Can Yoga Help Workplace Stress & Anxiety?

With the often relentless pace at work, it’s sometimes difficult to carve out even a half-hour for lunch. Stepping away for 20-30 minutes to have a bite to eat, stretch my legs, and just get away from the workplace energy for a little while can be helpful in reducing those feelings of stress and anxiety that slowly surround me like a misty fog.

So when I read about this study that included guided workplace yoga and meditation to help with stress relief, my first thought was, “Where do I sign up?”, although I’m unsure that anyone wants to see me in full downward facing dog while wearing my Dockers.

I’ve written before about the benefits of mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy, most notably here and here. Conceptually, being able to recognize and be aware of your stressful, anxious state is the first step toward doing something about it. Over time, I learned breathing and relaxation techniques that can be put into use in just about any situation, at any time, the result being a more relaxed, unstressed version of me.

The study, conducted at the Ohio State University here in Columbus, was specifically designed for office worker types wearing business apparel, and involved an hour meeting once a week during lunch, plus 20 minutes per day of yoga and meditation performed at the subject’s desks. The results were impressive:

Mindful attention awareness increased significantly and perceived stress decreased significantly among the intervention group when compared to the control group’s responses. Overall sleep quality increased in both groups, but three of seven components of sleep were more affected in the intervention group.

On average, mindfulness increased by about 9.7 percent and perceived stress decreased by about 11 percent among the group that experienced the intervention. These participants also reported that it took them less time to fall asleep, they had fewer sleep disturbances and they experienced less daytime dysfunction than did members of the non-intervention group.

Two things jump out at me from this study – one, that simply being exposed to the concept of mindfulness, becoming aware of what you are feeling and why, is enormously beneficial. Secondly, there is an amazing sense of empowerment that comes from having effective tools, like yoga and meditation, to help address the stress and anxiety, and feeling better even a little bit can help spur you on, which can lead to even more effective results.

If you would like to know more about the study, you can read the full details at Anxiety Insights. Go forth and unwind those tight muscles and loosen that tense mind!

Does Life’s Stress Lead to Weight Gain

We’ve all read that stress and anxiety can lead to a host of health issues, like increased blood pressure, poor sleep habits, headaches, and other maladies. But does it lead to weight gain, and if so, why?

MedicineNet has an article positing that life’s stress can lead to overeating and weight gain, but I’m a bit confused by their explanation – that heavier men and women gain weight when stressed, but their skinnier counterparts do not.

From the article:

A study in the July 15 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology suggests that when heavier men and women are stressed, they gain weight.

And:

Block and colleagues found that men were more likely to gain weight due to job demands, lack of decision-making authority, difficulty paying bills, and lack of skill discretion — the ability to learn new skills and perform interesting new duties.

The researchers use the term “psychological stress” to describe the factors that caused the weight gain; they say study participants were more likely to gain weight if they already had a higher body mass index (BMI).

Couldn’t it be more likely that people with a high BMI tend to overeat as a matter of course, and their lack of control of food has little to do with stress, but rather with their behavioral activity in general?

I’ve struggled with my weight for years, and yes, I occasionally overeat when feeling anxious or stressed. But I also have periods where I don’t overeat when stressed, and I have longer stretches where I am feeling very relaxed and unstressed, yet I eat too much.

I’m not sure that I agree with the study results that stress is the driving factor in weight gain, especially among high-BMI subjects. More likely, a high BMI could be just another symptom of how people deal with life in general, stressed or not.

Image by Christian Cable via flickr

CNN Discovers Mindfulness

You know that eastern practices are becoming more mainstream when CNN starts reporting on them. Heck, I would expect Glenn Beck to begin railing against yoga and meditation now, as both exercises clearly discriminate against the mindless hordes.

All political humor aside, the mere fact that the concept of mindfulness is catching on in these odd and confusing times shows that perhaps the philosophy of quick fixes and pharmaceutical intervention is becoming antiquated as the populace discovers that much like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, they had the power all along.

I’ve written about mindfulness here, here, and here, and the longer I practice, the more beneficial it becomes. Certainly, attaining a mindful state isn’t something that happens quickly, or easily. Thoughts and feelings intrude incessantly at the beginning, and it can be difficult to push the head full of busy out of the way and refocus.

But the mere act of recognizing a lack of focus and the presence of intruding chatter and chaos is itself therapeutic, as it helps to frame the amount of noise with which we’re normally dealing and provides a sense of empowerment and calm when we begin to have success at reducing the bedlam to white noise.

The CNN article discusses various “mindfulness” techniques as solutions for stress-busting, but that’s become a sort of catch-all, a default description for anything that helps someone to slow down and feel better. Breathing exercises, stretching, yoga – all are part of plucking yourself out of the rat race and pushing the reboot button to reset your level of tension and anxiety.

Think of your muscles, mind, and body as a rubber band. Visualize that rubber band being stretched when you’re stressed and tense, and then watch it as it grows slack, returning to its natural state. Over time, this rubber band continues to stretch, growing tense, but often fails to fully return to its original loose form due to the underlying tension that never quite goes completely away.

