Have you ever found yourself finishing up a solid chakra-aligning session of yoga only to find yourself completely relaxed and at one with everything? No? Well have you ever finished up a session only to find yourself thinking you’re better than everyone? Because according to a new study, it seems that the latter is more likely, with yoga and meditation being found to be directly responsible for an inflated ego.
As Mental Floss notes, a forthcoming study from the journal Psychological Science reports that both yoga and meditation increase “self-enhancement”, which results in people attaching a lot of self-importance to their own actions
In the first part of a two-phase study, 93 students in England and Germany regularly evaluated their sense of self-enhancement after a yoga session over the course of 15 weeks. After first asking students how they think they compared to other students in the class, researchers then asked more telling questions to work out just how egotistical students felt after their sessions, before also asking students to self-rate themselves on a self-esteem scale.
In all three methods, it showed that students who had partaken in yoga showed much higher self-enhancement when compared to others who hadn’t in the previous 24 hours.
Researchers also put in place another study in which they recruited 162 people who practiced meditation, asking them similar questions in regards to their self-enhancement following a session. Similar results followed in this study as well, showing that those who had meditated showed higher self-enhancement in the hour following meditation than those who hadn’t meditated in the previous 24 hours.
So if you have one of those friends who you find absolutely insufferable to be around after a round of yoga at the gym, don’t treat them too harshly about it, just remember that there’s a scientific reason for it all.
Check out the Mountain Goats’ ‘Yoga’:
