I think it's probably non-controversial that exercise (posing, stretching), and mindful activity (meditation, thoughtful breathing) are good for us. Certainly it's something I feel happy encouraging patients to do, particularly if they enjoy it or feel that it benifits then.
What I find thought-provoking though is the use of the phase "health approach" in the first line of the abstract:
> Yoga is the most popular complementary health approach practiced by adults in the United States.
I wonder what exactly qualifies as a "health approach". The paper acknowledges exercise is well know to be good for people, particularly in ageing - so it's heathy, but is exercise an "approach"? What about reading, or caring for young children (both also good for your health) can that be a "health approach"?
I usually try to talk about these practices as being part of a heathy lifestyle, rather than being therapies. I feel that we're over-medicalising when we start to say that riding a bicycle or hugging our friends are therapies, rather than just being healthy.
What I often see is something like “exercise and yoga are good self care, but for serious mental illness you need professionals.” And “professionals” in 2019 usually translate to psych meds and talk therapy (eg CBT), both of which have extremely shoddy science but get far less skepticism.
I got involuntarily committed for mania/psychosis, didn’t sleep for weeks, hallucinations etc so of course I was prescribed the intense cocktail of mood stabilizers, antipsychotics etc and told I needed that and intense therapy for the rest of my life. I stopped all meds and therapy and focus on mindfulness, sobriety, routine etc and feel it’s the stable path.
I entered a super deep depression when released but read everything about mental health I could get my hands on. And I now believe the best “therapy” for serious mental health issues is things like yoga and meditation, plus lifestyle changes.
It gets reduced to stress reduction and mild exercise, but mindfulness is about developing awareness of feelings which leads to better emotional regulation. If you can develop more space between your thoughts and feelings and your consciousness you stop being so controlled by them.
The skeptics will say it’s a bunch of new age mumbo jumbo but they don’t apply that same skepticism to psych meds even though psych meds are not understood at all, mostly work by placebo, and have awful side effects. Not so long ago doctors were ordering lobotomies and overprescribing OxyContin because an attractive pharmaceutical rep sold it to them but now when they overprescribe psych meds and talk therapy they are seemingly infallible.
The thing that you're missing is that most health professional will still include things like "exercise and yoga" in their treatment plans because that's what is required. Usually it's the patients that expect pills and therapy to show magical, immediate results. Nobody (well, I'm sure there are doctors that would, but at the risk of invoking a No True Scotsman, some doctors are pretty bad at their job) is going to tell a depressed person or a person with severe ADHD to just pop pills and not exercise, meditate or otherwise not do any self-care. The pills are there to help the ill person get to a place where they can start working towards those things, pills are step one of a long process, they're not the only step. The thing psych meds are not taken with much skepticism is that they can show results incredibly quickly, even if getting the right results cant take months of fine-tuning and trial and error due to the fact that the mechanisms aren't well understood.
A very good analogy for mental illness and psych meds is diabetes and insulin. Most people who are prediabetic or have diabetes will have type 2, adult-onset diabetes, which can be stopped or reversed with lifestyle changes, but those are hard. If an obese person is feeling terrible and goes to a doctor and gets diagnosed with diabetes, the doctor will give them insulin because they need it to live and function, but it's not actually going to solve the problem. Insulin is just step one for such a person, step 2 involves exercise and diet, maybe surgery in severe cases, but many people can't commit to such lifestyle changes and just keep taking insulin as a stop-gap measure to keep living in relative comfort, while other people will manage to use their new feeling to take up the needed lifestyle changes and get cured (or go into remission, as they say), possibly to a point where they no longer need insulin or other medication.
In the same vein, just as there is type 2 diabetes, there is type 1 diabetes, whether it manifested because of environmental factors or was purely inherited, these people need insulin to live. The state of medical science today means they will need insulin and other medication for the rest of their lives, but they still need the diet changes and exercise, nobody is expecting them to just sit on medication and nothing else.
