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A yoga-teacher friend of mine just bought an iPhone 6, and it filled him with joy and excitement. The next day he went to his usual yoga practice, and changed into his workout clothes, leaving his pants, and his brand new iPhone, hanging in the back of the room. Unfortunately, sometime between the sun salutations and the savasana, someone stole his brand new phone right out of his pants’ pocket.
He was disappointed and shocked, and anger threatened to bubble up within him. But as he noted later on facebook “the real yoga practice started once the phone was stolen.”
I’ve written several times about the benefits of yoga, and I think they’re fairly well accepted. But the real difficulty with yoga is remembering to do it in the first place. And by “remembering to do it,” I don’t mean remembering to go to class every week. I mean remembering to use all your yoga skills in real life.
Have you ever seen someone leave a yoga class, and then take out their cell phone and start shouting into it? Or maybe you’re driving the speed limit when a car cuts you off and honks, and you see a yoga mat leaning up against the rear window? Shouldn’t these people be calmer? Yes, yoga helps rewire the brain’s stressful habits, but unfortunately the brain is very clever, and its habits aren’t easily changed.
The brain’s habits are based on context cues from the world around you. Do you have an accent that only comes out when you go back home? Do you act differently around your old high school friends than your current co-workers? That’s because the brain recognizes specific contexts, and activates the corresponding habits. It’s the same reason recovering alcoholics shouldn’t walk into bars, because it will trigger old drinking habits. It’s also why it’s sometimes hard to be productive when working from home; due to the context at home the brain is more likely to activate eating and TV watching habits.
Recognizing the context of a situation is mediated by one brain structure in particular: the hippocampus. The hippocampus is part of the mammalian brain, meaning reptiles don’t have one. Thus, like you, a mouse could learn to act differently in a park versus a formal dinner, but a snake would pretty much behave the same anywhere.
So how does this relate to yoga? Well for one, the hippocampus is one of the brain structures most sensitive to stress. Stress provides a particular context, and thus has its own associated habits. If your calming yoga practices aren’t fully engrained, then when you get stressed you’ll usually forget to do them. Secondly, the context of yoga is almost always in a yoga studio, on a mat, surrounded by a sweaty group of people. If you only ever practice yoga in that specific context, then the hippocampus assumes those calming habits you learn only apply to that context. Thus, when someone steals your wallet, the stress context – and the not-being-in-the-middle-of-downward-dog context – means that most people will enact their usual stress habits instead of their calming yoga ones.
Calming the nervous system takes practice. It is not enough to take deep breaths during yoga class – you have to remember to take deep breaths when someone cuts you off in traffic. When feeling overwhelmed at work, close your eyes and clear your mind. When stressed about a presentation, relax your muscles. When some jerk starts yelling at you, observe the thoughts streaming through your mind and recognize they are as transient as clouds upon a mountain. To help retrain your hippocampus to use calming yoga techniques in all contexts, you have to continually remind yourself to practice yoga in the real world. Only with sufficient practice will it start to become habit.
If you liked this article then check out my book - The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time
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