Benefitting Your Mental and Physical Health with Yoga

Two important activities, exercise and meditation, are both recommended as effective ways to boost one’s mental health. What if they could be blended together in a practice that allows you to practice meditation and deep breathing and build strength, endurance, and flexibility all at once?
The solution is simple, and one that already exists: yoga.
Yoga for mental health
Derived from yog, the Sanskrit word meaning union, yoga works to reestablish and/or strengthen the connection between the mind, body and spirit. In a typical yoga practice, you flow from one pose to the next as you are guided by inhaling and exhaling of the breath. Intentional breathing helps to deepen a stretch, hold a balance, transfer out of or into a pose, or relax all the muscles after a particularly challenging hold.
In addition, yoga works to quiet the mind and help you focus any frantic, scattered thoughts on what’s happening right in front of you. Step onto the mat and focus on the yogic practice.
In fact, yoga has dozens of benefits for mental health. As outlined by “Yoga and Mental Health: An Underexplored Relationship” in Academia:
The physical Benefits of Yoga are to create a toned, flexible, and strong body, to improve posture, to improve energy level, to help maintain a balanced metabolism, to enhance functioning of respiratory, digestive, endocrine, reproductive and elimination systems, to reduce blood pressure, to improve efficiency of lungs, to enhance sleep, to promote cardiovascular and circulatory health, to relieve pain, to improve athletic performance and to improve balance. The major psychological benefits of Yoga are to calm the mind, to attune people to the environment, to enhance concentration and mental clarity, to reduce stress and anxiety, to encourage positive thoughts and self-acceptance and to promote flexibility followed by the spiritual benefits in which the awakening the spirit, building of healthy spiritual awareness, promotion of interdependence between mind, body, and spirit, enhancing the concept of oneness of all things and connecting personal energy to divine energy are incorporated.
Reducing stress and anxiety
Yoga increases gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) levels in the brain, a natural chemical released to promote feelings of calm and wellbeing, thereby reducing stress and anxiety.
Yoga, through its dependence on breathing techniques, further increases that sense of calm. Taking deep breaths is one of the surest ways of calming the mind; it’s a default phrase for many when they’re trying to help someone through moments of panic or high anxiety. Taking a deep breath increases the flow of oxygen to the brain, promotes feelings of clarity and reduces the impact of stress on the mind and body.
Enhance sleep
Getting enough sleep is not only an important means of taking care of your physical body (lack of sleep can severely disrupt one’s proper immune functioning), it’s also necessary for your mental health. Yoga is an effective way of increasing your sleep quality, making falling asleep easier and returning to sleep if you wake up in the middle of the night. A national survey reported that 55% of yogis claimed better sleep quality once yoga became a part of their routine.
The breathing exercises, reduction of stress, and physical challenge on the body all contribute to sleep improvement.
Enhance concentration and mental clarity
Meditation is an important aspect of yoga, combining the benefits of both. These include enhanced concentration and mental clarity. Yoga requires focusing on the connectedness of the body and breathing as you breathe during a balance or move through a standing pose. Sometimes, it takes increased concentration just to keep you from falling over.
Meditation complements this mental centering on the present moment as it requires the mind to be fully present to everything going on around you – the music, the breathing of the individual next to you in class, the voice of the instructor, the smell of the essential oils or the feel of sweat on the mat – and let them exist judgment-free before letting them go. Their presence doesn’t affect you; they happen to be there. This is incorporated more intentionally in different forms of yoga and generally in each practice, such as when holding a challenging pose but allowing your breathing to guide you and hold you through it even so.
Relieve pain
Battling chronic pain can be incredibly worn on one’s mental health. Still, yoga, through meditation, physical enhancement, and increased flexibility as promoted by yogic practices, can help minimize pain and promote overall mental wellness.
The poses are designed to stretch and strengthen all areas of the body. Certain poses target specific areas, such as stiff knees, achy shoulders, or a weak core. The poses work to stretch the muscles and strengthen them to reduce pain and increase strength.
Yoga as a supplement to mental health treatment
Many treatment centers are turning to yoga as a holistic, non-invasive and therapeutic practice for mental health conditions like depression, anxiety and even substance use disorder. To begin your treatment journey with holistic options like yoga, call Silvermist today at (412) 561-9558.