With mental illness it's the same way, some people can get better with just exercise and lifestyle changes, but some people need professional help (meds and therapy) to be able to implement those lifestyle changes and maybe get to a point where the no longer need the help. Other people, however, will need meds for the rest of their lives to have a chance at normal life, at least with the current state of medicine. One can hope for a breakthrough in the future but people need to live their lives right now, and if that involves taking a pill or two every day, so be it.
In my particular case, I think that I was pretty lucky that me and my psychiatrist only took 4 or so months to find the proper combination of meds for me, but at no point did he tell me that was all I needed. He always insisted that diet, exercise and mindfulness were part of the treatment and the meds were there to help me get started. Now it's been roughly a year since I started and I lost a ton of weight, exercise regularly (including yoga) and eat healthy. I'm down to only taking my ADHD meds because the others did their job and I don't need them anymore, but even if I have to take this pill daily for the rest of my life I'm okay with it because my quality of life skyrocketed. This was not possible for me a couple of years ago when I thought that I could power through my issues with yoga and exercise alone and didn't trust psychiatrists.
I think it's incredibly irresponsible to tell people that things like yoga, meditation, exercise and diet changes are a replacement for professional mental health help. This may be true for some people, but I suspect the percentage is close to the amount of people who are able to stop being alcoholics without help. The two things are orthogonal, professional medical help is one thing and a healthy lifestyle is another. Having a healthy lifestyle may mean that you don't need professional help, but professional help may be required for a person to be able to get a healthy lifestyle. Finally, professional help usually involves all those nice things like plenty of exercise and a good diet, sometimes yoga or mindfulness/meditation (even if they call it something else the principles are usually the same, CBT for example is basically mindfulness by another name). You go to the a professional so he can help you get going with all of that, because sometimes you just can't by yourself.
> most health professional will still include things like "exercise and yoga" in their treatment plans because that's what is required.
Wow, that is not my experience at all. Neither do I think it is irresponsible to suggest that yoga, meditation, exercise and diet change can substitute for "serious" mental health treatment -- Anyone who can maintain wellness activities (exercise, sleep, diet) is in a much better state of wellness than a person who is seeing a psychiatrist -- by definition. While it may be that psychiatry could help patients exercise, I have not seen any studies on the efficacy of psychiatrists in motivating patients to maintain a regular exercise routine. I'd imagine your average yoga instructor would do better.
>I think it's incredibly irresponsible to tell people that things like yoga, meditation, exercise and diet changes are a replacement for professional mental health help.
People probably made this kind of sentiment about lobotomies, and farther back things like bloodletting and leeches.
Yoga (योग) traditions are integral to thousands of years of human civilization. Yogas are plural and evolving. Yogas of mind and heart do involve hundreds of canons of text and prayer, which are -ahem- written.
I’m not sure why your post was downvoted; could be because the word “yoga” in English has a far more restrictive definition, and we are discussing, in English, an article about a subset of the physical practices of yoga that are practicedin the USA.
I used to avoid yoga specifically because I grew up with it being a religious practice, later came to enjoy the thoroughly secularists western version. But I wish it were called something else.
It’s similar to the use of the super useful word “jihad” only one meaning of which, and a terrible one at that, is recognized in English.
Of course all cultures adopt some foreign words by first twisting them up completely.
I even felt (quite often actually) that a lot of manual work can be zen inducing. Give me a good space, good tools and a boat load of things to process, and see you in 4 hours.
I'll be sweating and somehow exhausted but not the burnout fatigue, just the "I made 200 things with near zero errors and it was smooth because I was free to focus". Not equivalent but not far from coding flow.
One of the books I read that helped me finally beat my severe chronic depression has an entire section on engaging work and why it's good for your brain. It's called The Depression Cure by Steve Ilardi and basically the engaging work and any "meaningful activity" can stop your from ruminating and help you feel accomplished.
Gardening, fixing things around the house and walking the dog have become part of my "daily treatment" and that among other things has been a game changer.
Agree it's like coding flow- the satisfying feeling of inputs and outputs and then being able to look over everything when you're complete and know you left it all on the field.
