19/10/2025
Epilepsy affects nearly 1 in 100 people globally, and while medications are usually essential and save lives and improve symptoms, many individuals still experience seizures or live with challenging side effects. Clinicians and individuals therefore seek interventions to complement modern medicine.
The Cleveland Clinic is a large non-profit academic health system. Its flagship hospital is in Cleveland, Ohio, and it has additional locations in the USA and around the world. The organisation has launched the Lifestyle Intervention for Epilepsy (LIFE) programme, which is studying lifestyle-based approaches including yoga, mindfulness, cognitive behavioural therapy, and music therapy. Early findings suggest these approaches can enhance quality of life, reduce stress, and support seizure management. Given that yoga encompasses mindfulness, it may emerge as one of the more effective approaches.
Research indicates that yoga could offer real value. Possibly the most compelling evidence for its efficacy is yoga’s capacity to increase levels of GABA, the brain’s primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. GABA helps calm neural firing and maintain balance within the central nervous system. In epilepsy, both GABA levels and signalling are often reduced or disrupted, leading to excessive neural excitation and seizure activity. In a series of studies, Dr Chris Streeter and colleagues found that yoga practice significantly increased GABA levels, and importantly, did so more than another form of exercise. This provides a coherent neurobiological explanation for yoga’s potential to support neural stability and overall calm. In a 2012 paper, Streeter therefore noted the potential value of yoga for epilepsy.
Additional reasons yoga may be beneficial include improved autonomic balance with greater parasympathetic tone, reductions in stress reactivity and cortisol, as higher cortisol levels are associated with a greater number of seizures, better sleep quality, and lower systemic inflammation, each contributing to greater neurological steadiness and wellbeing.
Beyond these effects arising from yoga, we believe yoga therapy offers something more. For example, it is responsive to individual needs, ensuring practices are safely adapted to each person’s physical and medical realities. Yoga therapy also provides meaningful psychosocial support, helping individuals navigate fear, stigma, and isolation. And it directly addresses mental health, offering therapeutic tools for anxiety, low mood, and emotional regulation, all of which frequently accompany epilepsy.
At The Minded Institute, we want to raise awareness of how yoga and yoga therapy may support people living with epilepsy. We are seeking an expert who uses yoga therapy with this population to deliver a seminar for our community. If this is your field, or you know someone with this expertise, please get in touch or share this post.
