Can Yoga affect Emotions?

We have 6 basic emotions: anger, fear, sadness, joy, amazement and disgust. Contrary to popular belief, love is not an emotion, but a feeling.

From a bodily point of view, every emotion felt triggers a muscular reaction and with that a universal facial expression.

Anger puts the body in a state of aggression, the muscles contract, ready to pounce.

Fear puts the body on high alert ready to flee, muscle tone increases.

Sadness causes a still body folded in on itself, muscle tone is weak ...

Emotions have a bodily signature in the form of muscle and postural tensions. Stuck in the tissues, they cause chronic pain due to poor posture or cause an emotional state to persist beyond the moment the emotion is felt. For example, stuck in an elevator, I felt a surge of anxiety. Once out of the elevator, there is no more danger. And yet the fear and angst of the elevators remained. Tense, a tight chest, I always felt bad when I'm in a crowd or having to take an elevator. The emotion - fear - got stuck in my tissues.

By acting on these muscle tensions and postures, we act directly on the emotion blocked in the body. By stretching the muscles, we release the emotion. By acting on postures, we improve the general condition. And vice versa. Adopting a bad posture worsens the emotional state.

When we talk about yoga, we mainly think of the physical aspect of the postures, the "asanas", which literally stretch the muscles and fascia. But breathing plays a major role in releasing tension just like postures. Anger and fear make breathing shallow and fast and heart beat increase. By working the diaphragm, the main respiratory muscle, we act on the quality of breathing and on the heart rate which will have a direct impact on the emotional state.

From a physiological point of view, certain emotions such as fear or anger are at the origin of psychopathological disorders.

Whether they are anxiety attacks, panic attacks, generalized anxiety, performance anxiety, agoraphobia ... fear elicits a sympathetic response from the neuro-vegetative system (cf. blog on the nervous system). The person of an anxious nature will have an imbalance in the tonus of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. The sympathetic system is too busy, the parasympathetic weakened.

By practicing regularly, we balance the neuro-vegetative system, we improve the general condition by constantly cleaning up the accumulation of tensions and we release blockages layer after layer.