How Yoga Can Impact Your Mental Health

I’m reading an article on all of the health benefits of Yoga. Here is a partial excerpt From Dr. Joe Mercola :

Yoga’s Impact on Your Mental Health

Yoga has also been shown to help with a variety of common psychiatric disorders.^19,²⁰ A meta-analysis²¹ of more than 100 studies looking at the effect of yoga on mental health found the practice to have a positive effect on:

Mild depression

Sleep problems

Schizophrenia (among patients using medication)

ADHD (among patients using medication)

Some of the studies suggest yoga can have a similar effect to antidepressants and psychotherapy, by influencing neurotransmitters and boosting serotonin. More recent research has also found that yoga reduces anxiety and aggression among prison inmates. After doing yoga once a week for 10 weeks, participants reported feeling less stressed, and also scored better on tests of executive control, indicating a higher degree of thoughtfulness and attention to their surroundings. As noted by Scientific American:²²

“Several studies have shown that yoga helps to improve symptoms of anxiety and depression in prisoners, and now a study at the University of Oxford has found that it also increases focus and, crucially, decreases impulsivity—a known factor in much prison violence…‘Attention and impulsivity are very important for this population, which has problems dealing with aggressive impulses,’ says Oxford psychologist Miguel Farias, one of the study’s authors. With less anxiety and aggression, he notes, prisoners should be better able to reintegrate into society when they are released.”