Why Bikram Yoga Makes You Calmer: The Neuroscience Of Mindfulness

It’s January, and the studio is full again. People are back from holidays, back to routines, back to their mats. 

I can feel it in the effort in the room- a slightly frantic energy to be honest.

There is a collective determination to "make up for lost time."

The assumption seems to be: if I just try harder, I'll get more out of this. But in Bikram Yoga, pushing through the heat and overriding your body's signals isn't the path to success.

To understand why we leave the class feeling grounded and more calm, we need to look at the neuroscience of mindfulness and how our nervous system can react to intensity.

The Paradox of Effort- Why Pushing Harder Backfires.

The Bikram series is Yang. Intensely Yang.

Heat, discipline, precision, effort, repetition.

Twenty-six postures and two breathing exercises performed the same way every single time in a room heated to 40 degrees.

There’s nothing outwardly soft about it.

The structure is rigid, the heat can feel relentless.

However the students who gain the most physical and mental benefits from Bikram Yoga aren't the ones pushing the hardest- they are the ones who have learned to find Yin (ease) within the effort.

To breathe when it’s difficult.

To allow and receive rather than force and control.

There’s a quality of Yin that has to be present for the nervous system to actually settle. Without it, you’re just marinating in stress in a hot room.

Here’s why the “push harder” instinct backfires, especially in a practice like this.

Your nervous system has one primary job: keep you alive.

When it perceives threat (heat, physical challenge, discomfort, effort), it activates your stress response.

Heart rate increases, breathing becomes shallow, muscles tense, cortisol floods your system.

This is amazing when you’re actually in danger. It’s less helpful when you’re trying to hold Standing Bow Pulling Pose.

The problem is that your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between real threat and perceived threat.

A hot room, a challenging posture, and the internal narrative of “I have to do this perfectly or I’m failing” all register as stress and when you respond to that stress by pushing harder, gripping tighter, trying to fight your way through, you’re actually reinforcing the stress response.

You’re teaching your nervous system that this is dangerous, that you need to stay on high alert, that survival mode is appropriate.

This is the opposite of what most people are seeking when they come to yoga.

They want to feel calmer. More regulated. Less reactive.

But you can’t force your way to calm.

You can’t effort your way into ease.

The nervous system only down-regulates (shifts out of stress mode and into rest-and-restore mode) when it perceives safety.

And safety doesn’t come from pushing through.

It comes from breath, from allowing, from the small moments of softness you can find even inside intense effort.

And this is where the neuroscience gets interesting.

Neuroplasticity and The Brain That Changes

There’s a principle in neuroscience, based on Donald Hebb’s work, that Rick Hanson references in The Buddha’s Brain: neurons that fire together, wire together.

This is neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.

Every time you repeat a thought pattern, a behaviour, or a response to a stimulus, you’re strengthening the neural pathways associated with that pattern.

Practice something enough times and it becomes automatic.

This is how we learn language, develop skills, and form habits. It’s also how we train anxiety, reactivity, and stress responses.

This is one reason the Bikram series is always the same 26 postures and 2 breathing exercises in the same order. The standardisation isn’t about rigidity for its own sake.

It’s about creating the conditions for neuroplasticity to work.

When you practice the same sequence repeatedly, you’re not just building physical strength and flexibility. You’re creating a stable environment where your brain can notice patterns, track progress, and most importantly, practice responding to the same challenges in new ways.

Here’s what this means in the hot room: every time you step onto your mat, you’re not just training your body. You’re training your brain. You’re reinforcing whatever mental patterns you bring to the practice.

If you habitually respond to discomfort by gritting your teeth, holding your breath, and pushing harder, you’re strengthening the neural pathways that associate challenge with tension and force. You’re teaching your brain that when things get hard, the appropriate response is to brace, to fight, to override.

But if you can learn to respond to discomfort differently (with breath, with curiosity, with a degree of softness even inside the intensity), you’re building new neural pathways. You’re training your brain to stay present with difficulty without collapsing into reactivity. You’re literally rewiring your stress response.

