Hot Yoga Leads to Greater Well-being: A Six-week Experience-sampling RCT in Healthy Adults

Practicing hot yoga may bring significant psychological benefits, but it is largely unstudied. We examined the effects of hot yoga on multifaceted well-being indicators with 290 healthy yoga-naïve volunteers partaking in a six-week randomized controlled trial. Participants completed questionnaires pre- and post-intervention, and reported their emotional experiences four times per day throughout an experience-sampling study. Results revealed that the hot yoga group (n = 137) improved their well-being from pre- to post-treatment, comparing to the wait-list control group (n = 153). These improvements included life satisfaction, general health, mindfulness, peace of mind, and eudaimonic well-being (ΔR(2) ranging from .01 to .08)—but not flourishing, which describes major aspects of social-psychological functioning. Multilevel analyses demonstrated that momentary positive emotional experiences increased significantly throughout the trial in the yoga group only (conditional R(2) = .68), particularly when attending a yoga class (conditional R(2) = .50). Interestingly, this increase in momentary positive emotion explained the improvement in post-intervention mindfulness, peace of mind, and general health by 21%, 31%, and 11%, respectively. Finally, the benefits of hot yoga were more notable in individuals with lower levels of baseline eudaimonic well-being (conditional R(2) = .45), flourishing (conditional R(2) = .61), and mental well-being (conditional R(2) = .65), even after ruling out any possible ceiling effects. To sum up, this study demonstrated multiple psychological benefits of hot yoga and its potential to be an effective positive psychology intervention. Future research—especially considering an active control group—is warranted.