No, yoga is for sure not a new trend. It has been practiced for centuries in India and it started conquering the attention of some minorities in the west in the seventies of last century. Those of us who started practicing decades ago are amused and happy seeing how yoga has become such a mainstream workplace practice in the workplace. Especially since confinement forced us to change many habits, a growing number of professionals are including yoga into their daily lives. Both large multinationals and emerging companies offer their employees sessions in the office or resources to practice it online from the home office. Influential senior executives such as Jeff Beiner (Linkedin) or Marc Beniof (Salesforce) practice assiduously. Both among my yoga students and my clients and professional colleagues, the question about how to make the practice compatible with the work day arises.
Why is the interest in yoga booming in the world of work?
The first reason for many professionals to start is probably the need to take care of their mental health.
Even if we don’t talk about it enough, work stress is a real health problem. In Spain, stress is the second cause of sick leave, affecting at some point 54% of workers (IEPP), and mental health sick leave has doubled in the last seven years. In Europe, 12% of employees suffer serious cases of burnout (recognized as an occupational disease by the WHO since 2019). In other words: one in ten European workers have surpassed their limits – and this figure rises to more than 30% on the American continent. Looking from the outside into the life of companies with an observer’s mindset, we see people feeling that nothing is enough for their company or business, rushing from meeting to meeting, postponing tasks, and struggling to manage time and uncertainty.
As sarcastically pointed out by Jordy Alemany, neither yoga nor any other method of stress management can replace the obligation of companies to treat people with respect and common sense. In other words, if your boss constantly changes your expectations, doesn’t support or recognize your efforts, and gives you assignments on Friday afternoons which are due Monday morning, maybe you don’t need yoga classes – you need a new boss. But, even in well-managed organizations with good leaders, the very demanding and uncertain environment we live in has the potential to overload us with stress to the point of exhaustion.
A little biochemistry
Being able to react to stress is part of life. Our body’s physiological response to dangerous situations has been fine-tuned over thousands of years of evolution. When the issue is either being a predator or becoming a prey, the best solution is to flee or fight – in any case, a good session of extreme physical exercise. For such situations, the release of adrenaline and serotonin in the blood, the stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system and the acceleration of the heart rate are very useful.
But constricting pupils, racing the heart and reducing peripheral circulation is not of much help when we are faced with a threat that arrives by email. Flight or fight doesn’t work well in a business meeting. After hundreds of thousands of years of evolution getting us ready to survive as hunters and gatherers, we have spent an insignificant amount of time sitting in front of a computer. The response is not optimized for the new threats.
If we give ourselves time to recover, going through these cycles of activation and subsequent relaxation of the sympathetic nervous system does not represent a health problem. It even has some interesting positive effects derived from the production of oxytocin and its impact on creating cooperative bonds, as Kelly McGronigall explains in an excellent TED talk. The problem arises when this state of hyperalertness becomes chronic. Then the continued and unproductive activation of the system can end up causing exhaustion and giving rise to real physical and mental illnesses.
It is possible and important to learn to recognize these responses and manage them before pathological situations appear.
Posture and breathing
Stress is one of the ways in which modern work can harm our health, but it is not the only one. The second is posture. We sit in a chair with eyes fixed on a screen for eight hours and, during the breaks, entertain ourselves watching videos on that same screen. That is not the healthiest thing for our body.
Are you aware of how you are sitting reading this, and how long you have been in that position?
Most of the time we are not aware of our posture. Living under the tiranny of the mind, we forget that we have a body.
Something similar happens with breathing.
The capacity of our lungs is about 5L, but under normal conditions, when breathing is automatic and the posture is sedentary, we do not use more than 500 mL. Enough to keep us alive, but sometimes not enough to feel in top shape during prolonged intellectual work.
Muscular work generates large amounts of carbon dioxide. The chemoreceptors of our nervous system interpret this increase in CO2 tension as an order to accelerate the heart rate and breathing. This reflex ensures correct oxygenation when we move. Intellectual effort does not activate breathing in the same way. However, the brain becomes fatigued, needs oxygen, and will also be helped by good ventilation. Since this is not triggered automatically, if you want to oxygenate yourself in a sedentary job you must do it consciously.
