Do All Types Of Yoga Reduce Stress?

Research suggests most yoga types positively affect stress

Background

Yoga is frequently recommended for many common mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and coping with the stress of daily life. In particular, yoga is recommended for stress reduction in a wide variety of populations and in many different contexts. Populations examined in individual research studies that reported a positive relationship between yoga and reduced stress ranged from pregnant women to young adults, to explorers preparing for an Arctic expedition.

However, as most practitioners of yoga know, yoga styles and practices can be quite varied. Different yoga styles have different emphases. Not all yoga styles include the same practices. Yoga styles can differ in their intensity and their intention.

The research team on the study we summarized here was interested in whether all types of yoga reduced stress. They conducted a review study that examined many smaller studies. Their larger review study examined trends among the many individual yoga studies on yoga and stress to see if the trends suggested that all yoga styles similarly reduced stress.

Research question

Do all types of yoga reduce stress?

Research methods

The research team searched all research published between 2014 and 2018 listed in the PubMed and Scopus databases as well as papers published in the journal, International Journal of Yoga. They searched for studies using the keywords yoga, stress, tension, and pressure. The researchers then examined each study to see if it met certain criteria for inclusion in their review.

Researchers screened potential individual studies for the following criteria:

• Study populations were at least 18 years old or older, healthy, had no clinically diagnosed conditions, were not pregnant, and were not employed in work that required night-shift work
• Intervention in the individual study was a yoga practice and there was a comparison or control group included in the study
• Outcome measured in the study was related to the effect of the yoga intervention on stress
• Published studies with a longitudinal design or review studies were not included in the review

Once the research team identified studies to include in their review, they used two assessment tools to examine their quality and potential risk of publication bias. They used the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme checklist to rate the quality of each study. They used the Cochrane tool to assess the potential for publication bias in each included study. Publication bias is the tendency for researchers to publish only the studies that have positive statistically significant results. When combining the results of many small studies in a review, it’s important to include studies with negative and insignificant results as well as positive ones, so that the overall conclusions that the review draws are an accurate summary of all the relevant research.

Results

In total, the research team included twelve studies in their review that met all the inclusion criteria. When the study participants for all twelve individual studies were combined, there were 672 participants. Among the individual studies, the styles of yoga examined included: Hatha, Bikram, Kundalini, Sudarshan kriya, Kripalu, and Yin. The length of the yoga interventions in the individual studies varied from four weeks to 28 weeks. All the individual studies used the same scale to measure perceived stress, the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). However, some of the individual studies used other scales to measure aspects of stress in addition to the PSS.

The majority of the studies met the criteria for sufficiently high-quality research, but the researchers assessed the individual studies as more varied with respect to publication bias. However, all twelve studies included in the review reported that the yoga intervention evaluated reduced stress levels of the treatment group. Across studies, there was a correlation between greater yoga class attendance and a greater reduction in stress levels.

Why is this relevant to yoga practitioners?

Stress relief is one of the most common reasons practitioners begin and maintain a yoga practice. However, there are many yoga styles and classes to choose from. If using yoga to reduce stress is your goal, then it’s important to know if particular types of yoga are better for stress reduction.

The review study we summarized here found that yoga interventions in all of the individual studies they examined significantly reduced stress to some degree. Since they evaluated studies that incorporated a variety of different types of yoga, this suggests that practitioners can select the style of yoga that they connect most strongly with and expect that it will likely have positive effects on their stress. It’s possible that certain types of yoga methods, practice frequencies, duration of practices, or other variables create the context for a more positive impact on stress reduction than others. Additionally, multiple individual studies within the review noted the need for long-term yoga studies to better understand its effects. However, their results suggest that even in the short term, most types of yoga have a positive effect on stress.

Reference citation

Wang, F. and A. Szabo. 2020. Effects of yoga on stress among healthy adults: A systematic review. Alternative Therapies. 26(4):58-64.