Stress, anxiety, and what practice can honestly offer

This is the section where we are most careful. Slow practice helps many people feel considerably less anxious — and some techniques taught as calming can make anxiety worse. Here is what to practise, what to avoid, what the research actually found, and where a doctor or therapist belongs in the picture.

Nothing in this section treats a mental-health condition. If anxiety is affecting your sleep, work, relationships or safety, speak to a doctor or a qualified mental-health professional. Practice belongs alongside that care.

• Yoga for stress relief

  Yoga for Stress Relief: A Practical Guide for Depleted People

  Stress is not one state. This guide sorts wired from flattened and gives a different practice for each, plus a ten-minute version for the days you have nothing left.

• Breathing for anxiety

  Breathing for Anxiety: The Techniques That Help and the Ones That Backfire

  The most useful and most misused tool in the toolkit. What to practise, what to avoid outright, and what to do when breath focus itself is the trigger.

• Restorative practice

  Restorative Yoga for Stress: Five Shapes, Properly Propped

  Five shapes, held long, propped so thoroughly the body has nothing left to do. Including what to do when stillness is the hard part.

• An evening sequence

  Yoga Poses for Anxiety: A Twenty-Minute Evening Sequence

  Not a list of poses — an order. Ten shapes that take a wound-up evening down step by step, with hold times and reasons.

• What the evidence says

  Does Yoga Help Anxiety? What the Research Actually Found

  The evidence page. What has been tested, what was found, where the studies are weak, and the claims we refuse to make.

• Alongside treatment

  Yoga Alongside Therapy and Medication: How to Combine Them Well

  The page that says practice is not the whole answer — and shows exactly how to make it a useful part of one.

• Sound and humming

  Humming, Sound and Mantra for Calm: Why the Simplest Practice Often Works Best

  For people who cannot count breaths or sit in silence: sound does the pacing for you. Humming, mantra and bowl practice, honestly explained.