I Came to Yoga in the Middle of a Panic Attack

On the International Day of Yoga, I find myself thinking about where my relationship with the nervous system began.

I was in my twenties, working long hours at an ad agency and raising a child on my own. Then the panic attacks started. My chest would tighten, my breath would go shallow, and my body would run ahead of me in a way I could not talk myself out of.

I went to see my doctor, Dr. Gupta. She was an older general practitioner who also worked with Ayurveda and yoga, so she did not reach for the prescription pad right away. She gave me a choice: a low dose of medication, or learning to work with my own nervous system first, through breath and movement.

I chose to learn.

Not because medication is wrong. It has its place. I wanted to understand what was happening inside me before I reached for something to quiet it.

What I did not understand then is that yoga was not teaching me to relax. It was teaching me a skill.

The breath is one of the few things in the body we can influence on purpose. Slow it down, lengthen the exhale, and you start to pull yourself out of fight-or-flight and into the state where the body can actually recover.

That is not just a feeling. A 2025 review of 44 randomized trials found yoga among the most effective approaches studied for lowering cortisol, the body's main stress hormone.

I taught for over a decade after that. In schools, in companies, in rooms full of women. Again and again I watched the same thing happen when someone learned to drop out of their head and back into their breath. Some of them made big changes eventually: a different career, a relationship they finally walked away from. Most of it was quieter. They stopped bracing all the time. They found a center they could come back to. They started trusting their own voice again instead of reaching outside themselves for it.

I carry that into my work today.

When women come to me in perimenopause, they usually want to talk about food, supplements, weight, or how to train. Those things matter.

But underneath all of it is a nervous system.

In perimenopause, stress hits differently.

A woman who is constantly wired, bracing, and running on stress carries that into her sleep, her recovery, her eating, and her relationship with her body.

That is why nervous system regulation is one of the three pillars of my work, alongside well-planned plant-based nutrition and resistance training.

Not because it is soft. Because it is foundational.

Yoga was where I first learned that.

Twenty years later, I am still learning.