How to Sharpen Your Mind for Success with Kundalini Yoga Pranayama

The realms of pranayama — or breathwork — is one part of the Kundalini Yoga experience. If you are new to this practice, you may be intrigued by the benefits it can afford you. As you start using this activity in your routine, you will notice a big difference.

In recent years, experts and scientists have started researching this fascinating area. Within this article, we look at an enlightening study on how pranayama impacts your mind.

What Science Says About Breathwork

Research from Trinity College Dublin suggests that engaging in breathwork can help to improve your attention and sharpen your mind. The study authors asked participants to undertake an activity that took a great deal of attention. They then asked participants to engage in breathwork to help them regain their mental focus.

“Practitioners of yoga have claimed for some 2,500 years that respiration influences the mind. In our study we looked for a neurophysiological link that could help explain these claims by measuring breathing, reaction time, and brain activity in a small area in the brainstem called the locus coeruleus, where noradrenaline is made,” said Michael Melnychuk, PhD candidate at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity.

As Melnychuk explains, it’s important to have the right level of noradrenaline so that we can get everyday tasks done. If you are finding it hard to focus or feeling too stressed in some way, you may find that your noradrenaline is out of balance.

“Noradrenaline is an all-purpose action system in the brain,” he continues. “When we are stressed we produce too much noradrenaline and we can’t focus. When we feel sluggish, we produce too little and again, we can’t focus. There is a sweet spot of noradrenaline in which our emotions, thinking and memory are much clearer.”

Luckily, if you start to incorporate pranayama into your everyday routine, you can ensure that you have the correct levels of noradrenaline. That small change may make it easier to focus on the jobs that you need to complete throughout the working day.

“Put simply this means that our attention is influenced by our breath and that it rises and falls with the cycle of respiration,” says Melnychuk. “It is possible that by focusing on and regulating your breathing you can optimize your attention level and likewise, by focusing on your attention level, your breathing becomes more synchronized.”

Aside from supporting you in your current work life and making you more focused, Melnychuk suggests people can use pranayama to protect their brain as they age.

“Brains typically lose mass as they age, but less so in the brains of long-term meditators. More ‘youthful’ brains have a reduced risk of dementia and mindfulness meditation techniques actually strengthen brain networks,” says Melnychuk.

“Our research offers one possible reason for this — using our breath to control one of the brain’s natural chemical messengers, noradrenaline, which in the right ‘dose’ helps the brain grow new connections between cells.”

“This study provides one more reason for everyone to boost the health of their brain using a whole range of activities ranging from aerobic exercise to mindfulness meditation.”

Start Your Pranayama Journey Today!

Have you tried pranayama for yourself yet? If you are new to this practice, it is worth considering when you are planning your everyday routine. Get started today!