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There are many paths to managing moods, and one is through the body. Exercise has been shown in many studies to help with depression and anxiety. In his new book The Science of Yoga, William J. Broad takes a close look at one form of exercise, and finds it can have a dramatic effect on people’s mood.
Advanced yoga practitioners, says Broad, have a superior ability to control their autonomic nervous system, which controls bodily functions such as respiration rate, heart rate, digestion, and sexual arousal. Yoga has a particularly strong effect on the parasympathetic system, which enables us to slow down our body’s fight-or-flight response. In other words, certain poses, such as inversions, induce the heart into beating more slowly, which contributes to relaxation. Other research has shown that yoga can increase levels of the neurotransmitter GABA, which aids in relaxation and reducing anxiety.
Broad writes:
The portrait of yoga that emerges from decades of mood and metabolic studies is of a discipline that succeeds brilliantly at smoothing the ups and downs of emotional life. It uses relaxation, breathing, and postures to bring about an environment of inner bending and stretching. The actions echo, in a way, how yoga pushes the limbs into challenging new configurations. They promote inner flexibility.
Psychotherapy is one way to address anxiety or depression. But it is limited to time spent in the therapist’s office. Yoga is one of many helpful activities that people can pursue on their own and that increase one’s ability to manage emotions and control stress.
On the same day that The New York Times published a front-page story about the latest trends in multi-tasking (think multiple computer screens), the newspaper also ran an article about the benefits of something that is almost exactly the opposite of multi-tasking: mindful eating.
Based in Buddhism, mindful eating is the practice of attending closely to how the senses are engaged when one has a meal. When one mindfully eats, one is focusing on nothing but the food. There’s no reading the newspaper, no watching TV -- not even any conversation at the table.
Mindfulness offers a take on food different from the more common view of “good” and “bad” foods. Instead of avoiding a certain food because it’s “bad” to eat too much of it, you slow down the experience of eating the food. You savor it, think about it -- try to really taste it. Mindful eating is a surprisingly challenging thing to do, since we have so many distractions at mealtimes and we’re so used to using food itself to distract ourselves from what we’re feeling, both emotionally and physically. Mindful eating is widely used in treating people with eating disorders because so much of that disordered behavior is about consuming food, not tasting it.
Mindful eating is a difficult practice to master; even the experts quoted can’t do it all the time. But even thinking about the concept and trying it can help us. Compare the difference between really looking, smelling and tasting a piece of chocolate and then just popping it into your mouth without paying attention. It can be a completely different and more pleasurable experience when you taste the chocolatey taste and feel the melting texture of the chocolate. You may find that you feel satisfied with less, and enjoy what you have eaten more.
Knowing when we have taken a healthy behavior too far can be hard to judge. In the March issue of Runner’s World, Caleb Daniloff writes about how his attention to nutrition, while training for his first marathon, drifted into bad eating habits. Believing that losing weight would help him train better and run faster, he ended up restricting his eating, drastically cutting calories, becoming preoccupied with his weight and body, and avoiding foods that he formerly ate with abandon. He caught himself before developing a full-fledged eating disorder, but the article describes several elite athletes who didn’t.
Disordered eating — that is, eating behavior that doesn’t meet the medical definition of an eating disorder, but can be injurious nonetheless — is widespread. Three-fourths of American women between 25 and 45 display some disordered eating, according to a study cited in Daniloff’s article.
How do you know whether your eating is disordered? The most common sign, according to Leslie Bonci, a nutritionist quoted in the story, is this: “Food choices become about what not to eat.”
The article includes some common food rules people adopt that can signal disordered eating. The magazine’s list of danger signs is directed at athletes, but it’s useful for everyone. Here’s a paraphrase:
1. Eating energy bars as meals rather than eating real foods.
2. Avoiding fat, or carbs, or a particular basic food group.
3. Rigidly scheduling mealtimes rather than eating according to feeling hungry.
4. Logging calories precisely.
5. Avoiding eating with others if it doesn’t fit with your food rules.
6. Skipping fuel on long runs.
When you’ve taken all the pleasure out of food for yourself — when food rules take precedence over friends and family, when it’s all about what you’re taking away from yourself, rather than what you’re giving to yourself — you’ve crossed over from moderation to disordered behavior. Athletes and non-athletes alike would benefit from shifting their focus from food as an obstacle to weight loss to food as a means of fueling and replenishing one’s body.