The problem is removing the word "complementary" from the phrase. A "complementary health approach" is an approach that uses practices that are not normal conventional medical practices to complement conventional practices.
> mindful activity (meditation, thoughtful breathing) are good for us
The mindfulness craze has been criticised quite widely by psychologists, has no proven benefits, and at least some evidence that it can actually be harmful.
There’s plenty of literature. Another risk that is not generally discussed is that the mindful techniques used to alter thought patterns or suppress thoughts can backfire in a huge number of different ways. Suppressing negative thoughts can just as easily unintentionally suppress coping mechanism, amongst other things.
Then you have the issue that the majority of studies done into the benefits of mindfulness could not have possibly measured the majority of the potential negative outcomes.
Personally I don’t have an opinion one way or another. I simply don’t think it’s at all obvious that practicing mindfulness would be associated with positive or exclusively positive outcomes.
I could say the same thing for yoga too. I practice yoga regularly, and there are some obvious benefits to me. It’s a good workout and it makes me feel great. But many yoga positions are pretty intense. Am I doing harm to my body in some way be regularly applying this stress to it? I have no idea, but the answer to that question absolutely does not seem obvious to me.
> Another risk that is not generally discussed is that the mindful techniques used to alter thought patterns or suppress thoughts can backfire in a huge number of different ways. Suppressing negative thoughts can just as easily unintentionally suppress coping mechanism, amongst other things.
What's the link between mindfulness and suppression of thought? Mindfulness is a specific state of awareness. Mindfulness techniques promote this state of awareness.
I'm not aware of any mindfulness techniques that promote the suppression of thought, and if I was I'd say they were misnamed.
It’s a central part of “Mindful Based Cognitive Therapy”. They call it “releasing” though, not suppressing (perhaps that word isn’t new age enough?...)
You’re just arguing semantics my dude. For a fully peer reviewed description, read the paper I linked. It describes the dangers of one of the core MBCT practices.
Misusing common words isn't a good sign for any argument. To allow something to arise, whether it be a thought or anything else, is not suppression. To note it is not suppression. To not focus on something or not return to it is also, not suppression. There is no act or mechanism of suppression or inhibition.
I read the paper before I commented, and one of the cited ones from it that mentioned suppression. The talk about active inhibition. For example, from the paper you linked:
> Despite these efforts, unwanted thoughts sometimes per- sist. People can try to ignore these thoughts, negate them, sup- press them, correct for them, or think about something else, but unfortunately, these mental activities can be difficult to implement and do not always work in the intended ways (Wegner & Erber, 1992). For example, attempts to negate or suppress stereotypes and prejudice can backfire and produce an increase in unwanted thoughts (e.g., Gawronski, Deutsch, Mbirkou, Seibt, & Strack, 2008; Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Wheeler, 1996; Monteith, Sherman, & Devine, 1998). Also, attempts at correction for unwanted thoughts can lead to
biases in the opposite direction (e.g., Martin, 1986; Schwarz & Bless, 1992; Strack & Mussweiler, 2001; Wegener & Petty, 1997; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).
None of that, regardless of whatever semantic distortions you put on it, is allowing something to arise and simply noting it. That is the process of mindfulness. That is not:
- to ignore
- to correct
- to suppress
- to think about something else
So it's not a semantic argument at all.
Please, try not to call me "dude". Suppress the impulse if that makes more sense to you.
Yes certain poses you shouldn't do if your body is not ready for it.
Mindfulness and visualizations can be harmful if you are not ready for that level. CBT too soon or too long can be harmful.
If you always live and are only aware of the moment than imagination can't take hold. Everything is a balance and not everyone can sit in a lotus position but some parts might be possible some of the time for most of us.
I started yoga two years ago after suffering a small back injury while weight lifting (I lift 4 times weekly). I was looking for an exercise routine which was:
1) Easy to do while traveling
2) I could do well into my old age (I can’t lift heavy weights forever)
3) Would build back strength to counteract the degeneration of my desk job (developer)
I enjoy yoga immensely and I feel that I have granted myself a gift that will last a lifetime. I am not spiritual and was not flexible before starting so I wouldn’t count those are barriers for getting benefit from the practice. I do try to suspend my beliefs about spirituality as well as I can during practice which has worked well for me.
