How Yoga Can Improve Psychotherapy Outcomes

Having a regular yoga practice has been shown to reduce stress and inflammation, improve sleep, boost energy, increase body awareness, and create mental clarity. 

Yoga has also been shown to increase vagal tone, which increases one’s window of tolerance. Expanding your window of tolerance is step one in healing trauma, as it allows you to work through trauma without becoming overwhelmed by it. 

Yoga is a practice of mindfully staying present in your body, which is an essential skill for safely addressing trauma. 

Increasing vagal tone and widening  your window of tolerance through yoga allows you to safely go deeper into trauma work in therapy and experience some healing more quickly. 

Trauma work in therapy begins with creating a felt sense of safety in your body and safety with the therapist. We do this through building rapport, breath work, mindfulness, and other grounding techniques. Only after this safety is established do we process traumatic memories.

Think of it as like training to run a marathon. It won’t turn out well for you if you enter a race after eating a low-nutrient diet, a poor night’s sleep, and/or never running before. Your body would become totally overwhelmed. Marathon training requires nourishing the body really well to be able to handle the immense stress of running 26 miles.

Similarly with healing trauma, we must nourish the body (regulate the nervous system) so that it can handle the stress of addressing trauma without becoming overwhelmed.

Supplementing therapy with a yoga practice supports this first goal of establishing safety in the body, which is essential in the healing journey. 

For some, feeling safe in your body and with another person and having tools to regulate your nervous system is enough for healing trauma. Others will benefit from journeying onward into re-imagining the traumatic memories with a professional and receiving therapeutic interventions to process and integrate the memories.

While the road to healing and wholeness looks a little bit different for everyone, having a yoga practice is beneficial for anyone’s journey. 

Yoga - meditation, breath work, mindful movement- is an effective tool to support you on your journey home to yourself.