Work making you stressed?
Try yoga. Or also, maybe quit.
Yes, this is a bonus mid-month post, and part of my efforts of consolidating how I communicate in this space. And because I promised (and you asked for) something more in depth about stress, yoga and the workplace, I thought this was as great a place to start as any.
I find this topic really interesting, possibly because I spent quite a bit of my life over the past few years feeling stressed in the workplace. And frankly, I don’t think yoga was enough to help my stress – in fact, I completely agree with the various discussions around how employers should be offering better working conditions instead of free drinks on a Thursday, a free yoga class and a free meditation subscription. These things don’t compensate for a crappy work environment, whether that’s impossible deadlines, horrible clients or other such lovely things!
Having said that, there’s a lot that yoga has to offer, mainly because there’s a lot that yoga can do in the context of stress.
Yoga can help tackle workplace stress
There are at least two systematic reviews and meta-analyses that have looked at this exact topic – my apologies for the jargon. These are the coolest, strongest kind of studies because basically they put together all the other studies that have been published, sift out the crap and come up with more robust conclusions.
One systematic review found that yoga is better than doing nothing at all at managing stress – nothing at all being what we call a control, essentially something to compare the intervention to to ensure that there is something actually happening. What this means is that if you just stay with the stress and do nothing to help you manage it, then yoga is definitely going to be better than what you are doing right now, which is nothing – and I’m sorry but drinking or similar doesn’t count here. Nothing means not doing something that actually helps with stress that isn’t yoga, like maybe running or pottery or digging up potatoes in your allotment.
Likewise, the year before, another systematic review that I don’t have access to concluded that yoga has beneficial effects on mental health, mainly stress (although they found no benefit to heart health, which is potentially a bit odd because stress contributes to heart problems).
Yoga may help to improve broader wellbeing
Now, it really all boils down to stress in the end, but studies have looked at other associated metrics. For example, yet another systematic review that I don’t have access to found some benefits of yoga in the workplace in musculoskeletal health as well as stress.
Another study that I don’t have access to (ok I didn’t used to get this annoyance when I worked in publishing but now I do…) concluded that yoga was also helpful in improving stress, musculoskeletal pain, fatigue and general quality of life. What is weird about this study is that it was done specifically for workers in the diamond industry, which is a very very specific group of people (and I wonder what the motivation for that was in the first place).
Yoga could help make ‘better workers’
Now, I’m cringing just writing this heading, but I can’t think of another way to describe what I mean. Better workers = focused, energised and potentially more productive workers. Sorry, cringe, yes.
For example, this tiny study found that a workplace yoga intervention not only improved stress resilience compared to the control group, but also helped participants feel like they had higher clarity of mind and experienced a greater sense of purpose and satisfaction.
But my favourite one of these studies is this one (a qualitative one, which means smaller number of participants but deeper insights), where participants felt that yoga helped to make them more productive. This make sense, at least to me. Think about it – if you are mega-stressed about something, all you can think about is whatever you are stressed about and can’t really focus on your tasks, which means you can’t really do your tasks effectively or efficiently. They even felt grateful towards their employer and more inclined to want to give back to the company.
A good workplace needs to be many things
And free yoga can sometimes be a plaster for bigger problems. So first thing is to sort out all the operational issues and then think about how to integrate benefits like yoga within the general focus-on-wellbeing package to get all of the above benefits.
If you are a yoga teacher who is thinking of approaching employers, then hopefully this gives you some good evidence for why yoga in the workplace is a good thing. I haven’t tried this myself, so if you do then I’d love to hear about it!
As a random aside, I have to say that as a hater of AI, I am completely converted to two new programmes that I tried today to help me write this. I share a cool screenshot from one of them, which shows relevant research in the field of yoga in the workplace. I do love research, but tools that make the search part easier are very welcome in my toolbox.
