Top 5 Benefits of Practicing Yoga
Are you thinking about doing yoga? Practicing yoga regularly offers many benefits. Read on to learn about the top 5 benefits of practicing yoga.
As nearly 40 million people in the US are practicing yoga, many people are learning the benefits of teaching and studying yoga. If you’re finding that work is stressing you out or you’re not able to find relaxation when you’re out of work, yoga might be perfect for you. If you went through rehabilitation following surgery or an accident, yoga can be a great way to reconnect with your body.
Here are five major benefits to see from practicing yoga.
1. Serious Stress Relief
One of the biggest reasons that yoga has become popular in this increasingly stressful world is its ability to ease that stress. Practicing yoga is one of the few physical activities that can give you a workout while also promoting relaxation.
Cortisol, your primary stress hormone, will tend to fire under the pressures of working out vigorously in a gym. However, in the context of practicing yoga, you can get tone your body, get stress relief, and leave feeling both relaxed and strong.
If you’re emotionally distressed, working out can help you feel better. However, an aggressive workout can leave you in distress. Lowering your anxiety, depression, and fatigue is much easier with yoga.
Yoga is being practiced as a therapeutic tool as much as it is a fitness routine. When combined with other ways of reducing stress, it can improve your stress hormone level and keep stress under your control.
2. It’s Good For Your Heart
If you work a typical nine to five job or sit at an office all day, you’re probably not getting enough blood pumping through every part of your body. IF you want to ensure that you’re supplying your body with the most important nutrients, you need your heart to be healthy. It’s the organ most responsible for moving nutrients throughout your body.
When you move around during your yoga practice, you make your heart healthier and can lower your risk for heart disease. Yoga can help people lower their blood pressure and avoid heart attacks and strokes. By keeping your blood pumping, you’ll be making yourself healthier and happier.
For people who already have health problems, starting yoga practice is a great component of a healthy lifestyle. It can help slow the progress of heart disease and make you feel better on a daily basis. A few dietary changes and yoga can lead to less stress which will keep your heart in great condition.
Since practicing yoga is often combined with a better diet, it’s hard to quantify the effect it has. However, it certainly can improve your life.
3. Sleep Easier
While a sleep schedule is probably one of the first things anyone short on time or high on stress will disrupt, it’s one of the worst things to disrupt. When you’re tired, you’ll see lapses in judgment and the quality of the choices you make. Physiologically, your body will have less time to heal and replenish itself.
One of the things that your brain does while you’re sleeping is to get rid of the protein and plaques that can contribute to Alzheimer’s.
Poor sleep quality can also cause other physiological problems. Since you won’t have a steady metabolic cycle, you could deal with obesity and high blood pressure. These could either contribute to the potential for depression or happen alongside the other problems.
People who practice yoga have been found to be able to fall asleep more quickly, stay asleep longer, and then report feeling more rested than those who don’t. If you need to be more alert during the day at work or school, your sleep schedule could be optimized for that. If you’re not getting adequate and high-quality sleep every night, consider practicing yoga for 15 minutes each day.
4. Have a Better Quality of Life
Along with other therapies, yoga is being added as a complement. For people who are dealing with treatment as varied as psychotherapy, limb amputation, or cancer, yoga has been a positive addition to their lives. For people who need to find a way to calm down, recenter, and find their place in the world, yoga can work wonders.
By improving your mood and eliminating fatigue, there is an alertness created which can be very motivating.
One of the things that yoga adds to a lot of people’s lives is the time for reflection. When you can reflect on what you’re going through, what you’ve been through, and where you want to go next, you can improve your life. By accepting and relaxing in response to the conditions at hand, you’ll see your life change immensely.
While yoga alone isn’t enough therapy to help improve your life, it can be a great addition to a therapeutic approach.
5. Deal With Chronic Pain
With the various issues from fibromyalgia to arthritis, millions of people are living with problems related to chronic pain. For people with pain that can’t be treated on a permanent basis or can’t be dealt with by current medicine, yoga can fill up a serious gap.
While wrist splinting can seem like the obvious solution for dealing with carpal tunnel. However, as some studies have shown, yoga can help too.
According to one randomized trial, people with carpal tunnel were given either a wrist splint or the opportunity to try yoga for eight weeks. in the end, the study found that yoga improved the grip strength of carpal tunnel sufferers more than a wrist splint.
Practicing Yoga is Great For The Body and Mind
If you’re considering practicing yoga on top of your other self-care and medical treatments, you won’t be disappointed. Since you can set your own pace, you don’t have to push further than you can handle and you’ll finish each session, more pleased with yourself than the last.
Essential Oils and Choosing a Diffuser
Essential Oils are a great aid to meditation and peace of mind – and yoga. Before things get too cold, check out our guide for finding the perfect humidifier.
A Diffuser your kids will love
If you would like a really fun, beautiful silent diffuser for your kids room that they’ll just LOVE – click here.
An Introduction to Yoga and Meditation
Yoga and meditation go together like strawberries and cream. We have a great introductory article on that for you right here. It also gives some insights into the use of essential oils and yoga. Happy reading!
