Restorative yoga for occupational stress among Japanese female nurses working night shift: Randomized crossover trial

Abstract

Objectives To determine whether restorative yoga is an effective method for relieving occupational stress among female nurses working the night shift in Japan. Methods From July 2017 to May 2018, 20 female nurses aged in their 20s to 30s who were working the night shift at a university hospital participated in a randomized crossover trial, consisting of a 1‐hour guided group yoga session followed by 4 weeks of at‐home practice and 4 weeks of usual stress relief methods. The level of stress was assessed by the Brief Job Stress Questionnaire of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare before and after performing restorative yoga. Descriptive statistics were calculated and data were analyzed by Student's t test, one‐way analysis of variance (with repeated measures), or Bonferroni's multiple comparison test. Results Vital signs showed no significant differences from before to after the group yoga session, and there was no change of weight after 4 weeks of at‐home practice. The mean questionnaire score for "psychological and physical stress reactions" was significantly reduced after the group yoga session. In addition, the mean score was significantly lower after 4 weeks of at‐home practice than before or after group yoga, or after 4 weeks of the usual stress relief methods. Conclusions These findings suggest that restorative yoga may be effective for alleviating occupational stress among female nurses working the night shift.

The Effectiveness and Safety of Mind-Body Modalities for Mental Health of Nurses in Hospital Setting: A Systematic Review

“…In the random sequence generation domain, 10 studies [42,47,48,50,51,[53][54][55][56]58] that used proper random sequence generation methods such as random number tables or simple randomization were rated as having low RoB, while the other seven [43][44][45][46]49,52,57] without a description of randomization method were rated to have unclear RoB. None of the included studies described allocation concealment and blinding of participants and personnel.…”

“…As a result of secondary screening for the full texts, 13 that were not RCTs [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32], three that did not use mind-body modalities [33][34][35], four which were without details (conference abstract) [36][37][38][39], and two using the same data as other journal articles (thesis or conference abstract) [40,41], were excluded from the study. Finally, a total of 17 RCTs were included in this review [42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58] (Figure 1).…”

“…Among the included studies, 15 were parallel RCTs [42,43,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][53][54][55][56][57][58] while the other two were cross-over RCTs [44,52]. All these studies were published between 1993 and 2020.…”

“…All these studies were published between 1993 and 2020. Three studies each were conducted in the US [45,46,57] and China [47,50,51], two each in Taiwan [42,44] and Japan [52,55], and one each in Hong Kong [43], Korea [48], Greece [49], Turkey [53], France [54], Malaysia [56], and Iran [58]. The analyzed sample sizes of the included studies varied from 27 to 224.…”

“…The analyzed sample sizes of the included studies varied from 27 to 224. Four studies used yoga [46,47,52,54] as their intervention, three used music [44,49,58], and one used music combined with aromatherapy as well as music in its four-arm RCT [58]. Seven studies used MBIs, including MBSR in three [45,50,51], meditation [48], and mindfulness-based programs in three [55][56][57].…”