It calms you down, it relaxes your body thereby lowering your heart rate and your respiration...

Hydrating reduces physiological stress of dehydration...

Savoring requires mindfulness of pleasure and promotes distraction...

I have no doubt that yoga is a practice that can make some people 'feel better' some of the time. But the list of things that can make people feel better is enormous.

The following suggestions are included on a list that suggests doing yoga as a means of pleasurable distraction. It was presented to me while I was in therapy, and it appears to come from a skills manual by McCay, Wood and Brantley. The questions I have are about these things are whether all of the things are equally valuable and/or can be said to have specific therapeutic value; or whether such a list demonstrates a huge range of things that can distract a person from awareness of mental suffering and thereby be temporarily palliative? To me the list has always looked like an unorganized and largely medically unsubstantiated brainstorm of things to do when feeling blue...

-talking with a friend
-going out with a friend
-inviting a friend in
-texting a friend
-organizing a party
-exercising (generically non-specific)
-lifting weights
-doing yoga, tai chi or pilates
-stretching
-taking a walk
-being in a peaceful place
-watching clouds
-jogging
-biking
-swimming
-hiking
-surfing, rock climbing, skiing, sky-diving
-participating in a playground game
-watching a playground game
-getting a massage
-going for an automobile drive
-sleeping
-eating chocolate
-eating ice cream
-cooking a favorite recipe
-cooking a new recipe
-taking a cooking class
-going out to eat
-playing with your pet
-borrowing someone's pet and playing with it
-giving a pet a bath
-bird/nature watching
-finding something funny to do
-going to a movie theater and watching whatever is playing
-watching television
-listening to a radio
-playing a game with a friend
-playing a solitary game
-chatting online
-web surfing
-creating a website
-blogging on your website
-joining an internet dating service
-selling something online
-buying something online
-doing a jig-saw puzzle
-calling a crisis hotline --really this is on THE BIG LIST OF PLEASURABLE ACTIVITIES--
-going to a mall to shop
-getting a haircut
-going to a spa
-going to a library
-going to a bookstore
-going to a café
-going to a museum
-going somewhere to people watch
-praying
-going to a house of worship
-joining a worship group
-writing a letter to God
-calling a family member
-learning a new language
-singing
-learning a new song
-writing a song
-listening to something happy and upbeat
-turn on music really loud and dance
-memorize lines from a script
-make a movie
-take photos
-join a public speaking group
-participate in a local theatre group
-sing in a choir
-join a club
-plant a garden
-work outside
-knit/crochet or sew...or learn how
-make a scrapbook
-paint your nails
-change your hair color
-take a bubble bath
-work on a machine/car/truck/motorcycle/bicycle etc
-sign up for a class
-read a book --seems to repeat, but it's item 88 on the list
-read a trashy magazine
-write a letter to a friend
-write positive things about yourself
-write a poem/story/movie/play
-write a journal
-write a letter to yourself
-make a list of 10 things you like about yourself
-draw a picture
-paint a picture
-masturbate
-have sex with someone you care about
-make a list of people you admire
-write a story about sexy things you've imagined or done
-make a bucket list
-make a list of celebrities you would want to have sex with
-write a letter to someone who make your life better
-create your own list of pleasurable things

I group those types of lists together. One type of exercise doesn't work for you, then try a different exercise, and brainstorming helps with that. I put hobbies I want to try on one list and languages I want to learn on another. Course, grandiosity can make for very long lists. That list right there? That's more or less the types of lists I make all the time.

In education it's pretty well established that some learning takes place under almost all education treatments. Psychology seems to have a similar problem. For many illnesses most treatments will make some people 'feel better'.

In this light, when trying to identify the best methods for treating a mental illness, the question really can't be does the treatment relieve some symptom or characteristic one or several mental illnesses. So, then Dr. Doraiswamy finding yoga of possible value for a handful mental illnesses is really not very illuminating...MANY things can do pretty much the same thing. Patients should get what is best for them, not merely what sometimes works and is available through a particular clinic or clinician.

And resolving the search for an effective psychiatric treatment into an indeterminate, perhaps endless, period of trial and error effort that depends more upon patient/therapist capacity to persist within an alliance, while casting about more of less without design for things that work among whatever number is available, seems not very much like a rational strategy to find the best treatment. (I do recognize that pushing for patients to get a best treatment method rather than a method that works for some people or the method(s) the clinician is best or most comfortable with, really isn't a dominant approach to the clinical psychiatric enterprise).

If progress is going to made in getting best treatment to patients, it seems to me that the questions really must be of this form: which treatments work better than others, and for whom do specific treatments work better than others?

In that respect, I recommend, not completely facetiously, using the ameliorative value received from a cup of warm broth as the default comparison...then we could say things like proposed psychological treatment "A" works 'x.x' times better for illness "B" than a cup of warm broth; or for cohorts of patients characterized by multiple traits and symptoms J,K L,M,N, O and P this treatment worked 'x.x' times better than a cup of warm broth.

i thought the idea of me organizing a party as a way to get me out of a slump particularly amusing. the inability to pull that off is what weakened my family ties.

basically a buddhist school, kids do yoga, and kids are taught a respect for all living creatures. even little school kids.
i suspect they will grow up to be as mentally and physically fit as their genetics will let them be.

as we were made aware by the Naval Yard shooter being well versed in buddhism.

But the notion of absence of harm wasn't really the point of my reply.

The point of my reply was, and remains, that very many things will help -some- people feel better.

OF COURSE feeling better is not a terribly bad thing for the person feeling better. I don't mean to say that. But this forum wasn't intended to be about merely idosyncratic experiences. Information can also be considered critically with regard to generalizability.

In that respect, the questions 1) is something, a cup of broth or yoga practice better than something else? and 2) is the something that makes you feel better merely palliative or is it curative? move the discussion towards broader awareness by placing the supposed helpful thing within the context of many, and juxtaposed against a few other, possible behaviors to 'feel better'.

Honestly, we're neck deep in things that help some people 'feel better', but pretty short on things that reliably move most people into the "recovered" class.

Something like the standard used for comparison in psychiatric research, TAU (treatment as usual), would be useful for general discussion and commentary here about how some newspaper reports some activity that makes people feel better.

Yoga makes people feel better? That's not too informative.