Yoga, Mindfulness, and Exercise…Oh My!

Hey guys! Welcome back to yet another blog post…this week has been fun. I got to take a deep dive into how yoga, mindfulness, and exercise affect our bodies (both differently or similarly), as well as how they affect our mental health. So, when conducting further research on mindfulness last week (through Pub Med), I stumbled upon the following research article: https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2019/0515/p620.html.

The article compiles a plethora of research conclusions on the affects of yoga, meditation, and exercise on depression and anxiety disorders. Specifically, the article performed a meta-analysis (or synthesized data from numerous independent studies that posed the same research question) which pulled from research results relating to adults with anxiety or depression disorders. A very summarized version of the results are as follows: exercise proved most beneficial as an adjunctive (an additional or supplemental) form of therapy for depression (MDD) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), yoga could be used as the adjunctive form of therapy for depression (MDD) and other anxiety disorders, including Panic Disorder, and mindfulness-based meditation proved to be beneficial as a adjunctive form of therapy for those with depression disorders.

I was particularly intrigued by how the anxiety or depressive disorder each activity proved most beneficial for varied. This got me thinking…perhaps each activity has a different effect on the body! I have already done research on how mindfulness affects the body (see my previous post on the benefits of mindfulness on the mind and body), but I wanted to compare those results to how exercise and yoga affect the body too. In summation, exercise releases endorphins—which make us happy, reduces stress receptors in the hippocampus, as well as increasing the size of the hippocampus (which is similar to mindfulness!!) which contributes to a better memory and attention span. Also, with the increased circulation that comes with being active, the brain gets more blood and oxygen to help it work to its full capacity! For yoga, it’s definitely more difficult to find conclusive studies on its physiological benefits. This is because the studies that have been done rely on subjective means for measuring benefits, and have non-diverse sample sizes. However, yoga can be broken down into three main parts: the physical exercises, the breathing exercises, and the spiritual contemplation that comes when participating in yoga. By doing this, it is clear that yoga may have a lot of the same health benefits as exercise and mindfulness, as it is essentially a combination of the two! Thus, it also releases endorphins, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and improves strength & flexibility.

When comparing these results, they each vary in some way, but also have many overlapping benefits. For mindfulness and exercise, for example, both increase the size of the hippocampus. For yoga and mindfulness, both activate the parasympathetic nervous system. This research into the affects on the body inspired me to create an experiment of my own! Keeping my overarching question of how to make these coping mechanisms accessible for teens in mind, I found myself wondering if there was a difference between the health benefits for adults (which is the age group that the studies I looked into surveyed) and for teens and kids. So, this coming week, I will survey my family (which includes two teens and two adults) as we participate in various forms of exercise! This is by no means a valid, air-tight study, but simply a form of self-experimentation or trial run for how students and adults with jobs incorporate exercise into their lives differently. Hopefully, the results will be interesting! I look forward to the coming weeks of my independent study.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog, and I hope you learned something today! As always, please consider subscribing so you can follow my journey learning about the science of wellbeing. Have an amazing day 🙂

Resources I used in my research:

https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/basics/pa-health/index.htm#brain-health

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22933142/

https://lifesciences.byu.edu/how-exercise-affects-your-brain

Cool video to watch below! Credits: ed.ted.com