Before summer, I started telling you about my journey in the world of yoga and mental health, starting with anxiety (which is the one I am most personally familiar with). But then holidays, a busy work schedule and life stopped me from writing. So here we are again reader, I’ll pick up from where I left off.
As soon as I completed the yoga for stress and anxiety course, I wanted to also do the yoga for depression (and possibly also one on post-traumatic growth). But the pandemic hit, and we had lockdowns and a general chaos and mismanagement on how to deliver yoga teacher trainings or complete the ones that were already running (at this point I was on a course on anatomy, which I never completed) and then the school went bust.
So this time, instead of waiting to learn from other people, I decided to jump straight into the science to understand how yoga and depression interact.
Depression, in some ways, can be considered as the opposite of anxiety
In that it feels like a heavy cloud on our bodies and minds that makes us feel fatigued and unmotivated, alongside the intense feelings of sadness and other negative emotions. But just like anxiety, there is a growing boy of evidence suggesting that a yoga practice could help to alleviate the symptoms of depression.
For example, a recent systematic review and meta-analysis analysed 19 randomised controlled trials, or RCTs, which compared a mostly physical style of yoga (eg hatha and vinyasa) with treatment alone or interventions like health education, social support or self-help books.
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