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Could a ‘yoga pill’ provide calmness in the middle of an anxiety attack?
That first moment of panic varies for anxiety attack sufferers.
Your heart starts pounding, or your chest seems to tighten and breathing become difficult. Or, perhaps, it’s the onset of a headache or a loss of focus.
The situation is made worse when a person is in a public place — a supermarket, a sporting event or at work. Taking a deep breath, lying down or closing your eyes may not be an option.
But what if in the midst of this personal chaos there was a pill that provided the benefits of breathing and instant relaxation that could soothe such an attack?
Scientists may have discovered a pathway to such a solution, which they’re calling the “yoga pill.”
What is a “yoga pill?”
My colleague Deborah Vankin chronicled the groundbreaking scientific research performed by neuroscientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla.
They have identified a brain pathway that instantly deflates anxiety. The new study was published in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience. It lays out how the aforementioned brain circuit regulates voluntary breathing — meaning conscious breathing as opposed to automatic breathing that happens without your having to think about it — allowing us to slow our breath and calm our mind.
The discovery opens up the potential for the creation of new drugs that would mimic the relaxed state common during breath work, meditation or yoga, according to Sung Han, senior author of the study.
“This top-down breathing circuit has been a longstanding question in the neuroscience field,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s exciting to find the neural mechanism to explain how the slowing down of breathing can control negative emotions, like anxiety and fear.”
The discovery helps explain what we don’t know about calmness
We’ve long known we can control our breathing patterns to alter our state of mind — when we get stressed, we might take a deep, slow breath to feel calmer.
Scientists, however, didn’t understand how that worked — which parts of the brain were actually slowing our breath and why that activity makes us calmer.
Now they know that there is a group of cells in the cortex, the higher part of the brain responsible for more conscious, complex thought, that send messages to the brain stem, which in turn sends information to the lungs. That’s the aforementioned “circuit.”
The practical applications from the discovery, though, is what makes the Salk discovery so important, Han says.
“It can, potentially, create a whole new class of drugs that can more specifically target anxiety disorder,” he says.
A new yoga pill would be a game-changer
Common anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax and Lexapro target multiple areas of the brain that control brain processes and behaviors.
It’s why these drugs don’t work for everyone in the same way and may create unwanted side effects. More precisely targeting an individual brain circuit makes a medication more effective and reduces potential side effects. And, in extreme cases, such a pill might be more efficient for targeting anxiety than doing breathing exercises.
“If you’re in panic, breathing techniques alone may not be sufficient to suppress anxiety,” Han says.
We’ve still got a while to go
Han’s team is now trying to find the opposite circuit — a fast breathing circuit — that increases anxiety.
“To target the slow breathing circuit, we need to understand the opposite circuit, so we can avoid targeting it,” Han says. “To relieve the anxiety.”
While Han hopes his findings will lead to a “yoga pill,” that’s likely a long ways off. The research, and ensuing clinical trials, could take up to 10 years, he says. And nothing is for certain.
For more on the topic, check out the complete article.
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Column One
Column One is The Times’ home for narrative and longform journalism. Here’s a great piece from this week:
(Sakchai Lalit / Associated Press)
Like most babies, Moo Deng spends a lot of her time sleeping. But for a few hours a day, the 4-month-old pygmy hippo springs to life, gumming on leaves, zooming around the compound and tossing her head in a silent, open-mouthed roar. These moments, captured by her zookeeper at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo, a two-hour drive south of Bangkok, and shared on social media, have turned her into a global phenomenon — an “It Girl” beloved for her sporadic fits of energy and proclivity for snapping toothlessly at hoses and knees.
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For your weekend
(Illustrations by Lindsey Made This; photograph Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
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Have a great weekend, from the Essential California team
Andrew J. Campa, reporter
Carlos Lozano, news editor
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