Yoga vs. Smartphones

Sometimes it’s fun to compare and contrast two things that don’t even appear to be closely related.  Consider yoga and smartphones.

Although many practitioners view yoga as merely a set of good stretching exercises, a good yoga teacher will strongly emphasize the psychological aspects:  focus on your breathing and try to avoid (or dismiss) mental distractions.  Yoga is also associated with mindfulness, which is again a form of mental focus: paying attention to what you are doing, whether it be walking or eating.  Mindfulness is moving the focus “off the mat” into daily living.

As we focus in yoga we also become aware of outside thoughts that creep into the mind.  Recognize and acknowledge those thoughts whether they be hopes, worries, regrets or whatever.  This skill helps return to the mental focus at the time, but it also is useful in being otherwise conscious of gut reactions to try to slow down and contain those reactions long enough for critical thinking to kick in.

Smartphones on the other hand often do just the opposite, but it goes beyond the distraction of continual nagging ringtones, chirping and vibration or of pulling out the phone to check it 80 times a day on average.  This Wall Street Journal article paints a far scarier picture.  Studies show how the phone can affect the owner’s concentration and performance, even when it is in an apparently passive mode.

Research over the last few years suggests that as our brains depend more and more on technology our intellect weakens.  Two studies found the beeping or buzzing affects owner’s focus and performance “whether they check the phone or not.  Sometime just hearing the phone signaling but being unable to answer it can cause a spike in blood pressure spikes and other negative physical reactions.

A more worrisome example involved a test of 520 undergraduate students in two areas:  available cognitive capacity (related to ability to focus) and problem solving. “Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.”  They found that the farther away the students were from their phones, the better they did; although none reported that the phone was consciously a distraction.  (The same dynamic shows up in some college classrooms where those who bring their phone to class generally earn a lower grade.)

But the two are similar in other ways.  Yoga and mindfulness have in some ways become a fad.  As I wrote back in August, the mindfulness-like exercise of walking in the woods is becoming a moneymaking venture for some who label it forest bathing, which apparently requires a trained leader.  Just last week a reader sent me another ad for a similar activity offered by a parks and rec department in Connecticut: hiking yoga for only $25 per session.  Brown University warns:  “Dependable scientific evidence has lagged worrisomely behind the rapid and widespread adoption of mindfulness and meditation for pursuing an array of mental and physical wellness goals.”   Many of the claims are based on hype.

Likewise smartphones are promoted with a great deal of hype.  The newest model is superior to anything on the market and to all competitors.  People will stand in line to trade in perfectly good phones just to be on the cutting edge.

Both smartphones and yoga may also have something of an addictive quality.  As long as two-and-a-half years ago Pew research already had a category of smartphone dependent.  Maybe yoga can help with the smartphone problem, or maybe it would be a case of trading one addiction for another.

Cat Yoga?

This should be a lesson to me:  Never ask what’s coming next?  

CNN featured this story on cat yoga, and they have the nerve to put it under the Health section of the website.  Now I have nothing against cats, and I certainly have nothing against yoga; but cat yoga is not about health, it’s just a gimmick.  But CNN hasn’t got a section called gimmicks on their website, although almost every news website these days probably ought to.  Such a section would give the so-called journalists more permission to bombard us, as they already do, with news from their professional investigation into what is trending on Facebook and other social sites.  They also get a chance to show how clever they can be with puns.  This is not news and cat yoga is not yoga.

The story tells that people receive on-line invitations to a cats-only animal shelter – this one in Marietta, GA – three times a month to do yoga as the shelter cats are allowed to wander around the floor.  They got the idea by watching cat videos on the Internet and thought it might be one more way to get people to visit the shelter and possibly adopt a cat.  (Can you say “Gimmick”?)

The excuse for having it on the health page comes later.  “Studies show that yoga can improve your balance, your breathing, your sense of self and your overall health. It can reduce anxiety and fight off depression. It strengthens your core and can help ease chronic pain.”  The endorsement for cat yoga comes from the teacher who says she sees a difference in her students and believes, "Cat yoga is good for your soul."  This is clearly where we move from scientific research into the land of the airy-fairies.  There is no research on cat yoga as such.

It is true that yoga is beneficial.  But that applies to yoga, not cat yoga or dog yoga or beer yoga or suspension yoga or rock & roll yoga or paddleboard yoga or naked yoga or yoga on horseback – Honest, I didn’t make any of these up!

The benefits from yoga come from the opportunity to focus inward, to stretch safely in an accepting environment, to sync the breath with movement and to practice a little guided meditation.  Do these quotes from the cat yoga story sound anything like that? 

“Cats love yoga mats and can't help but be the center of the action”

“If you've ever tried a hero's pose with your cat around, you know the challenge has nothing to do with your breathing or flexibility.”

“Cats may be distracting”

"There's not as much pressure to make my form perfect."

All these intentional distractions and need for reassurance from being judged by yourself or others sound nothing like traditional yoga, in fact, it’s quite the opposite.  So I’m not expecting studies of so-called cat yoga to show any benefits beyond what you might get just from hanging around with cats.  Of course if you are a cat person, cat yoga at the shelter is like being a grandparent: you can play with them, cuddle, and spoil them rotten, but you can also give them back when it’s time for the feeding, the litter box cleaning and the medicines.  Just stretching is optional – but it’s not yoga.

