Nina Zolotow on Yoga for Anxiety

Light in the forest, photo by Brad Gibson
(Trees on hill in shadow with rays of light
streaming through and illuminating from behind)

Recently I had a chance to interview Nina Zolotow on her ideas about Yoga for Anxiety, her upcoming workshop with Barrie Risman on the topic, and here's what she said.

Priya: Tell me a little bit about yourself and what brought you to yoga?

Nina: I’m a long-time yoga practitioner and a certified yoga teacher who focuses on yoga for emotional well-being, which includes stress, anxiety, anger, depression, and insomnia, as well as on yoga for healthy aging. In my yoga career, I’ve actually done most of my “teaching” through my writing. I’m author/co-author of four books on yoga—my latest “Yoga for Times of Change: Practices and Meditations for Moving Through Stress, Anxiety, Grief & Life’s Transitions” will be published in Spring 2022—and I’ve been blogging for 10 years now on the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog, which I’m also the Editor in Chief of. I do also teach specialized workshops, however.

I originally came to yoga in my twenties as a form of exercise because I felt it just worked really well for my body and I enjoyed the practice. It wasn’t until many years later after I had already had some problems with anxiety and depression that I learned from Rodney Yee and Patricia Walden how helpful yoga can be for emotional well-being.

The thing is, not all yoga practices are helpful for people with those types of problems. So you can’t just “do yoga.” There’s actually a lot to learn about how to use yoga effectively to target stress, anxiety, or depression. Once I realized this, I started studying these topics as much as I could. And as I learned more and more, I changed my own practice to help myself become more balanced and that worked! I haven’t had serious problems with anxiety since then.

Ultimately, one day I had an epiphany that I should become a yoga teacher so I could share with others what I had learned over the years about how to use yoga for emotional well-being. So after many years of being a practitioner and writing about yoga, I decided to take a 500-hour training at the Berkeley Yoga Room, with my main teacher Donald Moyer. I also took various workshops with people like Patricia Walden and Roger Cole as well as various yoga therapy workshops to supplement what I learned in my teacher training.

Priya: I hear you're offering a workshop on yoga for anxiety with Barrie Risman---what got you interested in this topic?

Nina: As I said earlier, I’ve been interested in yoga for anxiety for a long time and I’ve actually written about it in my new book. But the reason this workshop came about is that both Barrie and I were noticing that a lot of people were having problems with anxiety during the pandemic. And recently, even though there are now vaccines and more ability to see our family members and friends, some people were saying their anxiety was even worse and they didn’t know why! Barrie even said she was having anxiety, which is highly unusual for her.

To me, this wasn’t surprising because the chronic stress of the last year and half could very well be triggering anxiety in many people. And being stressed out for that long isn’t easy to recover from—you don’t just instantly snap out of it. But yoga can really help with these problems because with regular practice you can use yoga to reduce your baseline stress levels while at the same time you reduce your feelings of anxiety. So I said to Barrie, “I think we need to do an online workshop as soon as possible so we can help as many people as we can with their anxiety.” (And for people who can’t attend the online workshop, we’ll be offering a recording of it.)

Priya: Is there one limb of yoga that helps the most with anxiety, such as meditation perhaps, or does each limb have a way of helping?

Nina: I’m assuming you’re asking about the eight limbs of yoga in the Yoga Sutras For now, I’ll start by discussing those eight limbs, but everyone should keep in mind there are other yogic techniques, both ancient and modern, not to mention other limbs that can help with anxiety besides the eight limbs of classical yoga.

As far as Patanjali’s eight limbs, goes, your question is important because there is an assumption that all eight limbs can help in some way with anxiety. For example, people think oh, meditation is quieting so obviously it’s good for anxiety or they think pranayama would be good for anxiety because it’s always calming to work with your breath.

In fact, meditation is not typically recommended for anxiety because being alone with your thoughts can increase your anxiety! So starting a meditation practice when you’re experiencing anxiety is considered a bad idea by the experts I’ve consulted. Of course, if you’ve been meditating for years already and it doesn’t increase your anxiety, you could still meditate. But then obviously meditation is not actually helping your anxiety and you should do something else in addition to meditating.

