Yoga has come a long way since the ’70s. Today, a yoga studio is as common a town feature as a local Starbucks. Deep breathing, yoga, meditation, and body treatments are now part of mainstream culture and are here to stay.Yoga is a psychology—the whole practice helps us work with the nature of the mind, the nature of being a human, how emotions live in our bodies, how they affect our behaviour and our minds. Stress and anxiety are the main reasons behind many kinds of disorders affecting your mental health and you need some remedy that can help you rid yourself of these unwanted conditions. Yoga is a great stress reliever and it has been shown to ease anxiety and depression as well. When you shift focus from the body to your breath, yoga helps relieve anxiety and also eases physical tension.
Yoga is a practice of poses and breathing techniques designed to strengthen and balance the body and the mind.It seems to work even better than some other mind-body techniques.When compared to visualization and breathing exercises, those who practiced yoga felt more alert and energetic and had a more positive mood.
While the positive impacts of the practice of yoga can be more easily identified and monitored on the physical body, yogis agree the practice of yoga positively benefits the mind as well by helping yogis manage stress, calm their nerves, and relieve depression. Here are a few benefits of yoga for your good mental health.
Natural Anxiety Relief
Available reviews of a wide range of yoga practices suggest they can reduce the impact of exaggerated stress responses and may be helpful for both anxiety and depression. In this respect, yoga functions like other self-soothing techniques, such as meditation, relaxation, exercise, or even socializing with friends.By reducing perceived stress and anxiety, yoga appears to modulate stress response systems. This, in turn, decreases physiological arousal for example, reducing the heart rate, lowering blood pressure, and easing respiration. There is also evidence that yoga practices help increase heart rate variability, an indicator of the body’s ability to respond to stress more flexibly.
Yoga’s effects on Quality of Life and Depression
Yoga has been shown to enhance quality of life in people who are healthy and ill. A review study found that yoga is as effective or better than exercise at improving a variety of mental and physical health measures such as stress, quality of life, mood states, heart rate variability, pulmonary function and so on. A study concluded that because weight gain and toxicity are side effects of various pharmacotherapies, yoga may be an effective and less toxic auxiliary treatment for severe mental illness. It improves subjective wellbeing, mental health and executive functioning within prison populations Yoga improves the quality of life of pregnant women in various studies and enhanced their interpersonal relationships.
Sharpens Concentration
Yoga-goers can improve brain function with each yoga pose. Certain yoga techniques have been used to stimulate the brain and nervous system, thus demonstrating the practice of yoga may improve mental concentration and focus. Additionally, processing information may come more quickly and efficient.
Changing Behaviours and Habits
The unfortunate reality is that changing your behaviour and habits can be very challenging, hence the high levels of relapse or non-remittance found in mental health conditions. Attempting to shift habits and dismantle deeply entrenched negative ways of thinking is an uphill battle at best. If yoga offers a chance to encourage PFC functioning without needing to fight these embedded ways of thinking, it makes the arduous task of self-transformation just a little easier. For some, yoga practice might serve as a substitute for other forms of therapy, while for others it might be a much-needed complement to primary intervention.
Relaxed Body, Relaxed Mind
From a purely physical point of view, the stretching involved in yoga relaxes the body and increases the supply of blood and nutrients to the muscles. It releases connective tissue, improving the way we move, function and feel, all of which supports mental health. Recent research seems to indicate that yoga has an advantage over other types of aerobic activity when it comes to emotional stability.