anxiety

Hi Linda

Connie says a few things in there about relaxing etc (thanks!). I am sure you know those as you indicate.

I would be interested to know about your abilities in specific poses, any particular areas you feel stress in your body. Where is it that your heart rate raises to a level that you feel stress triggering.

It’s possibly physiological stress. It’s possible that you are introducing stress with pose technique that needs fixing.

Struggle, effort and challenge are all 3 different things but many hot yogis lump them together.

The poses are likely to be a challenge but there should NEVER be struggle.

I would be willing to explore that with you further but I would need your response to my post and more specific details just to see where we need to go with this.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Thanks for your post, Linda. I don’t have panic disorder, but I do have anxiety that I have used meds for on and off. The hot room is, of course, a HUGE trigger, but I have come to treat it as a special, contained space… it’s like I keep this wild horse in the stall most of the time, and when I take out that horse, I know he’s gonna buck and go nuts, but if I don’t ride him once in a while, nothing will ever change! 🙂

That said, something I have learned that makes my experience a bit better is to ultimately trust mySELF, not the teacher. I have a tendency to want to be perfect and do what I’m told, but I’ve learned that when I get to a certain stage of exhaustion or stress, I sit down, NO MATTER WHAT the teacher encourages me to do. When I feel overheated, I leave the room (*gasp!*). Giving myself permission to do so lessens the judgment about my stress. As a result, I sometimes have rockstar classes where I do every pose fully and don’t feel much stress at all.

Dunno if that helps at all, but there’s my take! Ride that horse but listen to yourself while you’re doing it.

While I haven’t suffered anxiety attacks, I have been prone to nervous anxiety and stress, and have had a breakdown through nervous exhaustion (basically running on adrenaline – way before I did hot yoga), so I can relate to the “anxiety feeling in class” having experienced similar (to the degree of needing to leave the room).

I do think there is a degree of “old triggers” – ie the body stress in class is an approximation of similar physiology outside of class (when subjected to intense stress).

In fact I found this to be great training – once I’d learned to handle the intense stress in the hot yoga room, everything else outside became easier. (A byproduct I hadn’t expected! I went, like most people, for the physical benefits!)

One thing I had researched was the effect on poor breathing in class – exacerbated by the hot environment.

If you breathe shallowly (upper chest) – and this is easily stimulated too by mouth breathing and/or gasping – then this can turn into what is known as “paradoxical breathing” – the type of breathing anyone undergoing severe stress is likely to adopt (along with fight/flight/freeze reactions set of in a chain reaction by this type of breathing).

On the other hand, by training ourselves to breathe abdomino-diaphragmatically (deep belly breathing), this can be counteracted. This is probably the hardest type of breathing to maintain in the hot room (and not appropriate in all poses) – but in my personal experience and in that of coaching other students who have experienced some stress/anxiety in the room, it has been key to overcoming it.

While this might not be true in your case, it’s another avenue to explore!

Love to hear how you are going …