When you don’t use it, you lose it
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The past month has been full of many personal challenges. As a result, I have had to cut back on my yoga practice. Usually I attend three classes a week, and this is blocked out on my calendar and protected, because I need it, and I enjoy it. As a mother of two small children, this is "me time", it's my time to reset and regenerate. But these past weeks, I have simply not been able to do it. I have done a class here and there, but not anywhere the regular practice I had built up to. I knew that yoga was having a great impact on my health, my body, and my mindset. But I really didn't understand the full impact until it was gone.
I noticed:
👎 A lack of energy and focus, less motivation
👎 More brain fog, more self doubt, less confidence, more hesitation and self-sabotage
👎 Loss of muscle tone and strength - picking up my 4 year old is difficult again, my knees are losing strength, and going up stairs is not as easy as it had become
👎 Difficulty with emotion regulation
👎 An increase in rumination cycles and negative thoughts
👎 Less motivation to do other self-care practices - losing my way with other good habits I have been building
What is really fascinating to me is that most of the changes I noticed are supported in some way by research. In my reading, I found that there is research to support that “yoga may be capable of altering attentional processes relevant to onset and maintenance of depression” (West et al., 2022). Given that health concerns like depression and stress contribute to negative impacts on brain health (Gothe et al., 2019), it makes sense to me that I had been feeling more cognitively capable while doing yoga regularly - and that I was able to recognize a noticeable difference in my brain fog, memory and overall cognitive experience after stopping yoga for a few weeks. This is also supported in a study by Gothe, Erlenbach and Salerno (2024) who determined a medically significant improvement of self-reported cognitive function in cancer survivors after 12 weeks of Hatha yoga practice. What is ironic about this is that, during these weeks I have had particularly stressful situations going on, so it was actually the perfect time for me to be using yoga regularly — it’s possible that I unintentionally made my cognitive function and my ability to handle stress worse by the very act of ceasing my yoga practice.
In terms of my confidence and self-esteem taking a nose dive, this is also supported by research that investigates the efficacy of yoga as opposed to the hot topic of power poses. In this study by Zavala, Lantos, and Bowden (2017), it was found that practicing “open expansive body [yoga] postures” increased energy and self-esteem more so than utilizing similar power poses for the same amount of time. My take on this is that where a power pose serves you in a moment, it is temporary, it’s not a regular embodied practice. An ongoing yoga practice weaves into your physical experience of living, and increases your overall experience of posture and strength in the body - leading to better self esteem and overall confidence. In Clinical Somatics it is understood that posture influences how we feel, and that even the slightest postural changes can have a big impact on our psychology (Warren, 2019). Having been teaching posture and alignment techniques for over 20 years, I can say that I have seen first hand the impact of postural improvements in my students and clients. When we feel stress, it creates tension, which alters our posture and our ability to breathe effectively - yoga provides a source for stabilizing posture and alignment, even when life is stressful.
I could go on about the other things I noticed in my yoga hiatus, but in the interest of keeping this relatively short, I will simply say that I will be getting back into my regular yoga practice toot sweet. Sometimes it takes losing or leaving something out before we realize just how impactful it is in our lives. Sometimes it takes dropping just one of our much needed self-care practices to unravel all of them (enter, "oh I'll get back to it later" thinking that then starts to apply to everything...).
So, let’s talk about you now - what routines have you built that you protect against all odds? What have you let go of that has impacted your health and wellbeing? And most importantly, what can you get back to, or begin, to facilitate more self-care and self-compassion in your life?
REFERENCES:
Golec de Zavala, A., Lantos, D., & Bowden, D. (2017). Yoga Poses Increase Subjective Energy and State Self-Esteem in Comparison to “Power Poses.” Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 752. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00752
Gothe, N. P., Erlenbach, E., & Salerno, E. A. (2024). Yoga improves self-reported cognitive function among cancer survivors: results from the STAYFit trial. Frontiers in Cognition, 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcogn.2024.1334727
Gothe, N. P., Khan, I., Hayes, J., Erlenbach, E., & Damoiseaux, J. S. (2019). Yoga Effects on Brain Health: A Systematic Review of the Current Literature. Brain Plasticity, 5(1), 105–122. https://doi.org/10.3233/bpl-190084
Warren, S. (2019, April 3). The Life-Changing Link Between Anxiety and Muscle Tension. Somatic Movement Center. https://somaticmovementcenter.com/anxiety-muscle-tension/
West, J. L., Tremont, G., Miller, I. W., & Uebelacker, L. A. (2020). Yoga v Health Education for Attentional Processes Relevant to Major Depressive Disorder. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-020-01519-y