If you’re feeling more anxious lately, you may be wondering if there’s any sort of yoga flow to ease anxiety. Especially given that so much Westernized “yoga” now focuses on fast movement, loud music, and getting a sweaty workout. Sadly, these can be counterintuitive to relieving anxiety.
Traditional yoga practices, however, focus instead on the three key elements of mindful movement, breathing, and meditation to help you find a more peaceful state. In fact, research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggests that yoga has many mental benefits. These include reduced stress, improved sleep, and decreased muscle tension.
So with that in mind, we’ve created a fairly simple flow that you can do when everyday anxiety is taking the helm of your thoughts.
Managing Anxiety with Yoga
Why does traditional yoga work when trying to mitigate anxiety?
Well, researchers believe that interrupting anxious thought patterns with mindful movement is key. The feedback loop of negative thoughts about all of the events of your life is effectively halted, and this relieves you of your heightened emotional state. In simpler terms, yoga challenges you to stay in the present moment so you’re less anxious about the past or the future.
Furthermore, yoga builds self-awareness. With regular practice, you develop the tools you need to better cope with everyday stressors. These tools include slowing your breath, quieting your thoughts, becoming aware of tension, and finding equanimity when in a state of discomfort. By increasing emphasis on the breath, you slow your heart rate, lower your blood pressure, and can move out of the fight/flight/freeze response that dominates the anxious nervous system.
Curious to see how it works for you?
A Simple Yoga Flow to Ease Anxiety
The following flow can help ease the symptoms of anxiety so you can clear your head and gain a new perspective. It isn’t a permanent fix, of course. But this flow, or any yoga flow that’s done mindfully and with intention really, can teach you different ways of coping with everyday anxiety and uncertainty.
So let’s get started.
1. Child’s Pose with Belly Breath
Getting close to the ground and in a prone position (face toward the earth) calms your entire nervous system. And child’s pose does just that.
Come onto hands and knees and bring your toes together. Slowly ease your hips back to your heels with a long exhale. If they don’t touch, you can place a blanket between your heels and hips.
Once you’re relaxed back onto your heels, stretch your arms forward and let your tailbone lengthen away from the pelvis. Begin to incorporate belly breath. When you inhale, the belly expands and you carry the breath up to the top of the rib cage. When you exhale, you empty the breath from the top of the lungs to the bottom.
Continue to breathe this way and stay for as long as it feels good.
2. Yoga Squat
As you come out of child’s pose, come onto your hands and knees. Then roll back onto your toes and feet to come into a squatting position. Your feet can be closer together, or you may choose to walk them wider apart.
If available, press your elbows against your inner knees, and bring the palms together in front of your heart. Again, take a few deep breaths. Hold in this position until you feel your energy moving down and you experience a sense of being grounded.
3. Standing Forward Bend
Moving out of squat pose, straighten your legs but keep your torso folding forward. Place your feet hip-width distance apart and stay soft in your knees.
Hanging forward with your elbows bound or arms free, you can sway a little bit side to side. Notice the relaxation you feel in your shoulders and neck as gravity works in your favor.
Keep the weight, moving more forward into the balls of the feet rather than the heels. And stay here for as long as you’d like before rolling up one vertebra at a time.
4. Half Sun Salutation
A half sun salutation is by itself a mini flow. It’s often considered a moving meditation and it’s an amazing way to start to bring awareness to your breath and movement and how they’re connected.
From your standing position, inhale and sweep your arms up. As you exhale, hinge from the hips to fold forward. Come up halfway so your torso is parallel with the earth, exhale fold back in toward your legs. As you inhale come all the way back with a flat back and sweep the arms overhead once again. As you exhale, the arms come back down to the sides or in front of the heart.
This flow is generally done taking one movement for one breath, but you’re welcome to slow it down. Take as many half sun salutations as you would like until you feel the meditative quality.
5. Tree Pose
Tree pose is a balancing pose and it will help you calm your mind and increase concentration.
Start by bring your palms to prayer and shifting your weight onto your right leg. Place the sole of your left foot to your inner left leg, either above or below the knee. Gently press the foot against the inner thigh and allow the thigh to push back to help you draw to center.
You can remain there, or add movement to your tree for an additional challenge. Hold for as long as you like before switching to the other side.
6. Reclined Twist
Once you have come back to standing from a tree pose, sweep the arms back up, and return to a forward fold. From there, bend your knees and slowly lower onto your hips.
From a seated position, gently roll onto your back, holding behind your legs if you need support for your back. Once you’ve come into a supine position, hug your knees to your chest and open your arms out to a T-shape. Gently let the knees fall over to the right and turn your gaze to the left. Stay in the spinal twist for as long as you’d like before switching to the other side.
Spinal twists are beneficial for resetting the nervous system, and are often done at the end of a traditional yoga practice.
7. 4-4-8 Breathing into Corpse Pose
Bring your legs back to center and slowly straighten them, allowing the feet to move to their respective corners and the arms to come out to the sides, palms facing up but hands relaxed.
Before moving into corpse pose, the quintessential resting pose, take some 4-4-8 breath. This involves inhaling through the nose for a count of four, holding the breath for that same count of four, and then exhaling slowly through the mouth for a count of eight.
This breathing exercise will help you relax more deeply into your body and mind before moving into your final corpse pose.
Find More Peace
We hope the above simple yoga flow to ease anxiety helps you experience a more settled space. Uniting your mind and body through movement and your breath can have a very calming effect on the nervous system.
It should be noted that if you’re struggling with more than garden-variety anxiety, yoga is not a replacement for other medical interventions. But even if you’ve been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, yoga can still be a powerful complement to ongoing treatment.
So if you’re ready to see how yoga can bring more peace of mind in these stressful times, contact us today. We have both in-person and online yoga and yoga therapy offerings to help ease your anxiety and bring steadiness into your life.
