Can Downward Dog Be a Pick-Me-Up? Summer Research Says Yes.

As the six-week experiment drew to a close, Tugade and her URSI students said they were encouraged by the results. “So many factors—less exercise, more screen time, and social media exposure, social inequities—can contribute to this stress among experienced college-aged women,” Tugade said. “Our working theory was that the practice of yoga can lead to good, beneficial outcomes, enabling young women in our study to gain self-confidence and empowerment.”

To conduct the study, URSI students Aviv Fischer-Brown ’27, Zoe Shelley ’28, and Michelle Lima Enriquez ’28 recruited 19 Vassar students who were on campus this summer. The participants answered questionnaires prepared by Tugade and the URSI students that contained a set of questions about their levels of stress, loneliness, depression, and anxiety before the sessions began. Then the participants engaged in four weeks of yoga classes taught by Carla Olla, owner of the Rhinebeck Yoga Center, and responded to a new set of questions prepared by the URSI students at the end of the sessions. The yoga classes focused on themes related to resilience.

In addition to the yoga sessions themselves, the URSI students planned luncheons after the yoga sessions and other gatherings with refreshments for the participants of the study to help them build a sense of community.

The results of their study were quite encouraging. “We discovered that yoga did decrease (the participants’) sense of loneliness and depression and increased their sense of emotional well-being and self-esteem. These findings highlight yoga’s powerful role in fostering inner strength and resilience amid stressful times,” Tugade said.

The URSI students said they were happy to have created a study that helped their fellow Vassar students, but also enjoyed learning how to conduct real-life psychological research. “I’m still figuring out what I want to do after Vassar,” said Fischer-Brown, a psychological science major from Chapel Hill, NC. “I’m interested in public health, and I have a passion for women’s health, but I didn’t know if I wanted to pursue it from the policy side or the research side. I found I really liked this kind of research. URSI is a unique program that lets you examine things in depth.”

Shelley, a neuroscience and behavior major from Charlottesville, VA, said she had taken only one psychological science class since she enrolled at Vassar, “but this work I did this summer will inform my work as a neuroscience major, seeing how things play out in real life and how creating connections to a community can really bring people together.”

Enriquez, a resident of Middletown, NY, who plans to major in psychological science, said she was encouraged by the results of the study and was looking forward to performing such research in the future. “Yoga not only increased emotional well-being, but (the participants in the study) also felt physically stronger, which gave them self-confidence and added to their self-esteem,” she said. “I’m a pre-med student, and this was an exercise that addressed people’s mental health.”

Olla said she could tell that yoga was helping the participants well before they completed their post-session questionnaires. “It was interesting to see all these young women interact with one another,” she said. “The shyer ones began to ask me more questions as the sessions progressed. They definitely became more self-empowered.”

Fischer-Brown said she and her URSI colleagues plan to continue this research by engaging with more Vassar students when they return to campus in the fall. “We want to do a study with a larger sample of students,” she said. “Since we saw such positive results in just a few weeks, we’d like to find out how helpful yoga can be in the longer term.”