How yoga can support your mental health

How yoga can support your mental health

Yoga is an ancient technique that combines positions with breathing and focus to improve strength, awareness, and body-mind harmony. Yoga has many obvious physical benefits — flexibility, stamina, and cardiovascular health, to mention a few – and we now understand its importance in our mental wellness more than ever.

Thankfully, self-care is a big topic, as life continues to speed up all around us, and we need to calm down and look inward, at our own mental health.

Yoga helps our mental health by:

1. Relieving anxiety 2. Lowering depression
3. Promoting better sleep
4. Fighting fatigue
5. Decreasing stress
6. Improving focus
7. Increasing tolerance

8. Increase the stakes by including meditation's wide neurological advantages. It has been shown in studies to improve focus and concentration while also lowering levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Anxiety, stress and depression are often inter-linked. They manifest in many different ways, causing everyones’ experience of mental illness to be unique, sometimes including:

1. Physical sickness
2. Difficulty breathing
3. Emotional outbursts
4. Low mood
5. Poor sleep
6. Physical aches and pains
7. Coping strategies such as addictions

Yoga and meditation promote relaxation

Relaxation is promoted by yoga and meditation, which is the polar opposite of anxiety, tension, and depression. They help us keep centred, which is important for stress management. The mind is diverted away from the trigger by pausing to breathe, meditate, or stretch, and a physiologic response of soothing begins.

Our vagus nerve, which is engaged in our parasympathetic nervous system - our rest and digest response – is stimulated by specific yoga and meditation techniques.

These basic routines heighten awareness of what's going on in our bodies, allowing us to spot changes and early indicators of mental illness. How? One technique is to teach us to focus on the current moment rather than worrying about the past or what might happen in the future.

Furthermore, exercise boosts the flow of serotonin, also known as the "happy hormone." As a result, moving and relaxing our bodies helps to calm the mind, and improving our mental health has a favourable impact on our physical health.

Yoga can help us maintain our internal equilibrium and raise our daily experience when the world feels out of balance, uneven, or low. And we may access it from anywhere at any time.