Many people also have the mistaken impression that pranayama is always quieting. Yes, breath awareness and pranayama practices that lengthen the exhalation or that pause at the end of the exhalation are calming and those can be very helpful for those with anxiety. But there are many practices that should be avoided, especially those that are stimulating (practices that lengthen the inhalation or that pause at the end of the inhalation). In addition, for some people just focusing on the breath can cause anxiety, so they shouldn’t do any breath work at all.

So I’m going to say the two most important “branches” for anxiety are asana and the niyama svadhyaya (study of the scriptures) in the niyama branch.

Asana is so powerful for helping with anxiety because when you learn about which poses are calming (and which are not), you can really reduce your anxiety and stress with the right yoga poses. And because yoga poses bring your mind into your body, you’re not focused on anxious thoughts, which can give you some respite.

And I include study of the scriptures because I think that yoga philosophy can help you accept impermanence and uncertainty, and to face challenges in your life with more equanimity. Changing the way you think about your life—taking a more yogic approach—is so helpful for reducing anxiety. The Bhagavad Gita is a good place to start.

For example, I overheard my husband, who is not a serious yoga practitioner, talking to a work colleague about how he was going to follow the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita as he engaged in a political battle at his work. He said like Arjuna he was going to fight for what he believes is right while trying not to be attached to the outcome. That’s a great way to reduce stress and anxiety!

The Yoga Sutras also contains some very interesting ways of working with your thoughts and Tantra Yoga philosophy includes many powerful ideas that can help you cultivate equanimity as well.

Priya: Can you give us examples of what helps?

Nina: The first principle of practicing yoga for emotional well-being is that everyone is different and what helps one person might not help another. We all have different bodies, different personalities, different temperaments, different preferences. So I always give people a whole menu of things to try to see what works for them and what doesn’t. Some of the things on that menu are:

1. Active poses can burn off the excess energy that’s often associated with anxiety.
2. Moving with your breath in gentle vinyasas can bring you into the present moment.
3. Stretching your hip joints can release physical tension and stored energy to relax you.
4. Supported inverted poses can calm you down.
5. Restorative poses can soothe you.
6. Prone poses (that face the floor) to comfort you. These including supported prone poses, such as Child’s pose and Prone Savasana, as well as supported forward bends. 
7. For those who like them, calming breath practices can reduce anxiety.
8. Guided meditations can help you relax without being left alone with your thoughts.

(Jivana’s book Accessible Yoga: Poses and Practices for Every Body shows how to make many of the poses listed above accessible.)

But I also always say, “If it’s not working for you, it’s not working for you.” So always keep in mind that if something that is supposedly calming isn’t having that effect you on, there is nothing wrong with you. You should just move on and try something else instead. Something may even work for you that’s not on my menu, say, like mudras or chanting.

Priya: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Nina: I just want everyone to know that anxiety isn’t something that you need to be at the mercy of. You can take charge of it! I think of this as a simple two-step process. First you need to learn about what anxiety is, what causes it, and how it is related to chronic stress. From there, you can then learn about which yoga practices help reduce your anxiety and stress and which do not, and then start to practice the helpful ones regularly. It can make a huge difference in your life!

So I hope that some of your readers with anxiety—and those who teach yoga to students suffering from anxiety—will join Barrie and me for our Yoga for Anxiety workshop on Saturday, August 28, because our focus will be providing you with all the information you need to get started with practicing yoga for anxiety. See barrierisman.com/yogaforanxiety for more information and to register.

I also have a lot of information on my blog about anxiety that’s useful for both practitioners and teachers. See Yoga for Anxiety: The Big Picture to get started. If you want to send me questions about anxiety to address on the blog, go to yogafortimesofchange.com and use the Contact Us form there to send me a message.

Nina Zolotow, RYT 500 is the co-author of Yoga for Healthy Aging: A Guide to Lifelong Well-Being and the editor-in-chief of the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog. A certified yoga teacher as well as a long-time yoga writer, she teaches workshops and series classes on yoga for emotional well-being, yoga for stress, yoga for better sleep, home practice, cultivating equanimity, and Yoga for Healthy Aging. Nina is also the coauthor, with Rodney Yee, of Yoga: The Poetry of the Body and Moving toward Balance.

This post was edited by Patrice Priya Wagner, Editor of Accessible Yoga Blog and member of the Board of Directors.

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