SWEAT AWAY SADNESS

Clinically proven to reduce depression, hot yoga could be key to managing your mental health, writes Eve Boggenpoel

- Eve Boggenpoel

‘It was so hard, my stomach was pulsing!' Dr Maren Nyer, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, tells Women's Fitness. Unable to perform the poses in the sweltering heat of her first hot yoga class, but determined not to be beaten, Dr Nyer returned to the studio the following day. This time she not only finished the class but had a transformative experience. 'It was a totally different feeling. I felt as if I was in a new state of consciousness,' she explains. 'I soon started going to classes regularly and noticed my sleep improve, my concentration improve, and I was less anxious and less reactive... everything just got way better.' In fact, she was so impressed with the results, she decided to conduct her own research into the mental health benefits of this style of yoga.

BETTER THAN MEDICINE

Dr Nyer's study looked at the effects of hot yoga on people with moderate-to-severe depression, with participants either attending hot yoga sessions once or twice a week for two months, or being on a waiting list for the same classes.

'Using the Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology - a gold-standard instrument that covers everything from lack of motivation and anxiety to thoughts of suicide - the hot yoga participants saw significant reductions in anxiety and stress, and improvements in quality of life, energy and emotional wellbeing,' she says. 'In fact, the effect size in our study was around one. With anti-depressants it's 0.4, so the effect size was more than double that of medication.'

WHY HEAT HELPS