5 Ways Yoga Helps Regulates Your Stress

Take a scroll through social media and you’ll find countless creators touting ways to lower or optimize cortisol. This want of control is more than just a passing trend as the hormone is an undeniable part of everyday life. It’s essential in helping your body not only respond to stress but regulate metabolism, support immune function, and maintain a healthy sleep-wake cycle. The real issue isn’t cortisol itself, but what happens when the body’s stress response stays switched on long after a threat has passed.

Higher cortisol levels over long stretches of time can disrupt rest, increase insulin resistance, and lead to anxiety and depression, all of which can lead to even more cortisol production, creating a vicious cycle, explains endocrinologist Gillian Goddard, MD.

Fortunately, various elements of practicing yoga can help regulate your stress levels—and your everyday experience of being in your mind and your body.

Yoga for What Ails You

Psychological stressors such as demanding work environments, economic uncertainty, and a constant stream of digital information can keep your stress response activated in ways the body wasn’t necessarily designed to handle. “Cortisol’s stress response system evolved when the threats our ancient ancestors faced were very different—animal threats, famine, other bands of humans,” says Goddard. Although cortisol is one measurable part of that process, it tells only part of the story.

“Cortisol is only one slice of the pie,” says Laura Schmalzl, a clinical neuropsychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who has studied yoga’s effects on the stress response. She notes that prolonged stress also affects heart rate, breathing, and other physiological processes.

Research suggests yoga-based practices can influence several of these systems. In one randomized controlled study, Schmalzl and her colleagues found that both movement-focused and breath-focused yoga practices reduced perceived stress and salivary cortisol levels over eight weeks. The breath-focused group also showed a greater improvement in sustained attention and presence, suggesting that the practice’s effects might arise from more than just the physical poses themselves. A meta-analysis of 42 randomized controlled trials similarly found that yoga-based interventions were associated with reductions in cortisol, along with changes in other physiological markers of stress.

Yoga’s potential stress-relieving effects appear to come from more than one component of the practice, including breath control, self-compassion, and more.

5 Ways Your Yoga Practice Can Help You Stress Less

Here are some of the ways yoga can help shift your body out of fight-or-flight mode.

1. Breath Control Signals Safety

Pranayama, or breath control, is a foundational element of yoga. Yogic breathing typically involves inhaling slowly through the nose as you feel your abdomen and chest expand, and gradually exhaling in the reverse order, like a smooth, continuous wave. This slow, deep, rhythmic style of breathing offers almost immediate stress-busting benefits by activating the parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) nervous system to calm anxiety or excitement.

“The breath is one of the very first things that gets affected when we experience stress,” says Schmalzl. Since the nervous system interprets breathing patterns as signals of safety or threat, intentionally regulating the breath can help tell the body that you’re safe and create a foundation for nervous system regulation.

The real benefit comes when you incorporate breath control into your everyday life. “When you drive to work, and you’re in a traffic jam, can you come back to your breath instead of going into a stress response?” she says. “It’s really about using the practice on the mat to create a new habit.”

2. Mindful Movement Reduces Reactivity

Physical exercise is technically a stressor, meaning an intense yoga class can temporarily raise your cortisol levels before they return to baseline. The good news is this spike can be beneficial by helping train the body to respond to stress by bringing cortisol levels back to normal. Over time, regular aerobic exercise can reduce the reactivity of the cortisol loop to chronic stress. The research also shows mind-body practices, such as yoga, can lower cortisol production and reduce anxiety, says Goddard.

“The key to all these modalities seems to be exercise frequency,” she says. “Essentially, the more you participate, the more benefit you get in the form of reduction in stress hormones.”

3. Focus on Community Provides Balance

For many, an added perk of attending in-person classes is the sense of connection that comes from practicing with others. Whether you’re a studio regular or retreat lover, that social contact can help you let off steam. Research has linked positive social interactions with the release of oxytocin, a hormone involved in social bonding that might also help regulate the body’s stress response.

To reap the benefits, give yourself a chance to connect with fellow yogis. Arrive a few minutes early to chat with other students, stay afterward to ask your teacher a follow-up question, or sign up for that weekend workshop you’ve been wanting to explore.

4. Self-Compassion Eradicates Stress

Yoga teachers often emphasize meeting yourself where you are without judgment, whether that means taking a different version of a pose or finding a pose that feels restful to you, such as Child’s Pose, mid-class if you need it. Although mindfulness was long thought to be yoga’s main driver for stress relief, one small study included in a systematic review actually found it was increased self-compassion that helped explain reductions in perceived stress following a four-month residential yoga program. Rather than striving for the “perfect” pose, participants were encouraged to approach their bodies with awareness and acceptance.

“Self-compassion could be even more important [than mindfulness] for stress reduction,” says Kristen Riley, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Rutgers University and co-author of the review. “It may mean that it’s quite important how yoga is taught.”

Early research also suggests self-compassion might influence the body’s stress response, with higher levels associated with lower markers of inflammation and subjective anxiety during stressful situations, even when cortisol levels remained the same. Learning to notice discomfort and limitations without judgment might help us develop a more accepting relationship with ourselves and our bodies, which in turn can influence how we respond to stress.

5. Routines Serve as Support