Just remind me from time to time not to ask, “What’s coming next?”

Yoga and You

Knowing that I am a registered and practicing yoga teacher (RYT-200), someone brought this article to my attention.  It was from the Health tab on the Fox News website and the headline read:  Can Yoga Change Your DNA?  The article went on to say that yes it can, and favorably.  You would expect that I should have been all excited about this news, a new and positive way to entice people to sign up for and attend my yoga classes.  But I like to practice critical thinking, which led me to do some research.

The original study was done in 2010, published in a cancer magazine in November 2014, cited by the Huffington Post in August 2015 and finally featured by Fox this week. 

According to Huffington, researchers at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada administered a yoga and meditation program or supportive-expressive group therapy or a 1-day stress management seminar to breast cancer survivors.  The sample size of those finishing the full study was 88, not large but adequate.  They all suffered from significant emotional stress.

Blood samples taken at the end of the study showed those in the yoga program maintained telomere length.  Telomeres are stretches of DNA that cap our chromosomes and help prevent chromosomal deterioration.  “Telomeres, located at the tips of DNA chromosomes, shorten with aging and age-related diseases including cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. As telomeres shorten, cells age and die more quickly. Conversely, telomere lengthening can increase a cell’s longevity.”  So something that positively affects telomere length is good!

So what’s the problem?  First, the author of the Huffington article writes:  “The yoga group participated in weekly 90-minute yoga sessions for 8 weeks. The yoga group also practiced the yoga and meditation program at home.”  Then she goes on to plug books she wrote on yoga and stress relief.  The trouble is, these women did not go to regular yoga classes.  They attended a program called mindfulness-based cancer recovery (MBRC), developed in-house based on some of the researchers’ experiences with different types of yoga and meditation.

The second issue is that the yoga group was not the only group to do well.  The original study tells us: “Researchers found the yoga and group therapy participants had maintained their telomere length.”  Only those in the one-day seminar had shortened telomeres.  Another smaller study from Harvard compared meditators to non-meditators and found the meditators had longer telomeres, but did not find a cause and effect relationship concluding only that meditation “might alter relative telomere length.” [Emphasis added.]  In addition, the University of Calgary study itself says clearly, “longer telomere length is associated with better post-cancer survival.” [Emphasis added.] (Associated with, especially from only one small study, does not guarantee any real-world relationship.)

Finally, the primary author of the study has her own book on Amazon on MBRC and has good reason to have been promoting this for the last 5 years.  That makes me suspicious of any claims that go beyond the bounds of the original study.

So what should I honestly tell students and perspective students?  For most people yoga can make you feel good physically and mentally.  It can reduce stress.  For a limited number of stressed cancer survivors, about 8 weeks of something resembling yoga was as effective as 8 weeks of stress therapy.  So if you want to reduce stress, which may lead to a longer life (but they are a long way from showing any significant relationships), give it a try.  I will not, like some complementary health guru, present the findings of a couple of very limited studies, even ones that may agree with my personal preferences, as the indisputable truth.  (Look how often researchers have waffled back and forth between the benefits and dangers of coffee drinking.)

If yoga is not for you, there was also an article on the Health tab of Fox News saying, “a recent survey conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health [found] 87 percent of men and women said that spending time with their pet helped them feel less [stressed and more relaxed]."  If you have a dog or cat and also do yoga, you should be super mellow!

Researchers, even at prestigious universities, apply for grants, do studies and publish the results of the studies with sexy headlines and lots of hype to secure more grants to do more studies.  (It’s called job security.)  One way critical thinkers reduce stress is to do a little of their own research instead of reacting to headlines and hype about "some flavor of the week" discovery leading them off in yet another direction in search of easy answers to life’s problems.

Irony

One definition of irony from Dictionary.com is "an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected."  You recognize it by critical thinking, and get a feeling of surprise that something isn’t quite right.

I got that very feeling last week when I came across a civil rights lawsuit against the Encinitas Union School District near San Diego.  A brief outline of the case is that last summer the school district received a $533,000 grant to incorporate yoga practice into their physical education program in the elementary schools.  The grantor foundation would provide teachers for 60 of the 100 required weekly physical education minutes with the intent of promoting the "gospel" of Ashtanga (the eight-limb path) yoga.  Some parents were upset that the program seemed to mix stretching exercises with religion, or at least a philosophy based on Eastern religions of Hinduism or Buddhism.

I can understand the parents' concern of confusing young children by teaching what seems to be religious thought in public schools.  Those who were concerned enough to withdraw their children from these classes were not provided an alternative, so the kids were not receiving the required hours of physical education. 

This all makes sense to me, so far, but let me take a slight educational detour.  The first subpart of the very first limb of Ashtanga is called ahimsa in Sanskrit.  It means not harming, and provides the philosophical background for vegetarian practices and non-violence (a la Ghandi) among other things.  There is a common Sanskrit chant associated with Ashtanga yoga, “Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu” which basically wishes peace and serenity to all creatures. 

With that background we move to the parents' final objection, found at the bottom of page 16 of the filing:  “Several children who opted out of the EUSD program have been teased, harassed, and bullied by children who participate in the Ashtanga yoga classes.”  If this is true and it is the yoga-trained kids who are being mean to their classmates, the teachers are failing to pass along the very yoga philosophy that the parents are objecting to.  That’s what struck me as ironic.