which can create a vicious cycle of fear and panic. So when working to counter anxiety, you want to create a yoga practice that reverses that cycle, with the help of deep, even, nervous-system-soothing breaths.

3. Be mindful of how you’re holding your eyes. The eyes greatly influence the brain so you want to keep your eye muscles nice and relaxed, the gaze soft the whole time, to help relax the brain. I advise against pointing the eyes up in any of the poses in your anti-anxiety practice, as this is stimulating to the brain and the nervous system. In anxiety, you’re already overstimulated, so you want to quiet the brain and the nervous system down instead. So keep the gaze soft in general, and consider modifying your practice by turning the eyes down at times. Not closed, but slightly turned down in a calming gesture.

4. Incorporate poses that require extra focus. One-legged balancing poses are a good example, such as vrksasana tree pose, natarajasana dancer’s pose, or any other pose in this category.

5. When practicing with anxiety, you might take your arms down in standing poses like your warrior one or your tall lunges. Arms up stimulates the heart. Taking them down can bring some ease and quiet to the system, while still allowing these poses to energize the legs, bring energy lower into the body and ground you.

6. Avoid doing any exhilarating backbends when you’re feeling anxious. Instead, keep any backbends you do on the more mild side and do them with a sattvic, even quality.

7. To help activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the calming nervous system, you’ll want to include ample forward bends and restorative poses in the later phase of your anti-anxiety practice.

8. In the back of the neck are some readers of blood flow called baroreceptors. When these baroreceptors detect an increase in blood flow, they send signals to the system to slow your heart rate, and relax your blood vessels to lower your blood pressure, which switches your nervous system to relaxation mode. Therefore, poses that stimulate the baroreceptors in the back of the neck are a good choice for an anti-anxiety practice. These include inverted or partially inverted poses where your neck is flexed (that is, your chin is pointing down toward your chest) such as shoulderstand, plow pose, or bridge pose.

9. Viparita Karani, legs up the wall pose, is another excellent choice for anxiety relief. The slow drain from this pose of the heavy blood in the legs towards the heart, lungs, and brain is extremely helpful against insomnia, another common symptom of anxiety. This pose alone, for 20 minutes or so, has helped many of my students through periods of insomnia.

10. When you get to your savasana, consider placing a blanket or a couple of yoga sandbags over your pelvis. This will help ground the body down and encourage it toward quietude. Consider also wrapping the eyes and/or head in a soft scarf to block out the light and activate the pineal gland, which will help re-regulate your sleep cycle.

11. And lastly, when anxiety is running high, I advise against practicing with any music. You want to reduce stimulation. The only music I’d suggest is something very grounding and simple, without much movement to it. Something with low, grounding tones, if anything at all.

You might use this information to design your own at-home anti-anxiety practice, or to make modifications in a class that you attend. If you’re interested in additional tips for an anti-anxiety yoga practice, you might enjoy this mini-course, which includes additional tips and a full-length anti-anxiety practice.

Lastly, I want to acknowledge that there’s so much information out there about what to do about anxiety, that that itself can be overwhelming. The truth is, lots of the options work; there’s not just one magic answer out there. I’ve found that the key is to pick one thing and commit to it, or one thing and keep your focus on it. Just one thing. That will get you feeling more confident about your ability to take care of yourself, which is the most important thing of all.

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This article was originally published on Julia’s blog here.