The practice becomes a laboratory for your mind. The same postures, the same heat, the same sequence, but with the opportunity each time to choose a different mental response.

The Negativity Bias And Why The Heat Captures Your Attention

Your brain has a negativity bias.

This isn’t a character flaw or a sign that you’re doing something wrong.

It’s evolutionary wiring. Our ancestors who were better at noticing and remembering threats (the rustling in the bushes, the smelly rotten food, the dangerous cliff) survived longer and passed on their genes. The ones who were relaxed and optimistic about everything didn’t make it (Side note and not a flex- i'm pretty sure this would be me)

So your brain is designed to scan for problems, register discomfort, and hold onto negative experiences more strongly than positive ones. Hanson puts it simply: the brain is like Velcro (stick) for negative experiences and Teflon (non-stick) for positive ones.

This is exactly what happens in the hot room.

The heat is uncomfortable.

Your muscles are working.

Your heart rate is elevated.

You’re sweating.

And your brain, doing its job, wants to fixate on all of it.

The discomfort becomes the loudest voice in the room. It drowns out the fact that you’re breathing, that you’re capable, that you’ve done this before and you’ll do it again.

The negativity bias is why a single difficult posture can colour your entire experience of class.

You might hold 25 postures with relative ease, but if Standing Bow was hard, that’s what your mind will remember. That’s what you’ll replay on the commute home. That’s the story you’ll tell yourself about your practice.

This bias also explains why students often feel like they’re not improving even when they objectively are.

Progress is slow and incremental. It doesn’t announce itself.

But struggle? Struggle is immediate and loud. Your brain registers it instantly and files it away as important information.

The heat amplifies all of this.

It’s a constant low-level stressor, a background hum of discomfort that your nervous system has to manage for 90 minutes. And because it’s always there, it becomes an easy target for your mind to fixate on. “It’s too hot. I can’t breathe. I need to leave. I can’t do this.”

But here’s the thing: the heat isn’t actually the problem. The heat is just heat.

What makes it unbearable is the story your mind tells about it, and that story is shaped by the negativity bias.

And this is where practice becomes interesting. You can’t turn off the negativity bias...

But you can learn to work with it.

The Three Strategies For Training The Mind

Hanson offers three strategies for working with the mind, and they map beautifully onto what actually happens in Bikram practice.

• The first strategy is to let go of negative experiences.

Not to suppress them or pretend they’re not happening, but to recognise them without getting consumed by them.

In the hot room, this looks like noticing discomfort without building a narrative around it.

You feel heat. You acknowledge it.

You don’t spiral into “I hate this, I always struggle, I’ll never get better at this.” You just feel hot. And then you return to your breath, to the posture, to the present moment.

This is harder than it sounds. The mind wants to elaborate, to justify, to create meaning. But each time you can catch yourself in the middle of a negative thought loop and simply let it go, you’re training mental flexibility. You’re proving to yourself that thoughts aren’t facts and discomfort isn’t disaster.

• The second strategy is to cultivate positive experiences.

This doesn’t mean forcing fake positivity or pretending everything is wonderful when it’s not.

It means actively noticing what’s going well in real time, as it’s happening, and giving it a few seconds for it to actually register.

Here’s the thing: your brain needs time (even just 10 to 20 seconds) to encode positive experiences into long-term memory. Otherwise they just pass through without making an impression.

And the Bikram series actually builds this in! The structure gives you these moments.

In the standing series, the stillness between postures and between sets and in the floor series, Savasana. These aren’t just breaks. They’re the opportunity to actually take in what just happened. To notice your breath steadying, your heart rate dropping, the fact that you’re still here and you did the thing.

But most students skip right over this. They’re already anxious about what’s next, replaying what went wrong, mentally somewhere else.

The positive experience passes through without registering.

So here’s the practical tool: use those pauses intentionally. When you’re standing still between postures or lying in Savasana, take the first few seconds to notice something that’s going well. Your breath returning. Your body recovering. The fact that you held the posture even though it was hard. Don’t search for something profound. Just notice one small thing that isn’t struggle, and let yourself feel it for a few breaths before moving on.

