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How yoga can help reduce stress for Alzheimer’s caregivers

People who care for someone with Alzheimer’s often deal with a great deal of stress, which can cause other serious mental and physical health problems.  That leads me to an interesting research project I read about recently.

It is a simple yoga program that involves chanting and meditation and has shown great potential in offsetting the emotional toll of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

Instead of prescribing meds for depression, UCLA researchers are exploring the benefits of a low-cost yoga program that helped significantly reduce stress and improve general health and mental processes.

The researchers recruited 49 family caregivers who were taking care of their relatives with dementia. Half of the study group was taught a brief, 12-minute yogic practice that included an ancient chanting meditation performed every day at the same time for eight weeks. The other half was asked to relax in a quiet place with their eyes closed while listening to instrumental music on a relaxation CD, also for 12 minutes every day at the same time for eight weeks.

While relaxing to music sounds like a pleasant escape, in fact it wasn’t nearly as effective as the chanting meditation. Researchers say more than half of the caregivers in the chanting group saw a 50 percent decrease in depression-related symptoms and a 50 percent improvement on a mental health score.  Only 19 percent of the relaxation group saw improvement in mental health.

An even more striking difference happened at the cellular level.  The meditation group saw a 43 percent improvement in the activity of an enzyme that slows cellular aging. Only a tiny portion of the relaxation group (3.7 percent) saw a benefit there.  More research on the benefits of Kirtan Kriya meditation is planned.  To read about the study, click here.

Maybe yoga isn’t the perfect solution for you, but my real message is how important it is, for you AND your loved one, that you take care of yourself when caring for someone else.

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