10 Ways to Soothe Anxiety With Yoga

by Nina

Morning Glories by Melina Meza

1. Lengthen Your Exhalation. Simple breath practices where you lengthen your exhalation (such as pausing briefly at the end of the exhalation) can help head off a panic or anxiety attack. Practiced on a regular basis, breath awareness and simple breath practices can reduce your overall stress levels, helping to reduce anxiety. See Balancing Your Emotions With Your Breath. 

2. Practice Conscious Relaxation. Although sleep is vital for good health, conscious relaxation provides benefits for anxiety that you cannot get from sleep. During conscious relaxation, there is a marked decrease in blood lactate, a substance associated with anxiety attacks. Blood-lactate levels fall rapidly within the first 10 minutes of conscious relaxation, while sleep has no effect on blood-lactate levels. As you relax, your thoughts stop racing and your mind quiets while your body is resting and digesting. See The Relaxation Response and Yoga for a large number of options. Because 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.

3. Exercise Before Relaxing. If you’re too restless to settle down into a relaxing practice or pose, try an active yoga practice, such as standing poses or Sun Salutations (or any other vigorous exercise you prefer) to tire yourself out before practicing conscious relaxation.  

4. Practice Supported Forward Bends. These poses can be wonderfully quieting and soothing. You can use supported forward bends to calm yourself when you’re feeling anxious or to turn inward when you’ve been over-stimulated. However, you do need to set up for them properly. See Soothing Yourself With Supported Forward Bends. Since backbends tend to be energizing—and can sometimes trigger feelings of vulnerability and anxiety—you may want to avoid them during periods of intense anxiety. See Yoga and the Front Body.

5. Practice Supported Inverted Poses. Using supported inverted poses for stress management is one of easiest ways for many people to calm yourself because all you have to do is set yourself in the pose and stay there for a while. The shape of the pose itself causes your baroreceptors—the pressure sensors that help control your blood pressure—to switch your nervous system from Fight or Flight (stress mode) to Rest and Digest (relaxation mode). See All About Supported Inverted Poses for options.

6. Practice Restorative Yoga. This form of yoga uses props to support your body and allow your muscles to relax completely. With your muscles completely relaxed, you can then turn your attention inward, focusing on your breath, physical sensations, or any other object of meditation, which allows the relaxation response to switch on. See Restorative Yoga: An Introduction for more information and options. You can practice restorative poses both on their own or at the end of a more active practice.

7. Practice Yoga Nidra. Yoga nidra or yogic sleep is a form of guided conscious relaxation, in which a teacher or a recorded voice provides imagery and mental exercises for you to follow as you relax in a comfortable reclined position. Since one hallmark feature of an anxious mind is the tendency to have urgent, repetitive thought patterns full of worry and fear that are hard to turn off, having a voice to guide you can help you turn off your anxious thoughts and start to calm down. We have two short guided relaxation tracks of our own on our Audio Tracks page but there are many other yoga nidra recordings out there for to you choose from, some of which are quite long (if you want a full hour of practice).

8. Keep Your Eyes Open. If closing your eyes in any forward bends or prone poses causes you to brood or worry, let your eyes remain open, with a soft, diffuse gaze. 

9. Practice Crocodile Pose instead of Savasana. For some people with anxiety, lying on their backs makes them feel vulnerable. So instead of doing Savasana, consider practicing Crocodile pose. Fold a yoga blanket in a rectangle and place it cross-wise on your mat. Then lie down with your lower belly on the blanket (this reduces the over-curving of your lower back that tends to occur when you lie on your belly). Take your feet slightly apart from each other and fold your arms so your elbows are out to the sides and your forearms are parallel with the front edge of your mat with your hands stacked. Then rest your forehead on your hands, gently tugging your forehead skin down toward your nose (an action that seems to be very calming, who knows why). If Crocodile pose doesn’t work for you, you can try a side-lying Savasana. See Corpse Pose Variations for info on these poses.

10. Customize Your Yoga Practice. Since anxiety and panic attacks are related to chronic stress, practicing some form of relaxation on a regular basis at home can help prevent the anxiety and/or panic attacks from occurring in the first place. As you practice on your own, notice how individual poses and practices are making you feel. This might lead to the discovery that poses or practices that are generally considered “relaxing,” such as Reclined Cobbler’s pose or meditation, might actually be increasing your anxiety. See Yoga Solutions for Anxiety and When Relaxing Isn't Relaxing for more info