Yoga for Anxiety, Measured Against Therapy

This carefully designed trial put yoga to a demanding test. Two hundred and twenty-six adults with generalised anxiety disorder were randomly assigned to twelve weeks of Kundalini yoga, cognitive behavioural therapy, or a stress-education control. Both yoga and therapy clearly outperformed the control, with more people meaningfully improved. The important nuance is what happened between the two active treatments: yoga did not prove as reliably effective as cognitive behavioural therapy, which the authors affirm remains the first-line choice. In other words, yoga helps anxiety, but it is a valuable complement rather than an equal substitute for evidence-based therapy. This is exactly the kind of honest, head-to-head finding the field needs, and its participants were mostly women. For a woman living with persistent worry, it offers a balanced conclusion worth holding: yoga is a genuine, low-risk way to ease anxiety and build calm, and also a reason not to abandon proven therapy when anxiety is severe, but to consider the two together.