This is how you rewire the negativity bias. Not by denying difficulty, but by giving equal weight to what’s working.

• The third strategy is to not create new negative experiences unnecessarily.

This is the one that applies most directly to the Yang pushing energy I’m seeing right now in the post holiday hot room return.

You’re already in a hot room doing a challenging practice.

You don’t need to add extra suffering by forcing postures your body isn’t ready for, by holding your breath, by gripping and tensing and overriding every signal your nervous system is sending.

The practice itself provides enough challenge. Your job isn’t to make it harder. Your job is to find the way through that doesn’t destroy you in the process.

Heat As The Teacher

The heat is interesting because it functions as both amplifier and equaliser.

It amplifies whatever you bring into the room.

If you arrive anxious, the heat will make that anxiety louder. If you arrive calm, the heat becomes manageable background. It doesn’t create your mental state, but it definitely reveals it. And because it’s constant and unavoidable, you can’t ignore what it’s revealing. You have to deal with it.

This is what makes the heat such an effective teacher. It removes the option of powering through on autopilot.

You can’t just muscle your way through 90 minutes in 40-degree heat.

At some point, your strategy has to shift.

You have to breathe.

You have to find stillness.

You have to let go of control and allow your body to do what it knows how to do.

The heat forces you inward.

When external conditions are comfortable, the mind can stay scattered, distracted, half-present. But when you’re hot, when you’re uncomfortable, when your heart is pounding and sweat is pouring and every part of you wants to leave, the only place to go is inward.

Back to the breath. Back to the present moment. Back to the one thing you can actually control, which is how you relate to what’s happening.

This is the obstacle that becomes the path.

The heat isn’t something to overcome or defeat. It’s the condition that makes mental training possible. It’s the thing that shows you, over and over again, that you can stay present with discomfort. That you can soften even when everything in you wants to brace. That your mind’s story about what’s unbearable and your actual capacity to bear it are two different things.

And here’s what happens neurologically when you practice this way: you’re teaching your nervous system that discomfort doesn’t equal danger. You’re building tolerance for physical sensation without reactivity. You’re training your brain to stay regulated even when conditions are challenging.

This is one of the most practical life skills you can develop. When your nervous system learns to distinguish between actual threat and mere discomfort, a whole range of capacities opens up.

You can feel difficult emotions without needing to immediately fix, numb, or escape them.

You can stay present in conflict, uncertainty, or boredom without your alarm system screaming that you’re in danger.

You can have hard conversations, sit with ambiguity, tolerate waiting, and recover from setbacks without collapsing into reactivity or avoidance.

Your brain stops catastrophising every uncomfortable moment, and you gain access to clearer thinking even under pressure.

This is why people leave class calmer. Not because the practice was easy.

Because they practiced staying present with difficulty.

And that capacity transfers.

The next time you’re stressed at work, stuck in traffic, dealing with conflict, your nervous system has a reference point. It’s been here before. It knows it can handle discomfort without collapsing into panic or aggression.

Patanjali wrote in the Yoga Sutras that when the mind becomes single-pointed, the many scattered thoughts disappear. The heat creates the conditions for this to happen.

It demands focus. It requires you to narrow your attention to breath, to posture, to the present moment.

The scattered mind that walked into the room has nowhere to go but inward, and in that inward turn, something settles. Not because you forced it to, but because the practice gave you no other choice.

The heat is the container that makes this learning possible.

The Art Of Balance: Yin Within The Yang

The word yoga means union, balance, the integration of opposites.

Both Yang and Yin are necessary. T

he problem isn’t the Yang nature of the practice. The problem is Yang without Yin to balance it. When you bring only force and effort to a practice that’s already demanding force and effort, there’s no harmony. Just depletion.

So here’s the paradox: the practice is Yang, but the benefits come from finding Yin within it.

The structure is rigid. The heat is relentless. The postures demand strength, balance, focus, effort. But if you meet all of that with more Yang (more pushing, more forcing, more gripping), you’re just adding stress to stress. You’re reinforcing the very patterns you came to yoga to unwind.