I started with the C1 classes at CorePower which I’d recommend to beginners who are interested.
Similar desires (no back injury, thankfully!) and got into a "Les Mills"-brand "BodyFlow" class at my gym about eight months ago.
Really glad I did! MUCH improved balance, much less overall pain, stronger in lots of ways, etc. Nice little guided relaxation exercise at the end, too. Recommended.
Definitely start out with a C1, but like any kind of working out you have to stick with it. I like spending 60 minutes in class at my pace with no judgement with others, body feels so much better.
I've developed a daily practice over the past 8 months and the two most important pieces of anecdotal evidence that I have noticed that keep me coming back are:
1) I am happier. No doubt about it. Situations where my memory recalls that my self was typically unhappy in have been turned around. I find myself content when I am "supposed to be" frustrated at various things like traffic, intense situations, etc.
2) Older people at the studio look younger than me. Not everybody of course. But a significant number of the elderly people who have a daily practice look as young and spry as any one of the youngest children who come into the studio. (They host kids yoga classes occasionally).
I am laying here in half lotus right now actually, counting down the last few minutes at home here until I leave for today's class.
> Older people at the studio look younger than me.
Not a rebuttal of your experience but don't forget that people doing yoga regularly are also most likely to eat healthier and exercise more than the average.
And becoming a part of a local community of people who all align with living that way, makes it really easy to live that way yourself.
Which is just another one of the many reasons that I enjoy going.
Everything from my physical fitness, to my mental health, to my nutrition, sleeping habits, and everything in between have improved significantly since committing to a daily practice.
this is not meaningful work, because there is no "brain health" outcome in the papers they reviewed that is clinically relevant.
For example: "Increase in right hippocampal GM density among yoga group." Why is this a good thing? Let's not even talk about the physical inappropriateness of using "density" to discuss MRI results.
Using meaningless-but-easy measurements as a surrogate / proxy for meaningful-but-hard measurements is an entire field called "biomarkers". It's incredibly challenging in neurology, and we don't have many good, validated biomarkers. If you want to use "MRI density" (sic), or "fMRI activation", then first you need an entire study to prove that the biomarker is valid. This a subtle point, but it's as if you're counting lines of code to determine the best programming language: yes, it's a measure, but how does it relate, and what does it mean?
We all (including doctors) want things that are natural, wholistic, and give us a subjective sense of well-being (like exercise and mindfulness) to be magically effective. But that doesn't change the need for rigorous science in order to know that it's the case.
And the formula is always the same: a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial within a representative population using a directly meaningful outcome.
This review failed the "meaningful outcome" part, even if (and I personally don't care to look further) they got the rest of pieces right.
"The studies reviewed also implicate the role of yoga in functioning of the dlPFC and the amygdala (see Fig. 4). Gothe et al. [24] found that yoga practitioners demonstrated decreased dlPFC activation during the encoding phase of a working memory task in comparison to the controls. Froelinger et al. [30] also found yoga practitioners to be less reactive in the right dlPFC when viewing the negatively valanced images on the affective Stroop task. Task-relevant targets activate the dlPFC, whereas emotional distractors activate the amygdala [49]. Exerting cognitive control over emotional processes leads to increased activation in the dlPFC, with corresponding reciprocal deactivation in the amygdala [50, 51]. The studies suggest that when emotional experience occurred within the context of a demanding task situation, yoga practitioners appeared to resolve emotional interference via recruitment of regions of the cortex that subserve cognitive control. Plausibly, these findings may indicate that yoga practitioners selectively recruit neurocognitive resources to disengage from negative emotional information processing and engage the cognitive demands presented by working memory and inhibitory control tasks demonstrating overall neurocognitive resource efficiency." [discussion, ¶5]
To a literate outsider, this does not seem like hand-wavey bullshit and seems to establish the signal->source->implication chain you request. This just happened to be where I was in the article when I read your comment.
none of these things are directly important. it's hard to recognize, because they sound very advanced and scientific, but it amounts to how bright a spot is on a brain scan. why is brightness there intrinsically good? well... it's not. I know the authors then project the actual measurements into some kind of hand wavy interpretation about how that affects the individual, but it's just hand waving.
no medication would ever be approved by the FDA using these outcomes, nor should they be (unless the community first establishes that it's a biomaker of some kind).
