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I asked Rodney what's so great about meditation, and the first thing he told me was, 'You and I take our thoughts way too seriously.' When you meditate, you learn to notice all these stray thoughts that ping around in your head, and take you out of real life. "We're constantly wrapped up in everything we think. We don't really see what we're seeing. We see what we're thinking about what we're seeing," says Smith.

When you meditate, you learn to watch your thoughts come and go, and you don't have to attach to them. You might learn that you're really stuck on your own need to please people or prove something to yourself. And now we're getting into therapy stuff that basically life isn't doing anything to you, it's all about your reaction. And when you learn to see that, you're lightening yourself up to have a good time on this planet.

Inflammation is known to be boosted by stressful situations. But when yoga experts were exposed to stress (such as dipping their feet in ice water,) they experienced less of an increase in their inflammatory response than yoga novices did.

Yoga focuses on deep breathing and controlling breathing, which may slow down the body's "fight or flight" response — the body's reaction to stress, Kiecolt-Glaser said.

Yoga also involves meditation, which helps people learn to pay attention to how they are feeling. So yoga experts may be more aware of their stress and better able to control their response to it.