Welcome. I'm Mandi Gardner. I have been practicing Ashtanga since before 2014, and I'm opening a Mysore-style shala in Herriman, Utah.
Two questions before we begin.
Do you know what a cognitive distortion is?
Have you ever felt more anxious after reading the news than before you opened it?
If you answered yes to the second one, you're in good company. Thank you for reading.
What's in it for you
By the end, you'll know the names of some of the most common thinking traps (cognitive distortions) and flaws in arguments (logical fallacies), so you can catch them in yourself and in the information you take in. You'll also learn how a daily Ashtanga practice builds discernment, and you'll get a simple five-step practice you can use the next time the news, a text, or your own mind sends you into a spiral.
Why you should listen to me
I've practiced yoga for more than 20 years. For almost eight, I've started each morning with a daily sadhana, a ritual I built from reading yogic texts. It has been the most powerful tool I've found for a grounded, peaceful day. I'm the author of RISING, and I'm in teacher training.
I'm not a therapist, and this isn't medical advice. I also know fear from the inside. With my personal background of complex PTSD, I have been overwhelmed by negative thoughts and emotions rooted in fear. What I'm sharing comes from research and from what has worked for me.
The three things we'll cover
We're flooded with information, and fear travels fastest
Two kinds of thinking errors: cognitive distortions and logical fallacies
How Ashtanga trains discernment
1. We're flooded with information, and fear travels fastest
Information reaches us all day, true and false, and it arrives faster than ever. My husband and I can both feel real anxiety when we pay too much attention to politics and the news. I see it with my teenage son, too. Information travels instantly, and young people receive it just as fast. I talk with him often about telling reality from untruth. I remind him that some of what he sees is false, and that some of it is made to confuse him or frighten him.
The research backs this up. In 2018, MIT researchers studied about 126,000 news stories shared on Twitter between 2006 and 2017. Falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth. True stories took about six times longer to reach 1,500 people. The effect was strongest for political news. Bots were not the main reason. People were. The researchers found that false news was more novel, and replies to it showed more fear and disgust, while replies to true news showed more trust and joy.
In other words, we are built to notice what is new and frightening, and false information is often designed to be both.
Review: We live in a noisy world, and our own minds are part of the problem. That is why discernment matters.
2. Two kinds of thinking errors
Cognitive distortions are habitual errors in how we interpret ourselves and the world, and they tend to skew toward the negative. Psychiatrist Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy in the 1960s. His student David Burns popularized a list of common distortions in his 1980 book Feeling Good. There's no single agreed-upon list, and most contain about 10 to 15 items. Everyone uses them sometimes. Here are some common ones:
All-or-nothing thinking: seeing things in black and white
Catastrophizing: jumping to the worst case
Mind reading: believing you know what others think, without evidence
Fortune telling: predicting the future as if it were fact
Emotional reasoning: treating a feeling as proof ('I feel afraid, so it must be dangerous')
Overgeneralization: one event becomes 'always' or 'never'
Should statements: rigid rules about how things must be
Mental filter: dwelling on the negative and ignoring the rest
Logical fallacies are flaws in how an argument is built. They can sound persuasive even when the reasoning fails. Aristotle catalogued some of the earliest ones in his Sophistical Refutations more than 2,300 years ago. Some you'll recognize:
Ad hominem: attacking the person instead of the point
Straw man: misrepresenting a view so it's easier to knock down
False dilemma: claiming there are only two options
Slippery slope: claiming one step will inevitably lead to disaster
Appeal to fear: using fear in place of evidence
Bandwagon: 'everyone believes it, so it must be true'
Hasty generalization: drawing a broad conclusion from one example
The difference is simple. Distortions live inside us. Fallacies live inside arguments. Both can make fear feel like fact.
Review: You can't catch a thinking error you can't name. Learning the names is the first step.
3. How Ashtanga trains discernment
Yoga has been called a science of the mind. In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali defines yoga as the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind (1.2). He names the root of suffering as avidya, misperception: mistaking what is not lasting for what is, and what is not the self for the self (2.5). His answer is viveka, discernment. He says unbroken discernment is the way out (2.26). Discernment is not a bonus. It is the point.
Here is a question I ask myself. If you weren't allowed to look outside your body for answers, what techniques could create peace? Ultimately, all we have is our body. And the universal tool we all carry is the body and the breath.
Ashtanga trains that tool daily. You link breath and movement. You hold a steady gaze (drishti). You repeat the same sequence, so you can see what changes. Over time you learn to tell the difference between sensation and story. Is that pain, or fear of pain? Is this real, or is it a prediction? The traditional practice of pratyahara, withdrawing the senses from outside input, is the opposite of a constant news feed.
A body practice has helped me heal my body, and it has made me stronger, leaner, and more flexible. It has also made my mind more flexible and more tolerant in how I think about things. For years my thoughts were rooted in fear. My daily practice and my morning ritual taught me to look inward for the love and grounding I was seeking.
What does the research say? Honestly, it is modest. A 2018 meta-analysis of eight randomized trials (319 participants) found small, short-term reductions in anxiety from yoga compared with no treatment. It found no clear effects in people with formally diagnosed anxiety disorders. A 2026 review reported small to moderate improvements in stress, anxiety, and depression, but rated the evidence as low-level.
In a 2014 trial of women with chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD, 52% of those who did 10 weeks of trauma-informed yoga no longer met PTSD criteria, compared with 21% of the control group. I don’t want to imply that Ashtanga classes treat PTSD. But what I can say is that dedicating myself to the Ashtanga practice has profoundly impacted my mind and body in positive way. And that’s why I take the connection between body and mind so seriously. I am not claiming yoga replaces therapy. I'm saying it's a practice worth testing for yourself.
That is why it's called a practice. It's an experiment. You try these technologies of peace, see how they work for you, and make them deeply personal.
A five-step discernment practice
Pause. Take five slow breaths.
Name it. What am I feeling, and what story am I telling?
Check it. Is this a fact, or a distortion? Which one?
Check the source. Who made this, and how do I know it's true? Does it use a fallacy?
Choose. Act, or let it go.
Review: Ashtanga builds discernment through daily repetition. It teaches you to feel before you react, and to question before you believe.
To sum up
We're flooded with information, and false, frightening news spreads faster than the truth.
Thinking errors have names. Cognitive distortions live in us, and logical fallacies live in arguments.
Ashtanga trains discernment. Body, breath, and daily repetition teach us to tell sensation from story, and fear from fact.
So here is my question for you. What practice helps you develop discernment? I'd love to hear. And if you're curious how yoga can help you discern, I'd love to show you.
Join the Foundations waitlist
If you'd like to learn Ashtanga from the beginning, join the waitlist for the Foundations course, starting in 2027. It's an 8-week course, live on Zoom or in-person in the new Herriman shala, and everyone who practices at the shala begins there. You'll be the first to know when enrollment opens.
Join the Foundations waitlist: holisticevolutionshala.com
Sources
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., and Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380).
Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders.
Burns, D. D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy.
Cramer, H., et al. (2018). Yoga for anxiety: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Depression and Anxiety, 35(9).
Mu, X., et al. (2026). The effects of yoga exercise on stress relief capacity and emotional changes: a systematic review and meta-analysis.
Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations.
Patanjali, Yoga Sutras 1.2, 2.5, and 2.26.
van der Kolk, B. A., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., and Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 75(6), e559-e565.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
