While we hear a lot about how yoga is great for winding down and relaxation, you may not know that yoga can help productivity. Yes, yoga is a great escape from our busy working lives, but there are many ways that practicing yoga can help us get more work done, increase concentration and send your productivity levels soaring.
Here’s 10 ways yoga can help productivity at work.
1. Yoga Relieves Stress
Stress is one of the major factors that can affect your health and work productivity. When we’re feeling stressed we sleep less, any illnesses or physical conditions can be exacerbated, and our mental health suffers too. If you’re stressed at work, you can find it hard to focus, and you may even need to take time off sick. Practicing yoga, even just for ten minutes daily can help release any tension in the body, and allows you to feel more relaxed, beating the work stress and letting you go back to your desk with a clear, calm mind.
2. Yoga Improves your Concentration Levels
One of the biggest hurdles on the path to a more productive workday is procrastination. It’s so easy now to get distracted while you’re sat at your desk, and you might find your to-do list never seems to get shorter despite the hours spent in the office. Practicing yoga allows you to take some time to focus on your breathing. The deep breaths you take during a yoga flow regulates oxygen in your blood. This will make you more alert and helps you concentrate on the tasks at hand.
3. Yoga Makes you More Creative
Taking time out to practice yoga not only improves your concentration levels, it can also open your mind to more creative and out of the box ideas. The emotional release yoga can give the mind can boost creativity. This is because when the mind is calm, the relationship between our emotions and rational train of thought can work together, helping us work through mental blocks and look at things from a different frame of mind.
4. Yoga eases physical ailments
The aches and pains that come from hard work can actually affect our productivity. If you work in a desk job, you’ll no doubt be no stranger to back aches, neck soreness, and eye strains. Untreated, these aches and pains can get worse and worse, and turn into headaches, stiffness, arthritis or carpal tunnel. Heading to the matt can keep physical problems away, and loosen our muscles from sitting over a computer everyday. And when you feel relaxed physically, you’ll be able to be much more productive than if you’re sore and stiff.
5. Yoga can fight fatigue
You may not think it, even sitting at a desk working can cause fatigue. You may think because you’re not being active you won’t suffer from fatigue from working. However, even if you work at a desk, fatigue can build up over the days and weeks, causing you to feel exhausted, and impacting your production levels. Stretching and gentle exercise like yoga can help increase your blood circulation, which reduces fatigue and gives your body higher energy levels.
6. Yoga increases positivity
A positive mindframe is key in being a productive, happy employee. And yoga helps in calming your mind and giving you an optimistic outlook. Yoga helps improve your physical and mental health, leading to a high morale; as well as improving your energy levels and creativity to increase your positivity. Taking even just 10 minutes during your work day to practice yoga stretching or breathing exercise can hugely increase workplace morale, meaning more work gets done.
7. Yoga boosts your immune system
Yoga can be used alongside medicine to help ease, treat and fight off a range of illness, such as colds, flu or arthritis. Not only does yoga practice increase your overall health levels, but regular practice can also improve the function of your cardiovascular, respiratory and digestive systems. This helps your body stay strong and healthy to fight off viruses and infections. Practicing yoga can also improve your lymphatic circulation - the lymphatic fluids are a very important part of your immune system, working to fight bacteria and destroying old and abnormal cells in the body.
8. Yoga reduces depression and anxiety
Yoga can help fight off depression and anxiety, which in turn can do wonders for your production levels. Maintaining strong mental health is just as important for your physical health, especially in the workplace. Yoga reduces stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, which can cause anxiety and depression. AS well as this, practicing yoga can help you focus on something as simple as your breathing when you are feeling overwhelmed, helping the negative feelings pass and keeping your mind present.
9. Yoga improves sleep
A tired mind is not a productive mind, and if you’re consistently not sleeping well, chances are your work is going to suffer for it. We’ve already explained how yoga reduces stress - which is a number one suspect when it comes to sleepless nights. Yoga can also regulate your nervous system. If you’re prone to lying in bed with your mind racing, your nervous system is working in overdrive. Yoga can help to activate the side of your nervous system that controls resting (your parasympathetic nervous system), helping you fall asleep, and more importantly, stay asleep.
10. Prefrontal stimulation
Finally, yoga works to stimulate the part of your brain that controls critical decision making. This is called the prefrontal lobes of the brain. This can help your brain work quicker, and as an added bonus, it’s also the part of the brain where your ‘happy’ hormones are released!
By Amy Cavill
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