• Posted January 9, 2026

Yoga Aids Opioid Withdrawal, Clinical Trial Shows

Child’s pose, downward-facing dog, tree pose and cobra might boost people’s ability to fight opioid addiction, a new trial suggests.

A regular yoga practice performed alongside treatment for opioid use disorder accelerated people’s recovery compared to treatment alone, researchers reported Jan. 7 in JAMA Psychiatry.

In fact, yogis achieved full withdrawal from opioids more than four times faster with the help of their yoga practice, researchers found.

“Yoga significantly accelerated opioid withdrawal recovery and improved autonomic regulation, anxiety, sleep and pain,” concluded the research team led by Dr. Hemant Bhargav, an associate professor of integrative medicine at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, India.

In the clinical trial, 30 men in India with opioid use disorder were randomly chosen to receive 10 supervised 45-minute yoga sessions over two weeks, while also receiving buprenorphine. Another group of 29 men received buprenorphine alone.

Buprenorphine works by activating a person’s opioid receptors, which reduces drug cravings without promoting the high caused by opioids.

Researchers figured people receiving buprenorphine treatment might be further helped by yoga’s breathing techniques, mediation and focus on physical poses. 

“Yoga is all about self-awareness and self-control," said Dr. Manassa Hany, director of the Addiction Psychiatry Division at Northwell Health’s Zucker Hillside and South Oaks hospitals in New York state. "Being in charge, feeling your emotions, your body parts. Focusing on being in the moment.”

Opioids calm the nervous system, so withdrawing from opioids causes the opposite reaction, said Hany, who was not involved in the research.

Essentially, the nervous system freaks out during opioid withdrawal.

“It becomes very hard for the brain to accommodate this new change of no opioids and just goes all over the place,” Hany said in a news release. “Your nervous system just acts in a way that really, really pushes you to fix it right away. It can result in anxieties, joint and body pain, diarrhea, vomiting, watery eyes and noses, and yawning. They're difficult symptoms to control and people feel really terrible.”

The study showed that patients armed with a yoga practice achieved stable withdrawal from opioids 4.4 times faster.

These folks got past their withdrawal symptoms within a median of five days, compared to nine days for those taking buprenorphine alone, the study says. (Median means half took more time, half took less.)

Essentially, yoga helps control the hyperstimulation of the nervous system that comes with opioid withdrawal, researchers said.

There are many reasons why yoga is a perfect fit for opioid addiction treatment, Hany said.

“One, it's free. You don't need to go and pay insurance or get approval. You don’t have the burden of bringing another pill to the patient. It's basically free of side effects,” Hany said.

”And most of the time when patients are in the detox unit, they are there 24/7. There's a room to keep them busy. Adding 20 minutes to one hour a day of yoga to their schedule can actually keep them busy as well,” Hany said. “You want to keep their mind busy doing activities, so it's all good. There's nothing negative about including and incorporating the yoga and the treatment as usual with the withdrawal."

However, Hany added that additional trials should be performed, especially since all the participants in this study were men between the ages of 18 and 50 living in India.

“You would want to repeat it or replicate it to see if it works for women as well as for men, if it works in the United States, if it works for people who are 65 and above,” Hany said. “You want to test its generalizability to see if you can actually do that for other patient population and groups as well."

More information

Johns Hopkins Medicine has more about yoga’s benefits.

SOURCES: JAMA Psychiatry, Jan. 7, 2026; Northwell Health, news release, Jan. 7, 2026