How Yoga Helps With Stress and Chronic Pain
Yoga is a mind-body practice or a system of exercises that is made up of a combination of controlled breathing, postures, meditation, and relaxation. The goal of yoga – which is thought to be one of the numerous integrative and complementary health approaches – is to combine mental and physical disciplines that may help you or any yogi to achieve peacefulness of mind and body. This is why yoga is associated with stress management, anxiety reduction, and eradication of chronic pain.
Stress is a common condition that is associated with day-to-day living. It is even believed that it can be helpful in some situations, especially if it is short-term stress. However, prolonged stress can be damaging as it can take its toll emotionally, physically, and mentally thereby affecting your digestion, sleep, libido, and relationships.
Benefits of Yoga on Stress
Yoga Helps to Relax the Mind – The mind becomes busy when you are anxious or stressed out. During those periods, focusing your mind on one thing at a time is virtually impossible. But yoga makes it easy to learn how to focus your mind, and with constant practice, it gets easier.
Meditation is a powerful but mostly under-utilized tool for slowing down and relaxing the mind. When you hold postures and flow from one sequence to another, or meditate in the classic seated pose, your mind slows down, and everything begins to come into focus.
After a while and with frequent practice, you begin to develop new habits that make you have internal peace.
Yoga Helps Your Body to Relax – When you practice yoga the right way, the benefits are similar to a full-body massage as it helps to reduce tension while relaxing your body. Some yoga postures have a calming effect that is felt deeply on the whole system, especially inversions and forward bends.
A yoga posture known as Balasana or Child’s Pose is extremely effective when it comes to soothing your adrenal glands while creating external and internal calm.
Enhances Development of the Mind and Body – A better sense of ease and harmony are engendered when the mind and body are connected. The body sends signals whenever you are under pressure and the ability or inability to respond can influence your wellbeing.
How Yoga Helps in Decreasing Chronic Pain
Chronic pain comes in many different areas, shapes, and sizes of the body which include arthritis, migraines, back pain, and fibromyalgia. When high amounts of epinephrine and cortisol flood your body over an extended period, it can lead to inflammation which causes muscle and joint pain.
Chronic pain is known to trigger stress in the body; therefore, stress reduction and pain can be dealt with yoga. This is because most of the approaches used to confront or reduce stress can also be applied to minimize chronic pain.
When you make efforts to control stress, and chronic pain in your body, the quality of your life is enhanced, and adverse effect of pain is reduced significantly.
Regular practice of yoga helps to increase mobility and has an opposing influence on the brain structures that are affected by pain, anxiety or impaired cognitive function.
Yoga is not difficult, and with the help of a trainer, you will find yourself performing postures that you never thought possible. Mental relaxation techniques, deep breaths, etc. can improve the volume of gray matter in your brain and enhance connectivity to white matter.
The best part of yoga is that it doesn’t take too much time: you can work out three to five days a week in short increments, depending on your schedule.
