Regular yoga practice also benefits healthy individuals, improving psychological well-being, sati…

Regular yoga practice also benefits healthy individuals, improving psychological well-being, satisfaction with life, and self-esteem, and reducing stress and performance anxiety. Studies have also found that yoga reduces fatigue and negative affect, while increasing positive affect and giving a feeling of being energised.

Yoga poses and self-esteem

Our study was unusual compared to others examining the effects of yoga practice in that it examined only the asana aspect of yoga in order to investigate its effect on self-esteem. Predominantly, research into yoga has focused on the benefits of meditation and breathing. A recent review of 465 research papers devoted to yoga’s role in promoting well-being noted that only 169 of those papers included the physical aspects of asana. To the best of our knowledge, only two previous studies have focused solely on studying the psychological effects of yoga poses.

We compared the effect of the tadasana, urdhva hastasana and garudasana yoga poses to two “high power” and two “low power” power poses. We found that after performing two yoga poses our participants felt more energetic, empowered, and in control than those participants who performed power poses. Feeling energetic directly affected their confidence and feeling of satisfaction with themselves regardless of their initial levels of self-esteem.

We think such effects had less to do with the meaning of dominance associated with the poses, and more with the feedback please join ha