Fair enough. But isnt their statement (and citation) that exerting emotional control directly correlates with measured increases in a particular region ... exactly what we want to see? If all people exerting emotional control exhibit red ears, and yoga practcioners have less red ears when under stressful focused tasks, it does seem reasonable that less emotional control is required. That logic is sound, right?
On a tangent: how do you know if the outcome is directly meaningful? that part is easy: ask yourself if you, personally, care. If I told you "an hour of Yoga will make your hippocampus more dense on an MRI" you should
1) ignore me, because that isn't even internally consistent
2) ask yourself why that's a good thing.
Compare that to
"your brain scan in 10 years will show less atrophy", or
"your brain scan in 5 years will show less chronic microvascular injury", or
"your scores in attention and daytime sleepiness will improve", or
"your life expectancy will increase by 4 years"
Those are directly meaningful, because you don't need a doctor to tell you why they are good things (or you do because it's jargony, but a doctor could explain it in one sentence)
I dont think we all want to be things that are natural to be effective. People want pills to be magically effective. Antidepressants fail to outperform placebo once you remove publication bias, there is no first principle scientific basis for them working, yet they are massively prescribed and advocated for and the “chemical imbalance” myth repeated ad nauseum. Meanwhile, meditation and yoga get massively more skepticism because they’re not pills.
The biggest mistake of our current mental health zeitgeist is sharp skepticism of mindfulness and yoga while accepting the magic of pills on pure faith.
1) Meaningful outcomes are really hard, and research is piecemeal. As a researcher, I know I have to publish intermediate and smaller results, because I can't get grants for bigger studies without a track record of publication. This is the way science is done today. Without an angel to just give $15 million for a study of an idea with no track record, you have to build the justification for longer-term studies paper by paper.
2) Placebo-controlled trials are not appropriate at all times. You can't placebo-control yoga. What's placebo yoga? For acupuncture, they placebo-control by putting needles in random places; for pill studies, you get a pill of indeterminate content. For yoga.... well, you know you're doing it. That may be part of the benefit. No getting around that.
For 60 minutes of hot yoga, the effort and challenge is occasionally so intense and nearly overwhelming, that it reminds me of the power of doing hard things. I often think if I just did 2-3 super hard things a day with this intensity, then I could master various skills, knowledge and perhaps life itself.
Although it’s harder to study and learn a programming language, even just for 2-3 hours a week, than it is to do something physically intense with group pressure. I think mostly the ease of studying and practicing is what limits me. Going to yoga is the hardest part, once there it’s relatively straightforward to complete it.
If I setup a system to intensely learn with limited technical friction (ie frustration of a slow environment with a clear path to what to learn), then I could overcome this. Of course, ultimately it just comes down to my choice.
Doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is one of those super hard things I try to do a day. It's not as "super hard" physically as one might think, especially as one improves their technique. Rather, for me and many others, it's very mentally and emotionally challenging in a fun and approachable way. The mental benefits I have realized since doing it very much speak to what you say about mastering various other skills, knowledge, and life itself. I've realized that for most of my life I've really doubted myself and that has held me back. BJJ has showed me that I can do this thing that I doubt I can do. I need only try. I might not succeed at first but with focus and persistence I will get there.
That's not to suggest everyone do BJJ. But, to your point, I think everyone should find things that really challenge them and try to engage in them on a near daily basis.
I think another major benefit of martial arts is the challenging practice of socializing. In addition to the support and camaraderie you get, you also learn a ton about others’ psychology.
