I’m taking up yawning as my new therapeutic exercise

I laughed when a friend talked about yawning therapy – now I’m a convert, writes Christine Manby

Illustration by Tom Ford

Thanks to the rise of social media, we’ve become used to people sharing the sort of information that 15 years ago we would have thought “a bit too much”. I open Facebook with my fingers over my eyes in case the first thing that pops up is a picture of someone’s ingrown toenail or a body part sporting a cannula in the hope of a “you OK hun?” I thought I’d seen it all until one of my Facebook friends posted a video of herself yawning so widely that I could see what she’d had for breakfast. Hadn’t anyone ever told her to cover her mouth? What on earth was my Facebook friend thinking?

“Today in therapy, my psychiatrist got me to yawn and I have never felt so good,” she wrote.

Really? That sounded suspicious. Wasn’t it more likely the case that the therapy session made the psychiatrist want to yawn so badly that she passed it off as a joint exercise? How could yawning be therapeutic?

“It’ll be ‘farting your way to emotional freedom’ next,” I scoffed. (Alas, someone’s already beaten me to becoming the founder of that particular discipline.)

But despite my scepticism, it seems that my friend’s psychiatrist was not just having a laugh. Like all bodily functions, yawning has its purpose and its benefits. Yawning doesn’t just serve to let us know it’s time to go to bed or indicate to the people around us that they’re boring us rigid. Quite the opposite. Thanks to the neurotransmitters that yawning releases, it’s a potent way of making us simultaneously calm and alert. While we do yawn more frequently when we’re tired, we also yawn when we’re nervous or when paying attention is particularly important. Dogs yawn before getting into a fight. As do fish.

Stress, such as one might feel before a confrontation, causes the temperature of our brains to rise. It’s thought that in such situations, yawning acts like turning on the air conditioning, helping to bring the temperature down again and keep our neural circuits from frying. This brain-cooling theory has been borne out by research by Andrew C Gallup and Gordon G Gallup Jr at the University at Albany. They had students watch videos of other people yawning and counted the number of yawns the students “caught”. (Yawns are very contagious. If you want to see just how contagious, fake one in front of a dog.) Those students who held an ice pack to their foreheads while watching the videos did not yawn at anything like the rate of those who held a warming pack to their heads. Gallup and Gallup proposed that cooling the brain, by cooling the blood vessels in the face, negated the need to do the same by yawning.

They also concluded that contagious yawning evolved as a means of keeping everyone around the campfire awake in the presence of danger. Meanwhile, research by Simon Thompson of Bournemouth University found that yawning also causes a rise in levels of cortisol in the blood, which in turn increases the body’s output of adrenalin, making us more focussed.

It’s not just the brain that benefits. The sort of yawning stretches you see cats and dogs do upon waking – and indeed that we humans sometimes do too, when we’re not trying to stifle them – are referred to as “pandiculation”. Yasmin Lambat, creator of SomaSensing intuitive somatic therapy, describes them as the body’s “innate self-healing movement blueprints”.

Lambat describes herself as a one-time “gym junkie”, who trained in pilates before discovering Feldenkrais and other somatic practices. A somatic practice refers to a bodywork technique that harness simple or improvised movements to enhance the mind’s perception of the body’s physical experience. Lambat describes it as a means to “help you tune into felt sense and experience the body as mind”.

As she explored somatic practices, Lambat moved her focus to the natural movements of pandiculation that she calls our inbuilt mechanisms for “revitalising the body after a period of inactivity, like waking up from sleep or sitting in one position for a long time… It’s spontaneous. It’s nature’s way of revitalising the body after we have been inactive, of revitalising the body and calming the mind, of keeping us supple and pain free. The added benefit is that it improves breathing without having to do separate breathing exercises.”

Thanks to the neurotransmitters that yawning releases, it’s a potent way of making us simultaneously calm and alert

While we may refer to such movements as stretches, they’re entirely different from the stretches traditionally seen in yoga or the kind you might to before or after a run. Lambat explains: “With static stretching you focus on creating flexibility at a joint. This goes against nature’s way and can run the risk of injury. With pandiculation, it’s not flexibility at a joint but suppleness of the entire fascial net.”

Fascia is the connective tissue beneath our skin that envelopes our bones, muscles, arteries, veins and cells and keeps them in place. Lambat explains, “Fascia is everywhere and stiffens like glue under stress, resulting in inflammation, chronic pain and unhappy, unhealthy tissue.” Lambat believes that fascial imbalances could be behind such conditions as fibromyalgia, gut issues and anxiety.

The aim of Lambat’s SomaSensing method is to calm that stress response and “re-plump” the fascial tissue by enhancing its “auxetic nature”. Lambat goes on, “Auxetic means ‘expanding or getting thicker’, enhancing the body’s shock-absorbing properties and suppleness. Unlike a stretch, pandiculation feels less like elongating an elastic and more like a balloon-like expanding sensation. The feel-good sensation in pandiculation is different to the feel-good sensation of a stretch. There is no effort in pandiculation not risk of injury. Anyone can practice this and it’s particularly great for us as we age.”

Lambat says that harnessing pandiculation in her exercise regime has left her feeling, “revitalised, nurtured, nourished and calm … more connected to my body, listening with my whole self, being guided from within, living less from my head and more from my heart. I am drawn to nature and notice how it takes care of me. I feel less anxious and am able to adapt to unexpected moments in my life. I live with less and I can’t imagine moving any other way than the way that nature intended.”

So how can we use pandiculation in our own lives? Is even it something we can decide to do or does it have to be spontaneous?

While Lambat says you can’t really induce pandiculation, we can notice it happening as we move about our day. “Our stressful lives may lead to sensory amnesia and numbing of this natural response. First ask yourself how often you notice yourself spontaneously stretching and yawning in the mornings or after sitting for a long time? If not, you could be in dysregulation. I would suggest starting there. Finding that urge from within.”

Lambat offers a couple of exercises to help harness that urge.

1. Find the urge from within. As you find the urge, notice how your body takes a spontaneous in-breath.

2. As the breath expands the body, glide the tail bone downwards to open up the curve of your lower back. Now find and unwind areas of your body that feel stiff. Keep going until your feel the urge to sigh.

3. Let out a spontaneous sigh to release.

If you want to explore this like a cat. Try pandiculation in four-point kneeling.

1. On all fours. Let your body hang out, let it rest, letting the head hang down. It should feel comfortable.

2. From this rest position, let the urge to move begin from within and notice how your body finds its way intuitively.

Like Tony Riddle’s “ground living”, Yasmin Lambat’s SomaSensing method is, at its heart, about allowing our bodies to move as they were designed to and it works. There’s no need for special equipment and you can fit it in as you go about your day. So while excessive yawning should always be checked out by a doctor, as it could be a sign of an underlying disorder far more serious than chronic boredom, perhaps next time you feel a yawn coming on, you should let it take its fullest expression. Assuming you’re not sitting opposite your boss at the time, yawn deep and stretch far. Though maybe don’t post your tonsils on Facebook.