When Slowing Down Makes You Feel Anxious: On Yoga, Trauma and Learning to Be in Your Body

“Have you tried yoga?” 

If you're experiencing anxiety, depression, burnout, stress, or difficulty sleeping, chances are someone has suggested it to you. 

Maybe it was your therapist or your doctor. Maybe that friend who swears yoga changed their life? There is a good reason for the recommendation. Yoga incorporates movement, breath, attention and research suggests it may be a helpful addition to treatment for depressive symptoms and can reduce anxiety and stress for many people. But what happens when you try it—and hate it?

Maybe focusing on your breathing makes you anxious. Closing your eyes makes you uncomfortable. Being still causes thoughts or emotions to come rushing forward. Perhaps looking at your body in the mirror brings up critical thoughts about your weight, shape, strength, flexibility, aging, or physical limitations. Suddenly, this thing that was supposed to help you relax feels like anything but... So when an instructor says, “Close your eyes and notice your body,” your nervous system may respond: No thank you. We don't do that here.

Sometimes Avoiding the Mat Is Information

As both a psychologist and yoga teacher, I am interested in what happens when someone tells me, “Yoga just isn't for me.” While I agree yoga is not the best approach for everybody, sometimes there is more to the story.

We spend a surprising amount of time living around our bodies. We work through hunger, ignore exhaustion, distract ourselves from discomfort. We criticize what we see in the mirror without even catching it. For someone experiencing burnout or depression, beginning to move your body again may also make painfully clear how disconnected you have become from your physical self. For people with trauma histories, turning attention inward can become even more complicated and uncomfortable.

Interoception is a term that describes our ability to notice and interpret internal sensations—like your heartbeat or the feeling of air filling your lungs and chest cavity when you breathe deeply. It can also include cues from the body that something needs our attention like pain, hunger, temperature changes, tension, nausea, or that familiar knot developing in our stomach when we feel anxious.

Trauma can affect how people experience and interpret these internal sensations. Sometimes we may understandably avoid sensations which remind you of previous frightening experiences. Research on trauma-sensitive yoga suggests that gradually developing a regular interoceptive awareness practice is one way to help people experiencing trauma-related distress.

Trauma-sensitive yoga is not a new idea, nor is the research behind it. The approach grew out of work at the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute (JRI), where researchers and clinicians, including Bessel van der Kolk and David Emerson, began formally studying yoga as an adjunctive treatment for trauma more than 15 years ago. A landmark NIH-funded randomized controlled trial conducted from 2008–2011 found that women with chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD who participated in 10 weeks of trauma-informed yoga experienced significant reductions in PTSD symptoms. More recent research has continued to examine Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY), including a large multisite study of women veterans with military-sexual-trauma-related PTSD that compared TCTSY with Cognitive Processing Therapy. Across this body of work, researchers have explored how practices emphasizing interoception, choice, agency, and a different relationship with bodily sensations may support trauma recovery. The Trauma Research Foundation, founded in 2018 as an outgrowth of the Trauma Center's decades of trauma research, continues to support research and education around innovative and body-based approaches to trauma treatment.

As a therapist and yoga instructor who has completed foundational training in Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) , I allow what I have learned to inform how I approach both yoga and therapy. This means being thoughtful about the language I use, offering choices rather than assuming what someone's body should do or feel, and remaining curious when a client tells me that movement, stillness, breathing, or focusing on their body feels uncomfortable. Rather than seeing that discomfort as something to push through, we can talk about it in therapy and explore what it may be communicating to you. When more specialized body-based trauma work is appropriate, I can also help clients consider working with a fully certified TCTSY facilitator in a yoga class.

“Yoga isn't for me” doesn’t have to be the end of the conversation—it can be the beginning of a useful and enlightening one.  If you are ready to learn more, reach out to us at 872-529-1982 for a FREE 15 minute consultation call or email admin@chicagopsych.org. We would love to discuss options with you and see how we can help.