In my aikido (and in the past in judo and DZR jujitsu), I am continually putting others—and being put by others—in physically and mentally stressful situations. This requires sensitivity to not under- or over-stress training partners. So, in addition to being ready to respond to chaotic and potentially injurious situations, you also need to hold a model of the other person’s capabilities at the same time.
I’m sure you’ve had the experience in BJJ of practicing with someone far beyond your skill, and knowing that they are leaving you openings in hopes that you’ll see and take the opportunity. The best martial artists I’ve known have all dialed their technique to a level that was just barely within my grasp. On beyond being good is being good enough to simulate less evolved life forms :-)
I did BJJ for 6 months. During that time, the students and my teachers frequently came in injured (we had rotating teachers). Broken fingers, toes, sprained things, etc. Then one day one of the teachers was hurt so bad that she was out for awhile. I concluded that BJJ wasn't worth the risk of these kinds of injuries, especially ones that prevent me from working with my hands. Which is a shame because I loved how BJJ engaged the body and the mind, and the camaraderie with others.
One of the great things about bjj and judo, is that they are symmetric arts. That is, both participants have the same objective. This leads to a lot of intensity / realism within the rules of engagement.
This is also a downside, as some people get very caught up in winning.
By contrast an art like aikido is assymetric meaning that the participants have different roles and goals. You have an attacker, whose goal is to attack with energy and then fall safely. You have a responder whose objective is to avoid getting hurt by the initial attack and then to execute a technique. People work up to realism in a stepwise way that requires a great deal of pushing yourself psychologically. An upside of this approach is that there are relatively few partner-inflicted injuries.
Of course a downside is that realism, which is effortless in judo or bjj, takes a long time to achieve in aikido. It’s not uncommon to find dojos that never push toward intensity or realism—which is a (valid) reason aikido is frequently criticized by practitioners of other arts.
Both approaches are valid, and most marital arts are “effective” with respect to their own threat model. It’s mostly a question of whether you want an art where your Monkey Brain is called on to temper your competitive Lizard Brain (judo, bjj). Or, do you want an art where your Monkey Brain has to incrementally push your Lizard Brain to do things it is scared to let you do (aikido).
In my experience, the latter kind of art seems to yield fewer injuries at the expense of faster progress. At the right dojo, both will provide a positive social environment and as much fitness as you desire.
Here are some research findings related to yoga practices, what difference does it make to human system is well documented here: https://www.innerengineering.com/research
Go through it if you are interested.
I try to be open minded about stuff and am always interested in various ways to take care of ones body. But by far the most difficult part of figuring out what to do is that information sources touting benefits are also like.... telling me that this jade bracelet is good for my aura or something.
I mean I’m not a geologist but.... pretty sure there’s not much basis in some of this stuff.
Anyways I try to give the benefit of the doubt to things I don’t know about but a lot of sources make that realllly tough!
As the authors wrote in the discussion section, it is not very surprising that a combination of light physical activity and meditative mindset has general positive effects. However, you could probably obtain the same result by walking and reciting Goethe poems because what people in the west understand by yoga is not very far from that. Like the Taichi stuff. Nobody knows what they are doing, but at least it doesn't harm too much and, as noticed in the paper, it has some positive effects. Anyway, better than doing nothing.
I'm no brain healthologist, but yoga has been absolutely, irrefutably, amazingly transformative to my mental health.
I started with no prior experience at age 39 nine months ago, and have gone to 140 classes since.
My happiness, attentiveness, and friendliness have all increased to the point that I am hardly recognizable, mentally, as the same person I was one year ago.
In addition to the effort and focus you have to put in during class there are other benefits, like seeing and feeling muscles you never knew existed growing and strengthening, having better posture and balance, and getting a good night's sleep every night after practice (because you're so damned tired).
On top of all of that, my studio is full of very friendly and welcoming instructors and my fellow students are just as nice, so I've made tons of new friends-- which is really hard to do when you are a working adult.
I've also lost 40lbs since March. Because I'm so tall, one hour of yoga burns about 580 calories on average for me, and I feel better afterwards-- not worse like with some other forms of physical activity.