Therefore, our rubber bands end up being partially stretched at all times, so when we do relax, we don’t do it in the manner that we did before – we only return part of the way to a non-stretched condition.

Practicing mindfulness and stress-reduction helps us take that rubber band and relax it the rest of the way, so that it’s both easier to notice the disparity between the stressed and non-stressed self, but also to fully grow limp from an emotional, physical, and spiritual perspective.

I’ve actually seen great benefit to proactive mindfulness – doing a bit of deep breathing and mind-clearing prior to entering meetings or situations that are typically stressful, so that I’m much more relaxed at the beginning and my stress thermometer is starting from a much lower reading.

Mindfulness – catch it!

Mindfulness training busts stress , via CNN

More on the Stress – Anxiety Connection

Anxiety Cures has a bit more on the connection between stress and anxiety.

So how do you know if what you’re experiencing is a reaction to everyday events that tend to cause feelings of stress, or if it has moved from stress to actual anxiety?

One of the key indicators (keeping in mind that I’m a patient, not a mental health professional) seems to be the duration of the symptoms. Feelings that last six months or more are a common milepost, but that doesn’t work for everyone, and depending on the severity of the symptoms, a half-year is way too long to wait before asking for help.

If I was to recommend a measure, it would be the ability to cope. Once you find yourself feeling out of control, hopeless, or see your symptoms getting in the way of how you usually operate, it’s time to raise your hand and ask for assistance. Who cares what the label says?

Stress: A Common Reason of Anxiety

The Line Between Stress and Anxiety

Molly Belmont writes in the Albany Times Union about the blurred line between stress and anxiety.

The article posits that a clear delineation between the two is easily derived. Stress is based on actual events and eventually dissipates, where anxiety is a more pervasive worry aligned with various aspects of ones life.

John Forsyth, an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany has written a book, The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety, and he’s a proponent of a new therapy technique called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT.

According the Forsyth, the key of ACT is to get patients to separate their disorder from how they feel about themselves. That sounds a little like the concept of self-compassion that I wrote about in my posting Compassion for Self Healing .

Psychologist Terry Mooney provides some common examples to point out the differences Mooney sees between stress and anxiety:

Most people wake up in the middle of the night once in a while. People with an anxiety disorder wake up several times a week, and can’t fall back asleep for 15 minutes or more. Sometimes, they wake up flailing, or suffer from nocturnal panic attacks, Mooney said.

Most people feel nervous in social situations. People with an anxiety disorder wouldn’t go into social situations. They would avoid them, or they would drink or use substances to numb themselves, Mooney said. High co-morbidity exists between alcoholism/substance abuse and anxiety disorders.

Most people worry about family and loved ones. People with an anxiety disorder worry mostly about themselves, Mooney said. Without assistance, their health, their job, their ritualized behavior can become all-consuming, leaving little room for the other people or activities in their lives that they enjoy.

The blurred line between stress and anxiety

Breathing to Reduce Anxiety

When I thought about writing a post on the benefits of breathing to reduce anxiety, I started to smile to myself as I considered the alternative – stop breathing, and that will certainly eliminate any anxious feelings. So let me add some clarity here – I’m referring to effective breathing techniques to aid in anxiety reduction!

Years ago, when I was still in my late 20s and developed anxiety and panic issues, I was referred to a psychologist who recommended biofeedback as a tool to help me learn about physical cues and hopefully parlay that into a successful cycle of recognizing when I was stressed and tense, and then implement breathing and visualization exercises in order to achieve physical and emotional peace.

Ever the cynic, I was prepared to be disappointed by biofeedback in general and its ability to help me specifically, but I was pleasantly surprised. The visual and auditory alerts to my degree of tension and anxiety – the temperature of my extremities, skin response, breathing, etc. – truly did allow me to recognize my physical state and react accordingly. In fact, for many years after, I excelled at being able to self-identify when I was tense or anxious, and I could feel my body change as I reacted by doing what I had learned – deep breathing and relaxation exercises.

As I got older and began looking for strategies to assist me with my new (or not so new) anxiety challenges, I began to research Buddhism and some of the meditations and exercises involved with clearing the head – a quiet mind. Almost all of them involved structured breathing as a component, and some actually required that you focus on breathing as a way to keep extraneous thoughts from crowding out the things you were trying to accomplish.

Anxiety Cures has an interesting piece on breathing as a way to reduce anxiety, and while it doesn’t go into detail or suggest various techniques, it is a good starting point for those who have never explored the topic. Yoga is also listed as an example of a stress-reducing path that utilizes breathing as a key factor, but my background in yoga is limited to that which I embarrassingly perform as part of my Wii Fit regimen.

That said, I’ve found enormous benefit by incorporating effective breathing techniques as part of my overall anxiety reduction program, and I heartily recommend exploring the topic in more detail if you’re looking for another tool to add to your toolbox.

Breathe Correctly and Remove Your Anxiety