POLYVAGAL THEORY | How yoga improves your ability to cope with stress
The three states of our nervous system.
Yoga is popular for many reasons. One of them is definitely that it improves your ability to deal with stress. Why? That has to do with your vagus nerve, a nerve that connects the brain to your gut and all other major organs. It oversees a vast array of crucial bodily functions, including control of mood, immune response, digestion, and heart rate.
Homeostasis
The vagus nerve is constantly assessing whether you’re safe or not. When your vagus nerve assesses your surroundings to be safe, you feel relaxed. In this state, called homeostasis, the higher functions of your brain are active. This means that you can think about the future, be creative and engage in social behavior.
Sympathetic nervous system
When the vagus nerve gets signals that you’re in danger, it activates your sympathetic nervous system: your fight or flight response. Your heart rate and blood pressure rise, adrenaline is released, your digestion stops working and you become less aware of your surroundings. This is a stress reaction, a completely normal function of our body. In fact, our sympathetic nerve system is activated around 100-400 times a day! Without this reaction, we would never leave our beds.
Allostatic load
Our bodies can return from stress to homeostasis quite easily. This process is called allostasis. However, it becomes unhealthy when your sympathetic nervous system is activated way more often. The “allostatic load” on your body becomes higher and after a certain point, your body isn’t able to return to homeostasis at all. We’ve all experienced this before: even the smallest thing feels like too much to you and you’re not able to think reasonably at all.
Physical and mental processes in the different states of the nervous system.
Long-term impact
Being stressed isn’t fun at all in the moment itself, but has a long-term negative impact as well. A constantly increased heartbeat and high blood pressure cause heart problems and damage your organs. Muscle tension leads to neck-, shoulder- and back pain. Too much cortisol and adrenaline can lead to insomnia, painful joints, osteoporosis, obesity and anxiety. An overactive immune system can lead to allergies, auto-immune diseases, gut problems and less adequate reactions in case of actual illness.
And that’s where yoga comes in
After a yoga class, you often feel very relaxed and at peace. Yoga has helped you to deactivate your sympathetic nervous system. This has two major reasons:
Focus on the breath. The vagus nerve functions completely automatically. We cannot decide to increase our blood pressure or release certain hormones. However, you are able to control your breath. Doing so can consciously activate and deactivate your sympathetic nervous system. Our breath plays a major role in this. Over time, switching from stress to relaxation becomes easier to you: you’ve increased the allostatic load that you can bear.
The alternation between stress and relaxation. In a yoga class, you constantly switch between stress and relaxation. More intense poses are followed by short periods of rest in which you check in with your body and mind. By doing so, your body becomes able to switch from stressed to relaxed way faster. Besides that, it makes you more aware of signs of stress, which improves your vagal tone: your ability to assess whether you should get stressed or not.
Training yoga for stress relief
This summer, I’ll follow a yoga specialization course in yoga for stress relief. I’m excited to learn more about polyvagal theory and the connection between stress and our organs, emotions and mental state. And I’m looking forward to creating yoga classes that leave you all super relaxed and improve your ability to deal with stress in daily life 🤸♀️
〰️ Denise de Blok