But I didn't go for weight loss so that's just a nice bonus.
I'm relatively sure that the same could be said for many forms of physical activity, but yoga seems more suited to a variety of people regardless of age or physical ability.
Having become a bit enamored by yoga, I've started recommending to everyone I know, including my elderly parents, that they at least try it.
Being a martial arts / sports teacher with about 20 odd years of experience dealing with both soft and hard styles. I can’t really speak from a formal medical background but only really from an experience and results based perspective.
I see more and more people attending these types of activities because of “doctors orders”. And in many cases I see sports of any from just compliment whatever regiment the doctor has set out for the patient to begin with. I guess this is where physio has its place in the medical world as well, where patients need specific exercises to help with specific injuries.
Anyway, I want to point out the differences between the soft and hard approaches in the martial arts because I think it’s relevant. Not only are both approaches pretty much contradictory to each other but I find that what people find case-by-case within each practice can differ completely, which makes the whole thing quite subjective and difficult to measure.
The hard approaches are more fueled around explosive movements and repetitive training. From the students’ perspective the left to right body movement from this type of training is something that I’ve seen people with strokes or brain related illnesses use as a tool to help rebalance their motor coordination. In some cases I’ve heard people recommend dance because of the left right approach that comes with dancing, so not much to do with the style itself but rather the constant reshifting from the left to the right during training helps in this area, which has more to do with training methodology.
Where as for the softer arts, although you usually have to explain the advantages to the student, soft arts are more geared around slow movement and are aimed around longevity.
Personally I’m a bigger fan of the softer arts, simply because I prefer low resistance training myself, plus anyone with an injury who is looking for a sport, low resistance will be the better approach.
The issue I have with soft styles is that I have read a bit about Tai Chi and the medical studies surrounding Tai Chi. Sufficed to say the medical studies in this particular area have not gone well, in many cases citing little to no evidence that soft styles help with age reduction.
Although the evidence us martial arts teachers rely on are the case studies of our masters, for instance master x from martial art y lived until he was 100 and that’s because he practiced martial art y since he was 10, and so fourth. What I’d find interesting is if there are more substantial studies made in this area, I mean after all finding the fountain of youth is pretty much everyone’s dream.
> This review of literature reveals promising early evidence that yoga practice can positively impact brain health. Studies suggest that yoga practice may have an effect on the functional connectivity of the DMN, the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex while engaged in cognitive tasks, and the structure of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex- all regions known to show significant age-related changes [65, 66]. Therefore, behavioral interventions like yoga may hold promise to mitigate age-related and neurodegenerative declines. Systematic randomized trials of yoga and its comparison to other exercise-based interventions, as well as long term longitudinal studies on yoga practitioners are needed to identify the extent and scope of neurobiological changes.
With studies like this, my reaction is to assume that it's not really about yoga, but rather just making a habit out of doing exercise and spending some time focused on something other than your cell phone or a computer.
There are plenty of good ways to get exercise and manage your attention, but you don't need buzzwords to accomplish that. Taking long walks without bringing your cellphone along (or leaving it in your pocket with notifications off) is a simple, cheaper (assuming you pay for yoga classes), and equally effective way to do this.
Something came out in the NYTimes recently that walking three times a week for a half hour had positive effects.
Can’t remember everything about it.
I love walking.
What I think is nice about yoga is you get mindfulness, flexibility, strength, balance, and endurance all in one session which seems like a pretty decent bang for your buck.
One thing that the paper doesn’t spend much time on, but which is probably important, is that practising yoga is something that people often do with other people, it can be a communal exercise - which is good for the social human creature.
Edit: I'm a bit long-worded and too heavy with using fancy words. I typed fast and didn't edit at all. Writing succinctly and in easy to understand English is more difficult, for me.
---
I could predict that yoga has a good effect on brain health since I have the following hypothesis: whatever you do with a serious attentive concentration will be good for your brain in that specific area.
One question I have left is: to what extent will one be able to go beyond that area and use their cognitive benefits for similar but different pursuits?
