Sunday yoga and the science of love

I can’t think of a better way to start a Sunday than with mysore practice with yogi friends followed by a group coffee date at La Colombe… perfect!

I love seeing our little yoga family growing here: new students, new friends, and new babies! Two of our beautiful ladies are now pregnant, and it’s such a treat to get to practice with them every morning (and have one of them be our amazing teacher)!

This is one reason we chose our latest book club book to be The Scientification of Love, by Michel Odent.

It’s about the science behind love (i.e. falling love, life partnership, pregnancy, giving birth, raising a child). The author, Michel Odent, is a French obstetrician whose research focuses on the primal period (the time of life between birth and 1 year of age), and he correlates events during this time period with health and behaviors later in life.

It’s a fascinating book. Here are some highlights:

1. In some animals, pain during birth correlates with love for the newborn. Research in animals has shown that when painkillers/anesthesia are given during birth, some mothers will actually reject their newborns (they do not seem to recognize it as their own). For example, ewes given epidurals will not take care of their lambs!
2. Oxytocin is the “hormone of love.” You may have heard about this hormone because it’s released during breastfeeding (builds the mother-child bond). In addition, both men and women release it during sexual activity/orgasm. Well, we also release it when we share a meal with someone! (One question that came up: do our oxytocin levels rise when we practice yoga together  each morning?)
3. Love-sickness is a real thing. Anyone who has ever been in love knows this feeling: the physical illness you get when you lose or are separated from your loved one (knot in the stomach, loss of appetite, etc). This is an actual chemical withdrawal of neurotransmitters (i.e. phenylethylamine - PEA), and you are craving them. 
4. Falling in love has chemical similarities to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). You know the feeling: you meet someone, you get crushy, you fall in love, and you develop OCD tendencies with this person (similarly with a new baby). When people fall in love they actually have lower levels of serotonin in the brain, just like people with clinically diagnosed OCD. 

Marriage & health

It may seem intuitive that people in a loving and supportive marriage will be physically healthier… but check out this article on some of the research behind it!

A happy marriage can strengthen the immune system, while an unhappy marriage can weaken it. In one experiment, researchers gave couples blisters on their arm and measured the length of time for the blisters to heal (a marker of immune function). For couples that argued, these blisters took a full day longer to heal when compared with couples that did not fight. And in couples that fought with hostility, the blisters took a full two days longer to heal!

In another experiment, researchers found significant changes in the brain from simple loving acts like handholding or backrubs. The article explains that these are ways of “outsourcing” negative emotions and stress... meaning that the brain gets less wear and tear over time.

When a husband held his wife’s hand, it “reduced the neural activity in areas of the woman’s brain associated with stress.” When the wife held her husband’s hand during electric shocks, it created “a calming of the brain regions associated with pain similar to the effect brought about by use of a pain-relieving drug.”

This makes me wonder - what is the more general effect of human touch? For example, what do the physical adjustments in our Mysore yoga practice do to our brains? For me, this simple touch can act like a pain-relieving drug (painful postures become easier, my respiratory rate slows).

I'm also wondering what marriage does to telomere length. My hypothesis: a happy marriage means longer telomeres.

Looking outward

 

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other 

but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

~Antoine de Saint Exupéry