Friday Q&A: Yoga for Better Digestion

Q: I tend to suffer from digestive problems, so I was wondering whether there are any yoga poses that I could do after eating to improve my digestion?

A: Although Baxter and I wrote a post about how there are no hard and fast rules about how long to wait after eating to do yoga (see Friday Q&A: When to Eat), if you do tend to suffer from digestive problems, it is probably best for you to refrain from doing active poses immediately after eating.

However, there is one restorative yoga pose that you could try after eating to see if it provides any help, Reclined Cobbler’s pose (Supta Baddha Konasana). Reclined Cobbler’s pose is the classic pose for improving digestion (as well as providing relief for women with PMS or during menstruation).

Baxter includes this pose as the first pose in his three-pose sequence for improving digestion (or just general relaxation), Mini Restorative Sequence. And we just happen to have made our one and only video about how to do this pose!

If you suffer from digestive problems, it is probably best to skip the other two poses in the Mini Restorative Sequence unless you are practicing 11/2 to 2 hours after eating because forward bends, like Child’s pose, and inverted poses, like Legs Up the Wall pose, could cause acid reflux or discomfort. But do give the entire sequence a try sometime when you have safely digested your last meal to see if it can provide help in general.

Finally, many digestive problems are related to chronic stress (see Chronic Stress: An Introduction). So you could experiment with trying some form of conscious relaxation (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga) to calm your nervous system after you eat. After all, the opposite of the Stress response (Fight or Flight) isn’t called the Rest and Digest response for nothing! Rather than lying flat on your back for these practices, I recommend that you prop yourself up on a bolster, as shown in this version of Supported Relaxation pose (Savasana) so your head is higher than your heart, and your heart is higher than your stomach.

In general, pacifying your nervous system through conscious relaxation and gentle yoga practices may help enhance your digestion in the long run.

—Nina

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How Your Breath Affects Your Nervous System

by Baxter

When I read the posts of my fellow YFHA bloggers, I often learn new perspectives that might differ from my own as well as new information that I was previously unaware of. Reading the posts also highlights occasions where I could have been clearer or given better information on a particular topic. As an example, I have written about breath techniques and their effect on the autonomic nervous system, as did Timothy in his awesome follow-up post on the buzzing bee breath, Bhramari Pranayama with Mudras. And we often mention that extending or lengthening the exhalation triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, the Rest and Digest part of our nervous system’s balancing program. This made me realize that I could add a bit more detail to explain how that actually happens.

It turns out the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) that connects brain to body is a two-way street. If I am anxious and nervous or stressed out by events in my life or simply the thoughts about those events, my brain, via the nerves of the ANS, will likely turn on the Sympathetic part of that system (the Fight or Flight response), which could result in faster heart and breathing rates, and increases in blood pressure, to mention just two of the most obvious physiological changes.

But the cool thing is that the lungs and heart can feed back to the brain and essentially convince the brain that things are calm and peaceful, even when there are still stressful circumstances. One neat way this happens involves the relationship of the heart and lungs and the nerves between them. In each round of breath, during your inhalation, your heart gets stimulated to beat a little faster. Then during the exhalation that follows, your heart gets told to slow down a tad. The overall effect is very little change in the heart rate from minute to minute. But when you make one part of the breath cycle, either the inhale or the exhale, longer than the other, and you do this for several minutes, the accumulated effect is that you will either slow the heart rate down or speed it up from where you started. When you make the inhales longer than the exhales, for example, by using a two-second inhale and a one-second exhale, and you keep this up for several minutes, the heart rate will go a bit faster. This will send a feedback message to the brain that things need to activate more in the brain and body for whatever work there is to be done, stimulating the Sympathetic portion of the ANS.

With the very useful Bhramari breath Timothy expanded on Bhramari Breath with Mudras, we do the opposite. As we hum during the exhalation, the exhales get longer relative to the inhales, as when we do a 1:2 ratio breath practice without the humming. This new respiratory cycle begins to slow down the heart rate, sending a message to the brain that everything is more peaceful and calm than five minutes ago, allowing the brain to support this shift further by activating the Parasympathetic portion of the ANS (the Rest and Digest or Relaxation response) that goes back from brain to body.

Research has shown that the vagus nerve as well as certain chemical neurotransmitters account for these effects of breath patterns on heart rate and subsequently on shifting the balance between the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic parts of the ANS. Keep in mind that the ANS is trying to keep all background systems in balance and responding appropriately to ever-changing circumstances of our day.

I’m providing this information for those of you who want to go a bit deeper in your understanding of how breath patterns affect the nervous system balance and either excite the system or quiet it. Our conscious choice of breathing differently can shift us to a more desirable part of the ANS, either by stimulating the active Sympathetic branch or the quieting Parasympathetic branch.  Most of us need more of the latter, but not always!

For a little more background on how the Respiratory system influences the Cardiac system, which in turn influences the Autonomic Nervous System, see The human respiratory gate as well as Effects of yoga on the autonomic nervous system, gamma-aminobutyric-acid, and allostasis in epilepsy, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

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The Digestion System and Yoga

by Baxter 

Over the last 2 years, I have had the good fortune to act as faculty for the Niroga Institute’s Yoga Therapy Program in Berkeley, CA. As part of my teaching duties, I was asked to present and teach the group about yoga and the digestive system. This is a fairly daunting task, as the digestive system is a complex system that interconnects with our conscious mind, the unconscious portions of our nervous system via the autonomic systems sympathetic and parasympathetic systems (which we have discussed here on more than one occasion), and our immune and endocrine systems. Despite the enormity of the task, I came to be reminded of a wonderful fact about the digestive system: it has its own nervous system, called the enteric nervous system (ENS). Upon further investigation, I discovered that this system has a lot to do with helping to move food through the small and large intestines, affecting the fluid absorption from the gut, as well as local blood flow in the gut. The ENS is sometimes referred to as an independent gut brain, which seems quite cool. But this is not quite accurate, for while it does have an independent influence on the many gut activities, it interfaces profoundly with the autonomic nervous system and conscious mind as well.

Human Digestive System

In some ways, this is good news. As we have seen before when discussing yoga and stress, if we can influence the autonomic nervous system and shift the patterns of excess sympathetic stimulation to balanced stimulation, including appropriate amounts of parasympathetic stimulation, we can allow for the body to have adequate amounts of rest and replenishment. In fact one lay term for the parasympathetic system is the “rest and digest response!"

When we engage in a balanced yoga practice that includes active poses, resting poses, breath awareness and relaxation, an interesting thing happens: our digestive system often works more efficiently with less unwelcome symptoms (I’ll leave that to your own experience and imagination to figure out what those are!). So, although the digestive system itself is complex, our yoga practices quite elegantly can interface and support the best possible digestion, via our effect on the conscious mind and the background autonomic nervous system.

More specifically, consider restorative practices and yoga nidra when you know you are under lots of stress that could over-activate your sympathetic nervous system (your fight or flight response). If you’re in the Bay Area and would like to learn more about yoga and the digestive system, consider joining me on June 2nd at 4th Street Yoga in Berkeley, CA. See http://www.4thstreetyoga.com/workshops.html for information. 

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