I also have a hypothesis for that (I just don't know to what extent it's true, I read some research on it but it's all quite tentative). It is: if one specifically focuses on an area, then the benefit will be specific. However, if one chooses a meta-topic (e.g. learning as fast as possible, increasing memory or increasing attention span), then that meta-topic will be trained and that person will be good in the meta-topic across all cognition. This presumes they are immersed in training this meta-topic though (i.e. it's everywhere in their life).
Examples:
1 (normal topic). One chooses to be amazing at chess, and just at chess. Then, the brain benefits will only be helpful for chess.
2 (meta-topic). One chooses to learn as fast as possible, and chooses chess as the medium to measure progress. That person will be able to learn as fast as possible on many more domains. In part, also I presume that such a person is actively trying to use the meta principles from learning chess as fast as possible to solve other problems in their life.
So they're not doing the same things. One is learning chess, and the other one is learning to play chess as fast as possible with the broader scope to learn anything as fast as possible.
One complicating factor is that the normal chess player can try to organize the meta-topics they have learned while playing chess. While this helps, I'd argue it's simply less effective than what the second person would be doing. It's similar to architecting a software product to do certain things from the get go (person 2) or patching your software product afterwards to do that same thing (person 1).
Usually when you learn a topic, you pick up skills in the process that are useful outside of that specific domain. For example, as a software engineer, I have refined the skill of being able to break down a problem into smaller, workable parts. Even if that problem isn't specifically related to software. I am also much better at reading documentation for products that I am unfamiliar with and learning how to do things myself. These are not things that I ever specifically practiced. They are just things that I had to practice in the process of learning to be effective in my job.
If you learn Chess, it will likely have the benefits on your memory, reasoning, and ability to hold more information in your head at once.
So, overall I believe that pretty much every topic you learn will have a positive impact on various meta-topic skills and that's how most people generally improve those skills.
I would agree as you can see in my final paragraph. I'm simply saying it's not optimal. Moreover, knowledge transfer is tougher than you think. I have seen software engineers fail to use their logic they've learned with software engineering and apply it to other domains on a consistent basis.
But the reason I'm staring it is because the current opinion in academia is that knowledge transfer is tough.
Edit: in me finding sources, I found something that counteracted my claim [1]. I suppose it's back to the drawing board for me. I remember from serious game research that expanding general cognitive abilities through games were hard (I'd need to search for the sources). So I figured if this is true for dual n back (DNB), then it is most likely to be true for a lot of things. But it wasn't true for DNB.
Meditation is a tribal act in a screentime age: quietly facing the same direction, obeying a common leader - together. Just like yoga, dancing, climbing & hiking.
I think tribal socialization is a better explanation for meditation's growing popularity than “watching your thoughts like a river.”
What you are describing is the "Westernized version" of Yoga. The Yoga practiced over thousands of years in India did not involve "obeying" a common leader except for the few months that you spent learning it. There was nothing tribal about Yoga. Far from it. Most Yogis would retire to forests or caves in Himalayas to practice Yoga in "solitude". And when Yoga was done for extended periods of time (months if not for years) it was called Tapasya. None of this applies to the commercialized Yoga that is practiced in the West. It was especially not for "freeing your mind" or "mindfulness" or "for calming your nerves" or "fixing an ailment". Those were side effects. The real goal of Yoga was achieving Moksha.
Do any of the centers/groups you have seen ever advertise that Yoga is for achieving Moksha? Never. That would defeat the purpose of commercialization.
What I find thought-provoking though is the use of the phase "health approach" in the first line of the abstract:
> Yoga is the most popular complementary health approach practiced by adults in the United States.
I wonder what exactly qualifies as a "health approach". The paper acknowledges exercise is well know to be good for people, particularly in ageing - so it's heathy, but is exercise an "approach"? What about reading, or caring for young children (both also good for your health) can that be a "health approach"?
I usually try to talk about these practices as being part of a heathy lifestyle, rather than being therapies. I feel that we're over-medicalising when we start to say that riding a bicycle or hugging our friends are therapies, rather than just being healthy.