Yoga can protect the brain from decline. More than keeping you flexible, the practice can help keep the mind young and quick.

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Marlynn Wei M.D., J.D.
Urban Survival
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Why Does Anyone Do Yoga, Anyway?
The health benefits are very real. But few understand how it affects the mind.
Posted Jun 22, 2015
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After my last weekend of yoga teacher training, a
friend asked me at dinner, “Why do you do yoga?
So you can learn to do what, headstands?”
Why do people do yoga?
More than 90% of people who come to yoga do so
for physical exercise, improved health, or stress
management, but for most people, their primary
reason for doing yoga will change. One study found
that two-thirds of yoga students and 85% of yoga
teachers have a change of heart regarding why
they practice yoga—most often changing to
spirituality or self-actualization, a sense of fulfilling their potential. The practice of yoga offers far more than
physical postures and headstands—there is self-reflection, the practice of kindness and compassion, and
continued growth and awareness of yourself and others.
Yet the health benefits are very real: Yes, yoga can increase your flexibility, improve your balance, and decrease
your cholesterol. A recent review in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology showed that yoga reduces
the risk of heart disease as much as conventional exercise. On average, yoga participants lost five pounds,
decreased their blood pressure, and lowered their low-density (“bad”) cholesterol by 12 points. There is a vast
and growing body of research on how yoga improves health concerns including chronic pain, fatigue, obesity,
asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, weight loss, and more.
As a psychiatrist, though, I am also naturally interested in the brain. While most people intuitively get that yoga
reduces depression, stress and anxiety, most people—even physicians and scientists—are typically surprised to
find out that yoga changes the brain.
A new, May 2015 study published in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience uses magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) of the brain to show that yoga protects the brain from the decline in gray matter brain volume as we age.
People with more yoga experience had brain volumes on par with much younger people. [In the figure to the
left, red triangles represent people who have zero yoga experience and filled circles are people who practice
yoga with varying frequency]. This finding has also been true in brain imaging studies of people who meditate.
In other words, yoga could protect your brain from shrinking as you get older.
Even more interesting, the protection of this gray matter brain volume is mostly in the left hemisphere, the
side of your brain associated with positive emotions and experiences and parasympathetic nervous system
activity—your “rest and digest” relaxation system. Emotions like joy and happiness have exclusively more
activity in the left hemisphere of the brain on positive emission tomography (PET) brain scans.

2. 3/29/2018 Why Does Anyone Do Yoga, Anyway? | Psychology Today
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Source: Villemure, et al.
But the truth is that the practice of yoga is not just about changing the brain, the body, headstands, or even
about gaining greater joy or happiness. If it were, it'd be just like another spinning class or weight-training at the
gym. Yoga aims toward transcendence of all those things. In a culture in which we rush from one day to the next,
constantly trying to change our health, body, or emotions, or to plan the future, yoga opens up the possibility of
connecting to what we already have—to who we already are.
As Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron explains:

3. 3/29/2018 Why Does Anyone Do Yoga, Anyway? | Psychology Today
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“When we start to meditate…we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle
aggression against who we really are.
"Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about
befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as
we are. That’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest….We recognize our capacity
to relax with the clarity, the space, the open-ended awareness that already exists in our minds. We
experience moments of being right here that feel simple, direct, and uncluttered.”
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So, why do I practice yoga? The answer can be complex and personal, but it can also be simple and universal:
Because I want to be present. Because I want to be present not just on my mat but also to myself and the
people—the community—around me.
Yoga can change the heart—but we’re not just talking about blood pressure.
Marlynn Wei, MD, JD is a psychiatrist and author in New York working on an upcoming yoga book with co-
author Harvard psychiatrist James E. Groves, MD.
Follow me on Facebook and on Twitter @newyorkpsych
Copyright Marlynn H. Wei, MD, PLLC © 2015
Dedicated to the yoga teachers (Ossi Raveh, Be Shakti, Dennis Teston, Mikki Raveh, Allegra Romita, and many
more) and fellow teachers-in-training at the Brooklyn Yoga Project—a community that befriends who we already
are.
Selected References
Park CL, et al. Why practice yoga? Practitioners' motivations for adopting and maintaining yoga practice. J
Health Psychol. 2014 Jul 16. pii: 1359105314541314.
Villemure C, et al. Neuroprotective effects of yoga practice: age-, experience-, and frequency-dependent
plasticity. Front Hum Neurosci. 2015; 9: 281.
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About the Author
Marlynn Wei, M.D., J.D., is a board-certified Harvard and Yale-trained psychiatrist and therapist in New York City.
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