Stress, posture and breathing have something important in common: they are processes in which both the body and the mind participate. Cognition and physiology influence each other. When we learn to become aware of how our body is doing and to identify and control the related mental processes, we take the first step towards being better. And that – becoming aware of the body to become aware of the mind – is exactly what is done in a yoga session.
But what is yoga?
For practical purposes, let’s say it is a structured and method of personal improvement that works the body and mind. It is difficult to define it clearly in academic terms because it comes from the Eastern tradition where knowledge is historically not classified in the same dualistic way that we do: sciences versus humanities, physical versus mental, etc. It is easier to say what it is not. It is not a sport, because it does not contemplate any type of competition. It is not a religion because it does not impose any belief system, and, what is very important for those of us who have a scientific militancy, it is not a pseudotherapy, because it does not pretend to be a therapy.
Yes, it has proved it can make us feel good and contribute to a healthy life, but still no responsible yoga teacher will try to convince you that he can cure a real disaese without involving your doctor. Yoga is a very good way to prevent pathological stress because it trains healthy attitudes, but if the pathology has arrived, you need medical or psychological assistance.
Beyond health
Modern health and mind care methods such as Pilates, mindfulness and breathing education are based on different aspects of the yogic tradition, combined with current physiology knowledge and adapted to the Western mentality. But yoga allows us to go a little deeper if we wish.
Given the Indian and Hindu origin of this discipline, it is deeply permeated by Vedic philosophy. Even the most skeptical of us can feel sooner or later inspired by the beauty of this ancient philosophy. When that happens, we can encounter some fundamental concepts of Hindu ethics – starting with detachment.
Detachment teaches us to act as if we do not care about the fruits of our action. At first glance it sounds dissonant with the way of working and living that we have been taught in the West. Here we talk about “results-oriented” executives. Detachment is the opposite: it is focusing the attention on the action, trusting that the right action will bring the right result, but without craving it. This allows us to bring our mind to the present, and reduce anxiety levels.
Beyond the basic benefit in stress management and posture, yoga – with its inseparable component of meditation – is of great help in the continuous personal improvement process that should accompany every leadership career. A meditative attitude teaches us to create silence and discover a new way of observing reality. This way it improves our listening, our attention, and trains us to differentiate what is essential and work for it consciously.
Gopala’s experience
When we think about yoga at work, we tend to imagine a young company with a creative and informal atmosphere… One of the pioneering organizations in this trend was very different from that stereotype: the General Council of the Judiciary in Spain. Its manager, José María Márquez Gopala, yoga teacher at the Sivananda centers, has been supporting the practice of judges, magistrates and staff of the Constitutional Court for more than twenty years, since he inspired the introduction of these techniques in the occupational risk prevention plan. of the institution.
To finish this reflection I have chatted with this expert teacher with whom i share last name, love for yoga and a few hours of practice in which I have learned a lot. He explains to me “that judges are dedicated to resolving conflicts, a very demanding task that we tend to take home, in our minds and in our bodies. body, at the end of the day. In order to continue doing this work in a healthy way, what they are looking for in the yoga session is to find spaces of silence and ways to be good with their body that allow them to separate themselves from the conflict and move forward with their mission.” I think this presence of conflict that he sees in judges can be also relevant for many managers and company employees.
The yoga at work that Gopala teaches is practiced in a chair or standing – not on a mat – and without any special clothing. However, he denies that this format is less deep than going to a yoga studio for classes in the traditional way. “We practice with eyes, arms, back, breathing and relaxation techniques. Any of these exercises, done in a chair and sometimes even with a shirt and tie can be as profound as a yoga nidra session done in a Himalayan cave if does with proper attention. That is the power of yoga,” says Gopala: “that it is available to everyone.”
A process to grow
It is within our reach and, after some practice, we will discover that the way in which an asana (posture) is conquered offers us a practical model to undertake any improvement challenge:
- We start exploring. We never say a priori “I can’t”, but pay very conscious attention to the indicators that tell us where our limits are.
- Once the posture is conquered, we breathe and relax into it and turn it into a new and expanded comfort zone.
- From there, with an attitude of even-handed observation, we begin to look at things from a new perspective.
Repeating these three steps takes us forward in much the same way whether we are seeking to get on our head, to deeply understand a dissenting point of view, or to master a new task.
Time to try?