BALANCE YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM WITH YIN YOGA

15th June 2024 by Nina Garcia

Ideally, you all would like to live in the beautiful countryside, going on daily country walks, breathing in fresh air, growing your own vegetables and minimizing stressful situations. Sadly, this is not the reality for all of us and certainly not for me. You know what toll modern society takes on your life, especially when you live in a city and get busy with everyday responsibilities.

The way life has evolved is not in line with your natural habitat. The evolution of life has sped up with the birth of technology and your body hasn't adapted or is designed to cope with today's fast pace and hyperconnectivity. As a consequence, your nervous system is more often in a constant state of alert.

Here is the hope - you can conciousely and with great awearness change this state through the practice of yin yoga.

I work with busy individuals, helping them destress not because they want to be calm, but because they need it the most. Sometimes it's hard for me to justify and explain the use of yin yoga to someone who is goal-driven, runs at 100 miles an hour and feels strapped for time. It is exactly for these reasons that they need yin yoga: to soothe their charged-up nervous system and teach their bodies how to slow down and soften.

THE NERVOUS SYSTEM - A BRIEF OVERVIEW

The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) are part of your Autonomus Nervous System and yoga pratice, specially Yin can help rebalance these two important systems.

The SNS is your fight-or-flight system. It's triggered in response to a threat and as a consequence, your heart rate increases, muscles contract, pupils dilate, saliva production decreases, you become more alert and adrenaline is released. In today's society, arguments with your neighbor, mid-year reviews, paying bills, loud music and messages can all trigger your SNS. You are in a constant state of action.

The PNS is completely the opposite - it's your rest-digest response. Through stimulation via the nerves running to your internal organs (primarily the vagus nerve), your heart rate slows, blood pressure drops, saliva can be secreted again and your eyes might get a little watery.

The nervous system affects and works with the immune system and fascial system. If you're constantly stressed, you can experience chronic stress and this has huge implications on your body. Stress fuels some of the biggest health problems of our time, including type 2 diabetes, depression, heart attacks and strokes.

HOW YIN YOGA CAN HELP RE-BALANCE THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

Two of the ways Yin Yoga can help bring balance to the nervous system are through stillness and breath.* Please remember not to force the breath and focus on the slowness of the breath. The slower you breathe, the more CO2 you have in your blood and you need CO2 for O2 transfer to take place from the blood to the cells to efficiently oxygenate the body. This slow breathing is very effective and dials down the SNS.

In Yin Yoga, each pose is like a mini meditation during which you learn how to cultivate internal awareness. Practicing Yin Yoga with the intention of cultivating awareness and loving-kindness makes the practice very different from one focusing on "stretching" or "getting more flexible". When you work with intention, you start to create shifts neurologically. You begin to adapt the way you think through great awareness of where your mind is in each held pose and consciously implement loving-kindness when the mind drifts to a negative or critical place. When you are actively stopping and changing the way you think, you are firing new neurons together in the brain to create new thinking patterns. If you keep coming back to something, eventually it becomes ingrained in the mind. Unfortunately, it’s easier for your critical mind to keep stirring and coming back to negative thoughts. The Yin practice gives you the space and time to note your thoughts and consciously change the dialogue.

On an anatomical level, your fascia is connected to your immune system and richly supplied with nerves that are connected to your nervous system. In fact, there are 10 times more nerve endings in your fascia than in your muscles. If you are working the fascia the right way (through Yin), you send the right messages to the nervous system and the brain: "I am safe, I can rest."

I hope this blog helped you getting a better understanding of the relationship between Yin Yoga and the nervous system.

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*Your uniqueness matters. The meditation and breathwork, in theory, "should" make you feel more relaxed, but the same technique can have a different effect on different people. Also, for some, they could be actually triggering and not very useful in certain circumstances.