The effects of yoga on depression may help you manage and suppress your symptoms. Harvard Health Publications says mental and physical health are essentially equivalent, and yoga offers a relatively low-risk, high-yield approach for improving overall health. Yoga may improve your mood and fight depression by reducing perceptions of stress, anxiety and fatigue, while enhancing your energy and sense of well-being.
Stress Response
Yoga can help modulate elevated stress responses, which may cause or worsen depression. Yoga can help control your stress response by decreasing physiological arousal, which involves lowering your heart rate, easing respiration and lowering your blood pressure. Yoga uses controlled breathing exercises that may also improve depression. Your immune system activates stress hormones when you perceive stress. Cyclical breathing patterns involved in sudarshan kriya yoga may improve depression by suppressing stress hormones, such as cortisol and corticotropin.
Brain Chemicals
Practicing yoga may improve depression by increasing levels of brain chemicals that combat depression. Depression and other mood disorders are associated with low gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, levels and commonly treated with drugs designed to increase GABA. A May 2007 "Science Daily" report on the results of a Boston University School of Medicine study suggests yoga elevates GABA levels in your brain. Researchers found that GABA levels were 27 percent higher in test subjects who did an hour of yoga than in subjects who read for an hour.
Tamas
Practicing yoga may reduce symptoms of depression by getting rid of tamas and reordering your life force. Tamas are associated with darkness and delusional states of mind in Hinduism. Tasmic depression occurs when you have too many tamas and lack life force or "prana." You may have trouble getting out of bed, or feel lethargic and hopeless if you have tasmic depression. According to Dr. Timothy McCall, physical symptoms of tasmic depression may include slumped shoulders, collapsed chests and sunken eyes. Yoga that stimulates the body, such as deep inhalations and backbend poses, may improve depression by fighting tamas and restoring prana.
Rajas
Yoga may help improve depression by fighting rajas. Rajas are associated with passion and activity, and rajasic depression results from and overabundance of rajas. This form of depression is associated with anxiety and restlessness. Symptoms of rajasic depression may include stiffness in your body, racing or scattered thoughts, agitation and hardening around your eyes. Fidgeting, darting eyes and difficulty exhaling fully may also occur with rajasic depression. Vigorous yoga practices, such as sun salutations, can suppress rajas by focusing your attention and burning off nervous energy.
