Modi has shown the power of yoga to unite the world
Yoga is a 5,000 year old Indian practice practised today by several hundred million people worldwide including 20.4 million adults in the United States alone. Yoga studios in Manhattan and London may soon outnumber Starbucks and McDonalds outlets - New York’s Central Park was the site of a recent yoga gathering of some 10,000 people and thousands have practised yoga in unison at the Eiffel Tower in Paris for a “la white yoga” session. Yoga’s holistic goal of promoting psychical and mental health is widely held in popular belief.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visionary effort to get the United Nations to declare an International Yoga Day have now borne fruit. The resolution, co-sponsored by 175 UN member countries, brought together nations with often differing views such as the United States, Russia, and China, showing the power of yoga to unify people across all cultures. The goal of the resolution was that increasing knowledge of yoga would allow more people around the world to practice it and benefit from it.
However, this resolution also comes at a time that yoga has become such a cultural phenomenon that it has become difficult for physicians and patients to differentiate legitimate claims from hype. There are more than a hundred forms of yoga ranging from traditional to wacky such as “nude yoga” (if you thought tight yoga wear exposed your cellulite, wait till you do this one), “cannabis yoga” (while smoking weed), “doga” (with man’s best friend, a dog), “paddle yoga” (on a surf paddle board), “aerial-yoga” (anti-gravity while hanging circus style from ropes), and “karoake yoga” (while channeling your inner Kishore Kumar). People don’t blink an eye when they hear of “hot yoga” (practiced in a steaming sauna at 35 Celsius)!
Most individuals already know that yoga produces some kind of a calming effect. Individually, people feel better after doing the physical exercise. Mentally, people feel calmer, sharper, maybe more content. My group at Duke University recently pulled all the literature together on various forms of yoga and meditation practices to see if there’s enough evidence that the benefits individual people notice can be used to improve brain fitness and even prevent or treat serious forms of mental illnesses. Our goal was to examine whether the evidence matched the promise.
The good news is that the research literature today on yoga is vast with studies showing benefits for yoga and meditation on virtually every aspect of human health as well as social and spiritual wellbeing. Yoga exercise affects many cellular and tissue process in the body such as neurotransmitters, inflammation, oxidative stress, lipids, and growth factors. Indeed studies also suggest that yoga practice can induce changes in expression of thousands of genes and can lengthen our telomeres (a marker of longevity). Both the physical poses (asanas) as well as meditative and breathing practices (pranayama) have unique benefits for the heart, immune system, brain and mind.
Meditation induces a relaxation response by activating the parasympathetic system which helps build resilience against stress, boosts our immunity and sharpens our attention, creativity and memory. Studies also find that yoga also enhances our emotional wellbeing and reduces exaggerated stress responses through a calming effect on the amygdala (a brain region that serves as our emotional thermostat).
Yoga also appears to affect our brain structure. A study from Harvard using MRI scans found that regular meditation can slow age-related brain shrinkage to the point where a 50-year old regular meditator’s brain may be similar to that of a 30-year old non-meditator. In another study researchers showed that just by looking at a person’s brain MRI scans (without any other knowledge of the person) they could differentiate a meditator’s brain from a non-meditator’s brain with over 93 per cent accuracy!
We also examined 16 high-quality (“randomized controlled”) studies that tested the benefits of yoga for mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, sleep complaints, etc. Yoga influences key elements of the brain thought to play a role in mental health in similar ways to that of antidepressants and psychotherapy. Benefits of the exercise were found for most mental health illnesses – e.g. yoga improved depression and anxiety (to same extent as antidepressants) and when combined with medication also improved quality of life of those with schizophrenia.
The research was published in the open-access journal, Frontiers in Psychiatry .
So what does it mean? Well, a lot.
Depression alone affects more than 350 million people globally and is the leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Stress and mental illness are also a major cause of work place productivity loss. Obesity and diabetes and heart disease are rising fast as our lifestyle changes. Cases of Alzheimer’s disease are expected to triple in coming decades as we live longer. The search for improved preventive strategies, including on-drug based, to meet the holistic needs of patients is of paramount importance and we need more research into yoga as a global priority.
There are many benefits associated with practising yoga for improving health, including, fewer side effects, relatively low cost, generally good access and the improvement of physical fitness. Indeed if the promise of yoga on the body-mind was found in a drug, it would be the best selling medication world-wide. For most of us, yoga should be a part of our daily routine to enhance our physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing. If you have medical problems, do consult a doctor before starting any vigorous asana practice and be sensible – don’t try to become a yoga master in one day.
I am also not suggesting that people with medical or mental illnesses self-treat themselves with yoga and throw away their medications – but that yoga appears very promising both as a primary preventive approach and in combination with regular medical treatments for many health problems, especially lifestyle related disorders.
We have now come full circle – research studies are now confirming the benefits of what Vedic sages proposed thousands of years ago. But most studies of yoga still are very small in size and there is a lack of large multicenter collaborative projects – in contrast to studies of popular heart or cancer medicines where studies often enroll and follow thousands of patients. This too is changing.
The Chopra Center in the US, in collaboration with several leading US universities (Harvard, Scripps, Duke, University of California, Mt Sinai) is spearheading a landmark study (Self Directed Biological Transformation Initiative – SBTI) of the effects of Ayurveda using the latest technologies such as genomics, metabolomics, microbiomics and telomere analyses. The results will be available soon.
With Prime Minister Modi and India having taken the lead to get the U.N. to declare June 21 as International Yoga Day, it is timely for leading Indian and Western scientists to collaborate and lead the next generation of research into yoga.
Dr Doraiswamy’s talk on Yoga