A lot of people might view yoga as a pastime of only the very fit or Hollywood actresses. While yoga has gotten a reputation of being an activity reserved for an elite few, it’s actually a centuries-old workout that wasn’t originally even intended to be used to improve one’s figure, but rather to improve one’s mind and spirit.
Yoga can be a life-changing activity. Even if you can’t afford to take yoga classes at a studio, doing yoga at home can still revolutionize your life. Here are some ways that yoga helps your mind, body and spirit.
Reduce Anxiety
Anxiety comes in many forms. Even if you haven’t ever been diagnosed with clinical anxiety, if you take a glance at any phobia list, you might recognize one or two of those phobias as being a form of anxiety that you carry with you. Even if your anxiety is relatively minor, it can still be a damaging force in your life.
Yoga significantly reduces the amount of anxiety that you feel on a daily basis. This is because it teaches you how to rely on your breathing to calm yourself and focus your mind. The breathing techniques that you use in yoga can be applied to other areas of your life to help you consistently feel happier and more focused.
Feel More Energetic
Yoga helps to improve energy levels in a myriad of ways. First and foremost, people who do yoga find that they have a better quality of sleep at night. As a result, they have more energy throughout the day. Furthermore, after a yoga session, most people report that they feel more invigorated, focused and energetic. Doing yoga in the morning can be a powerful way to feel more motivated and productive throughout the day.
Achieve Weight Loss Goals
Most of us want to lose weight. In fact, the reason that most people explore a new fitness routine is because they have weight loss goals that they want to achieve. Many people erroneously believe that yoga is “just stretching” and therefore won’t help them to achieve their weight loss goals. This is incorrect. Yoga not only provides a cardiovascular workout, but it can also help you to build muscle. A lot of yoga poses involve supporting your body weight on your legs or arms, which aids in building muscle. Yoga can absolutely help you to achieve your weight loss goals.
Feel Happier
While yoga might not be able to cure you if you’re suffering from chronic or clinical depression, you’ll be amazed at how much happier you feel after you begin practicing yoga regularly. Like any exercise, yoga helps to release chemicals in your brain that help you to feel more content and at ease with yourself. However, the mind-body element of yoga helps you to feel more centered, which aids in improving your overall mood. If you’re susceptible to “feeling the blues,” yoga will make a huge difference in how you feel on a daily basis.
Improve Discipline
Most of us have a hard time with staying focused and staying disciplined. Even if we’ve set goals for ourselves, we frequently find ourselves getting distracted or failing to achieve what we wanted to for the day. Yoga helps you to improve your sense of discipline. When you’re doing yoga, you have to discipline yourself to hold difficult poses and push through the workout. This sense of discipline will translate to other areas of your life. You’ll find yourself staying on task, even when you’re surrounded by things that could potentially distract you.
When a lot of people first start doing yoga, their main goal is to improve their body and gain lean muscle while losing fat. Yoga will absolutely help you to accomplish this goal. However, don’t underestimate the other life-changing benefits of yoga. When you do yoga regularly, you’ll notice that you start to feel more disciplined, happier and more energetic.
Yoga isn’t just about improving your body, although that’s absolutely one of its benefits. Rather, it’s about improving your overall feeling of wellness and quality of life.
