How Simply Moving Benefits Your Mental Health

I have long believed that for healing and transformation to take place in a deep and sustainable way, it needs to be embodied: not just narrative therapy, or cognitive, or academic, but actually getting right down into the nooks and crannies of the body.

As I re-read ‘The Body Keeps The Score’ by Bessel Van Der Kolk, it all came flooding back to me - and has prompted me to start offering online yoga classes for those that are interested in supercharging their own personal development or healing.

Psychiatrist van der Kolk is an innovator in treating the effects of overwhelming experiences, which we know in life and news as ‘trauma’. We tend to leap to address it by talking, but van der Kolk knows how some experiences embed themselves beyond where language can reach. He explores state-of-the-art therapeutic treatments - including body work like yoga and eye movement therapy - and shared in his book and his myriad other publications and papers what he and others are learning on this edge of humanity “about the complexity of memories, our needs for others and how our brains take care of our bodies” (source: www.onbeing.org0

For years, I skillfully (naively) bypassed my own embodied healing because I simply hadn’t been exposed to the school of thought that our physical body carries profound imprints of past trauma. Any wonder I fell upon yoga with such relief and clung to it like a drowning person clings to a raft as I slowly and determinedly swam to the shore of my own healed self.

Fortunately, one doesn’t need to have experienced trauma to benefit from movement - any movement. And specifically, mindful movement: where one is aware of the movement/s, aware of the changes that it brings about in the breath, the temperature, the heart rate, the mood - not just mindlessly pumping iron or pounding on a treadmill, but moving in a way that enhances our experience of living inside our own skin, in this world, on any given moment.

The yogis say “how we breathe is how we think, and how we think is how we breathe’ and perhaps there should be something similar said between how movement affects our feelings.

While it is obvious that our feelings can influence our movement, it is not as obvious that our movement can impact our feelings too. For example, when we feel tired and sad, we may move more slowly. When we feel anxious, we may either rush around or become completely paralyzed. But recent studies show that the connection between our brain and your body is a “two-way street” and that means movement can change your brain, too.

How exercise can improve mood disorders

Regular aerobic exercise can reduce anxiety by making our brain’s “fight or flight” system less reactive. When anxious people are exposed to physiological changes they fear, such as a rapid heartbeat, through regular aerobic exercise, they can develop a tolerance for such symptoms.

Regular exercise such as cycling or gym-based aerobic, resistance, flexibility, and balance exercises can also reduce depressive symptoms. Exercise can be as effective as medication and psychotherapies. Regular exercise may boost mood by increasing a brain protein called BDNF that helps nerve fibers grow.

For people with attention-deficit disorder (ADHD), another study showed that a single 20-minute bout of moderate-intensity cycling briefly improved their symptoms. It enhanced the participants’ motivation for tasks requiring focused thought, increased their energy, and reduced their feelings of confusion, fatigue, and depression. However, in this study, exercise had no effect on attention or hyperactivity per se.

Meditative movement (and it’s no secret that this is my favourite kind of movement) has been shown to alleviate depressive symptoms. This is a type of movement in which we pay close attention to our bodily sensations, position in space, and gut feelings (such as subtle changes in heart rate or breathing) as we move. Qigong, tai chi, and some forms of yoga are all helpful for this. For example, frequent yoga practice can reduce the severity of symptoms in post-traumatic stress disorder to the point that some people no longer meet the criteria for this diagnosis. Changing our posture, breathing, and rhythm can all change our brain, thereby reducing stress, depression, and anxiety, and leading to a feeling of well-being.

The surprising benefits of synchronizing our movements

Both physical exercise and meditative movement are activities that we can do by ourself. On our own, we can improve the way we feel. But a recent study found that when we try to move in synchrony with someone else, it also improves our self-esteem.

As I move to teaching and practicing online yoga, it’s been quite lovely for me to see how even though we are all practicing in the privacy and isolation of our own homes, there is still a sense of cameraderi, of connection, of togetherness, just through the knowledge that we are practicing together. Moving in synch. With our tribe, if you will.

In 2014, psychologist Joanne Lumsden and her colleagues conducted a study that required participants to interact with another person via a video link. The person performed a standard exercise — arm curls — while the participants watched, and then performed the same movement.

The “video link” was in fact a pre-recorded video of a 25-year-old female in a similar room, also performing arm curls. As part of the experiment, participants had to either coordinate their movement or deliberately not coordinate their movement with the other person’s arm curls. They filled out a mood report before and after each phase of synchronizing or falling out of synchrony. They also reported on how close they felt to the other person.

The results were interesting. When subjects intentionally synchronized their movement with the recording, they had higher self-esteem than when they did not. Prior studies had shown that synchronizing your movement with others makes you like them more. You also cooperate more with them and feel more charitable toward them. In fact, movement synchrony can make it easier to remember what people say and to recall what they look like. This was the first study to show that it makes you feel better about yourself, too. That’s probably why dance movement therapy can help depressed patients feel better.

Putting it all together

Your mind and body are intimately connected. And while your brain is the master control system for your body’s movement, the way you move can also affect the way you think and feel.

Movement therapies are often used as adjunctive treatments for depression and anxiety when mental effort, psychotherapy, or medication is not enough. When you are too exhausted to use thought control strategies such as focusing on the positive, or looking at the situation from another angle, movement can come to the rescue. By working out, going on a meditative walk by yourself, or going for a synchronized walk with someone, you may gain access to a “back door” to the mental changes that you desire without having to “psych yourself” into feeling better.

Please email me if you’d like details about my upcoming online yoga classes. I’d love you to join me. Beginners welcome.

See the original article here.