EMOTIONAL REGULATION THROUGH YOGA AND MEDITATION IN INDIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Emotion regulation, central to stress, resilience, and mental health, is often framed in modern psychology as managing emotions through tactics like cognitive reappraisal or expressive suppression. Indian psychology offers an older, broader framework linking emotional disturbance to desire, attachment, ego-involvement (ahamkara), ignorance (avidya), and the interplay of the three gunas (sattva, rajas, tamas). Yoga and meditation are not merely relaxation but coordinated methods—including morals, poses, breath control, sense control, attention training, and reflection—to transform the individual. This narrative review compares classical Indian psychological concepts with modern scientific findings on yoga, pranayama, and meditation.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The control of emotions is one of the most important topics of modern psychology as it determines stress and resilience, social functioning, and susceptibility to mental illnesses. In recent models, emotion regulation is defined as the mechanisms by which individuals control the kind of emotions that they experience, when they experience them, and how they experience or express those emotions. Such models also differentiate rather adaptive tactics like cognitive reappraisal and more expensive tactics like expressive suppression. Indian psychology considers the same issue based on a wider and older framework. Instead of depending on the view of emotion as an independent mental event, it connects affective disturbance with desire, attachment, ego-involvement (ahamkara), ignorance (avidya), and the interaction of the three gunas sattva, rajas and tamas. The yoga and meditation in this model are not only ways of relaxation to the person but rather coordinated methods of changing the individual via morals, poses, control of breathing, control of senses, training of attention and reflection. The paper is a narrative review of the classical Indian psychological concepts versus modern scientific discoveries about yoga, pranayama, and meditation. The student, community, and clinical evidence indicate better stress, anxiety, negative affect, self-compassion, adaptive coping, emotional maturity, and cognitive reappraisal, and mechanistically supported by interoception, decentering, autonomic regulation, and neural response supporting emotional salience research. Meanwhile, the literature itself is still heterogeneous in terms of methods, and yoga is not, in general, superior to all the active controls. This paper maintains that Indian psychology has a unique and useful contribution to make the regulation of emotions can never be a matter of holding feelings back but is rather a matter of transforming oneself by means of self-control consciousness.