Changing the Brain's Stressful Habits

by Nina

Peeling Paint by Melina Meza

Yesterday I read this article Yoga: Changing the Brain’s Stressful Habits in Psychology Today by a neurobiologist, Alex Korb, who took his first yoga class (which, surprise, surprise, turned out to be much more difficult than he was expecting!) and had a little epiphany:

“I came to realize that yoga works not because the poses are relaxing, but because they are stressful. It is your attempts to remain calm during this stress that create yoga's greatest neurobiological benefit.”

Ignoring for the moment that fact that this dude obviously knows very little about yoga (duh, some yoga poses ARE relaxing) and has only experienced an active asana class—from a single teacher yet—I hope he does his scientific research a little more thoroughly—I found what he wrote rather intriguing.

“Your brain tends to react to discomfort and disorientation in an automatic way, by triggering the physiological stress response and activating anxious neural chatter between the prefrontal cortex and the more emotional limbic system. The stress response itself increases the likelihood of anxious thoughts, like "Oh god, I'm going to pull something," or "I can't hold this pushup any longer". And in fact, your anxious thoughts themselves further exacerbate the stress response.”

In the past, we’ve written extensively about how to use yoga to trigger the relaxation response (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga) to help you manage your stress. In this case, we’re not talking about “stressful” practices but rather relaxing ones, whether that means restorative or supported inverted poses, meditation, breath practices, Savasana with a mental focus, or yoga nidra. But most of us also know from experience that an active asana class that includes some very challenging poses can relieve stress. We’ve mentioned that in that past, explaining that an active yoga practice is a form of exercise so it releases endorphins, the allover stretching you experience releases held stress from your body, and the mindfulness you bring to your practice gives you respite from your everyday concerns—and we’re not taking that back. However, this idea Dr. Korb expresses that by doing challenging yoga poses mindfully, with attention to breath and physical sensations, you’re teaching your nervous system to react more calmly to stressful situations is an interesting one:

“Even actions as simple as changing your posture, relaxing the muscles on your face, or slowing your breathing rate, can affect the activity in your brain (beyond, of course, the required activity to make the action).  These changes are often transient, but can be long-lasting, particularly if they entail changing a habit.”

This reminded me of what I have already written about samskaras (the ingrained habits of the mind) in my posts Meditation and Brain Strength and A Pathway in the Mind. In case you haven't read those posts, here is Stephen Cope’s definition of a samskara:

“Yogis discovered that consciousness is dominated by highly conditioned patterns of reactivity—patterns that are deeply grooved, and very difficult to change once established. 



“Every action based on craving or aversion leaves a subliminal impression on the mind. These impressions are called samskaras, or literally, “subliminal activators.” Yogis sometimes think of these subliminal activators as being pressed into the “hot wax of the mind.”



“Samskaras are like little tracks, little vectors, little ruts in the muddy road. The next time the car travels that road, these muddy ruts will have hardened into permanent fixtures, and the car wheels will want to slide into them. Indeed it’s easier to steer right into them than to try to avoid them.”

It seems to me that what Korb is saying here is that by using our breath and mindfulness to stay relaxed as we encounter “stressful” yoga poses, we are unconsciously retraining our nervous systems to stop reacting in our habitual way to stress. And that this retraining can help us handle stress more effectively in our everyday lives.

“Some people might think that the stress response is an innate reflex and thus can't be changed.  To clarify, the response is partly innate and partly learned in early childhood.  Yes, the stress response comes already downloaded and installed on your early operating system.  However, this tendency is enhanced, by years of reinforcement.  In particular, you absorb how those around you, particularly your parents, react to stressful situations.  Their reactions get wired into your nervous system. However, just because a habit is innate, and then reinforced, does not mean it is immune to change. Almost any habit can be changed, or at least improved, through repeated action of a new habit.”

This seems like a worthwhile way to approach the practice of active asana, especially if you’re someone who habitually “stresses out” when encountering difficulty. I’ve worked this way myself in my own yoga practice, as I’ve faced down my fears of doing poses that scared me, such as Headstand in the middle of the room, and poses that were difficult and stressful for me, such as Upward Bow pose (Urdva Dhanurasana). So I’ve long been an advocate of incorporating challenging poses—and those vary from person to person—into your practice for this very reason. So if you’re not already doing this, as you notice a stress reaction to a new pose, to a pose you already hate (yeah, that happens to the best of us) or to holding a pose for a longer time than usual, focus on slowing your breath, especially your exhalations. It’s nice to know that this will not only make your experience of the dreaded pose more pleasant, but that you’ll also be retraining your nervous system to handle stress with more equanimity.

Okay, now that I’ve said some nice things about Korb’s epiphany about how “yoga” works, it’s time to return to some snark. Because now that he’s figured it all out, Korb concludes by saying:

“The good news is that you don't actually have to go to a class to practice yoga. The poses most people associate with yoga are just a particular way of practicing yoga called the asana practice ("asana" translates to "pose"). The asana practice challenges you in a specific way, but life itself offers plenty of challenges on its own".

Well, thank you very much Dr. I haven’t even finished my post-doc yet! I’m so glad you learned everything you needed to know about yoga in just a few classes with one teacher. I, on the other hand, have been taking yoga classes for decades, and continue to read and study on my own as well. And while I agree that you can use your breath and mindfulness to retrain your nervous system while facing life’s challenges, essentially practicing a form of “yoga” outside the yoga room, I’m pretty sure there is more to yoga than just that. I asked Dr. Ram Rao—a scientist who not only has finished his post doc, but who has also trained to become a yoga teacher—what he thought of this article, and here’s what he said:

People practice yoga not for the challenge per se, but for its overall profound effects, which they do not get from other life's situations.

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