Do you think there are mental benefits of yoga and it will benefit your body positively, or do you think it’s just a process of performing various postures?
Well, Americans spend $16 Billion on yoga classes and equipment each year and there’s certainly a reason behind it! There are more Mental Benefits of Yoga than just ending up flexing your body.
This practice will surely help you deal with stress, traumatic events, PTSD, anxiety, and whatnot. In today’s generation if these issues are cured then the world lacks nothing. If you are Mentally healthy, then certainly your life and body shine.
What is Yoga?
The practice done to keep the mind at balance in the various spheres of life is yoga. It joins the mind, body and soul to reach spiritual awakening and connect the individuals’ consciousness to universal consciousness.
Yoga balances the 3 Doshas: Vata, Pitta and Kapha in an individual. The main objective of yoga is “Self Realization”
Characteristics & Mental Benefits Of Yoga
Yoga being 5000 years old has produced 100 different styles practised all over the world helping heal individuals from all age groups. When the yogis chant “Om”, the syllables AUM represent past, present and future respectively.
There’s a reason why “36 million people in the US regularly practice yoga” it has genuine healing mental benefits of Yoga :
1. Stress Buster and freedom from anxiety
- Yoga enables the reduction in the secretion of cortisol which is a stress hormone. Further, relaxing the mind and body to an extent that it positively affects the individual quality of life.
- It promotes focus on the present moment, which stimulates calmness, positivity and relaxation.
- PTSD, the experience of traumatic events, and being anxious about the future is a major health issue and yoga cures anxiety by guiding thoughts away from future worries and tensions.
2. Cure Depression
- people fighting alcoholism, curing through break up or death of loved one can certainly practice yoga to reduce their ACTH levels that will stimulate mental well being.
- It deals with issues of loss of energy, pain, troubles
- Hatha yoga is popularly practised in the USA, it successfully helps every individual to deal with depression by practising breathing and meditation.
3. Increasing Mental Strength
- Yoga promotes and individuals to indulge in self-realization, have self-control, self-effectiveness by thinking about their strengths, likes, dislikes, preferences, opinions and focusing on commitments.
- By being more reflective and calm and individuals can learn to enhance mental toughness.
- An individual manages their stress and develops self-belief through the practice of yoga.
4. Stimulates positivity and develops an optimistic approach
- Unwanted, damaging thoughts are erased through the practice of yoga further developing hopeful and positive thoughts creating confident individuals.
- Meditating brings about self-assessment and introspecting on the consequences of past deeds. Feeling of gratefulness or hope of improvement through learning is brought up enhancing optimism.
5. Release of beneficial brain chemicals
- Dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine is mood-boosting chemicals that are released through consistent practice of yoga asana.
- When the heart rate gets controlled through yoga the muscles work hard to release helpful brain chemicals as a result of which yoga stimulates a feel-good response and makes an individual happy!
6. Boosts concentration, focus and memory
- During the practice of yoga, you have to put in maximum concentration and focus on your breath and body.
- While maintaining balance during yoga postures, focusing on a point further enhances concentration power leading to better focus and memory strength.
7. Yoga improves social and occupational functioning in schizophrenic patients
- Yoga has proven to be beneficial for those suffering from psychological disorders and helps them improve their condition with time.
Read More: Yoga Is As Good As A Gym Workout
Few Physical Health Benefits of Yoga are:
1. Improvement in body flexibility, strength and posture
- You sit and stand straighter when you fix to form the perfect posture of your body.
- It eases your lower back pain and stretches your body to a level that becomes flexible enough further improving the strength.
2. Better sleep
- Pregnant women, arthritis patients and other groups have experienced better sleep by consistent practice of yoga asanas.
- People would sleep faster, sleep longer and feel rested every morning. Besides, It decreases sleep disturbances and reduced the requirement of sleeping pills.
- It increases melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep.
3. Heart health improved
- After conduction of a study amongst those above the age of 40 years who practised yoga consistently for 5 years showed lower blood pressure, pulse rate and had reduced risk from various heart diseases.
- Decrease in cholesterol levels and reduction in “bad” LDL cholesterol along with improvement of life of heart patients have proved yoga to be an effective method to improve heart functioning.
4. Improves Breathing
- It increases vital capacity. Vital capacity refers to the measure of the maximum amount of air that can be removed from the lungs.
- Asthmatic patients show better lung functioning after consistent yoga practice.
- Improved breathing definitely leads to better functioning of the heart and lungs for the best performance of an individual.
5. Increases blood flow
- Shirshasana or headstand in yoga is a posture that helps blood to flow to your head all over the upper part of your body from where it gets pumped back to the lungs and gets oxygenated. As a result, it increases in blood furthers optimizes overall body functioning.
Yoga honours the dance of light and shadow on the human soul. Moreover, It will surely help you improve the quality of your life by providing you balance, integration of body and soul, healthier mental functioning and more goal-focused psychology which will end you up in your desired position in life.
Written by: Nehal Sharma
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