yogajala Staff If you have ever felt your chest tighten, your thoughts race, or your breath become shallow during moments of stress, you already understand how closely breathing and anxiety are connected. Pranayama, the ancient yogic science of breath control, offers a direct and powerful way to calm your nervous system and quiet an anxious mind. Unlike … Read more
A new study published in Frontiers in Psychology has found that regular mindfulness exercise significantly improves mental health among university students — and the mechanism may have less to do with meditation itself than with what happens afterward at bedtime. Researchers discovered that mindfulness practice improves mental health through a sequential chain: it first regularizes … Read more
A randomized controlled trial published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research has delivered some of the strongest evidence yet that smartphone-based meditation can produce meaningful mental health improvements in working adults — even without a human instructor. The study, conducted with 300 employees in Japan, found that just four weeks of daily app-guided meditation … Read more
Women who are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease may be able to protect their cognitive function through yoga and meditation, according to new research from the University of California, Los Angeles. The study, led by psychiatrist Helen Lavretsky at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, adds to a … Read more
Meditation has entered the scientific mainstream, with smartphone apps racking up hundreds of millions of downloads worldwide. But a new wave of research from Harvard suggests that experienced meditators may be accessing brain states that go far beyond simple stress relief — states that scientists have never documented before. Researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital … Read more