Yoga Solutions for Anxiety

by Nina

In the last few of weeks, two different women I know told me they were having panic attacks. As their life circumstances were very different as were their symptoms, the private lessons I gave them ended up being very different as well. That’s the beauty of yoga (and the private lesson), which allows you to customize your solutions to a particular person’s needs and concerns. But before I started to write about my yoga solutions for anxiety, I felt some background about anxiety and how yoga helps would be useful. So I asked Baxter to write a general post about the topic, which we put up on the blog yesterday (see 9/11 Anxiety and Yoga). 

Now that you know something about how yoga helps with anxiety, I’ll tell you what I explained to both women about the basic strategy for combating anxiety and panic attacks. For each of them, we needed to come up with two things:

1. One or more techniques for heading off an anxiety or panic attack when it occurs. This is a short-term goal that can help you deal with your current condition more effectively.
2. A regular yoga practice to pacify the nervous system. Since anxiety and panic attacks are related to chronic stress, practicing some form of relaxation on a regular basis can help prevent the anxiety and/or panic attacks from occurring in the first place.

In the first case, the woman’s mother had recently died, after she had been at her mother’s bedside in the hospital for weeks. Her panic attack had come in the middle of the night, when she was alone in bed. After some experimenting, we decided together that the best technique for heading off a full-blown panic attack would be a breath practice where she consciously extended her exhalation. Although even just breath awareness can help with a panic attack or anxiety, having a specific exercise to do helped her focus more on her breath instead of just “watching” it. The good news is that she later reported back to me:

“The breathing has totally helped me, and it even helped me during the day when I was starting to freak out at a restaurant!”

For long-term relaxation, we experimented with some supported poses. In the end the one that suited her best was Legs Up the Wall pose, a supported inversion that triggers the relaxation response. Since she was very active already with ballet lessons and wasn’t a regular yoga practitioner, we decided that starting with a mini practice of this one pose for 10 to 20 minutes a day would be the best approach for her.

In the second case, the woman had recently moved to the Bay Area, away from family and friends, to go to graduate school and had already tended in the past to suffer from anxiety. Her panic attacks came in the daytime, when she was fully awake and getting ready to face her day in her new home. I also taught her the same breathing techniques of simple breath awareness and extending the exhalation but she didn’t seem interested in doing breath work. She was hyper and restless and wanted to do asana! And the thought of sitting still to meditate or lying down to practice breath awareness or yoga nidra made her feel even more anxious.

So for this woman, we decided the best strategy would be to do a very strong asana practice in the morning to head off the anxiety and to prepare herself for relaxation by tiring her out a little. I recommended sun salutations and standing poses possibly followed by forward bends (which some people find calming), but suggested that she stay away from backbends. Although backbends can be uplifting they also tend to energize you, and if you’re anxious and hyper that can be too much. Then I urged her to practice either a supported inversion or meditation at the end of her practice to pacify her nervous system. After trying every single supported inversion (see Inverted Poses), it turned out that the one that felt most comfortable and relaxing to her was a Supported Bridge pose with straight legs. I recommended that she practice this pose at the end of her practice from 10 to 20 minutes to pacify her nervous system.

As you can see from these two cases, yoga solutions for anxiety can greatly vary, depending on the person’s particular situation, yoga experience, and personal preferences. But as Baxter mentioned yesterday, there are three different possibilities for treating anxiety: pranayama, meditation, and asana. You can use them in any combination that works for you, and hopefully you’ll soon be able to reap both short-term and long-term benefits

Note that although a guided Savasana or yoga nidra can be tremendously helpful for anxiety (yoga nidra in particular has been very successful for treating veterans with PTSD), neither woman seemed inclined to try these practices. Having suffered from anxiety myself, I could understand that just the thought of lying down for a long period of time while you are awake is intolerable. However, if anyone out there is suffering for anxiety and wants to try either of these practices, click on the Audio Tracks tab at the top of the page to find Baxter’s relaxation tracks.