The Yin is what allows the nervous system to actually settle. And it’s built into the practice, if you know where to look.

Your breath is Yin.

Not the shallow, held, effortful breathing that happens when you’re bracing against discomfort, but the deep, steady, conscious breathing that signals to your nervous system that you’re safe. 

Every inhale and exhale is an opportunity to down-regulate. To remind your body that even though you’re hot and working hard, you’re not in danger.

Stillness is Yin. The pauses between postures in the standing series. Savasana in the floor series. These moments aren’t passive. They’re active rest. They’re where integration happens, where your nervous system re-calibrates, where the benefits of the work you just did actually land in your body. 

And the dialogue gives you the instruction for how to access this stillness:

"mouth closed, eyes open, breathing always normal"

That breath cue isn’t random. 

It’s intentionally there to create balance. 

Normal breathing, through the nose, with a closed mouth, activates your parasympathetic nervous system. It signals rest and recovery. 

The stillness isn’t just physical. It’s created by the breath itself, by the quality of attention you bring to those pauses.

Allowing is Yin.

This is the hardest one for most students to access because it feels counterintuitive in a practice that demands so much effort. And I’ve been watching this play out in the room lately as students return from the holidays. There’s a palpable tension, a sense of needing to prove something or make up for lost time.

The effort is there, but it’s rigid. Forced.

I can see bodies gripping and bracing when what they actually need is to soften and allow.

Allowing doesn’t mean collapsing or giving up. It means softening around the edges of the posture. It means letting your body find its way into the posture rather than forcing it into a shape.

It means trusting that if you create the right conditions (alignment, breath, focus), the posture will unfold without you having to muscle it into place.

Receiving is Yin.

This is about letting the practice work on you rather than trying to dominate it.

It’s about noticing what’s actually happening in your body instead of being so fixated on what you think should be happening. It’s about absorbing the feedback your nervous system is giving you and adjusting accordingly.

When you bring these qualities into a Yang practice, something shifts. The effort is still there, but it’s no longer effortful in the way that depletes you. The challenge is still real, but it’s no longer a fight. You’re working with your body and your nervous system instead of against them.

And this is where the calm comes from. 

Not from pushing through and proving a conditional worth wound that you can survive the heat. But from learning to find ease inside intensity. 

From training your mind to stay present and your nervous system to stay regulated even when conditions are hard.

The Yang gives you the challenge. The Yin gives you the capacity to meet it without breaking yourself in the process.

The Real Reason You Leave Calm

So when students ask me why they feel calmer after class, this is what I tell them.

You’re not calmer because you worked hard or because you survived the heat or because you pushed through discomfort.

You’re calmer because you practiced something your nervous system desperately needs: the ability to stay present and regulated when things are challenging.

You practiced noticing discomfort without spiralling into catastrophe.

You practiced finding moments of ease inside intensity.

You practiced letting go of negative thought loops and taking in small wins.

You practiced breathing when your instinct was to brace.

You practiced stillness when your mind wanted to race ahead.

And because you practiced the same sequence in the same heat in the same order, your brain had the stable conditions it needed to actually learn. To build new neural pathways. To rewire old stress responses. To prove to itself that challenge doesn’t have to mean collapse.

This is neuroplasticity in action.

This is mindfulness training.

This is why the dialogue, the structure, the heat, and the repetition all matter.

Not because they’re traditions to be followed blindly, but because they create the exact conditions your mind needs to change.

The practice won’t make your life less difficult. It won’t remove the heat, the stress, the challenges you face outside the room. But it will change your capacity to meet those things without breaking yourself in the process.

That’s what yoga is.

Not the perfection of postures.

Not the elimination of struggle.

But the cultivation of balance.

The integration of effort and ease.

The union of Yang and Yin.

The training of a mind that can stay steady even when everything around it is demanding otherwise.

And that skill, once learned in the hot room, goes with you. Everywhere. 

Every damn meeting, every difficult conversation, every moment life decides to turn up the heat