If you’ve been feeling a bit down recently and are in need of a mood boost, it can be easy to veer towards those vices which might not necessarily be the best for you. That’s not to say there’s not a time and a place for a bit of junk food, or a glass of wine, but one thing you can do everyday to help boost your mood is practicing yoga.
Building a healthy habit of practicing a little bit of yoga each day can help to improve your mental and physical health, as well as make you feel happier. Here are a few more reasons why doing yoga everyday can help you.
Improve Flexibility
The first thing that probably comes to your mind when you think of yoga is someone bending themselves into all kinds of shapes! Well, you actually don’t have to be super flexible to practice yoga, anyone can try! In fact, practicing yoga daily can actually help improve your flexibility and improve your mobility.
Improve Strength
You don’t have to go to the gym and lift lots of weights to improve your strength. If heavy lifting isn’t your thing, try a daily yoga practice. There are lots of poses that will help to build your muscles and tone your body - even more than lifting a heavy weight will do. You can find poses such as the plank, which strengthens your entire body in one go.
Improve Posture
If you work a desk job and find yourself slouching, practicing yoga every day can help you to improve your posture. A daily practice will help you to stand up taller and sit up straighter - which can in turn help ease any aches and pains that bad posture causes.
Help You Lose Weight
An everyday yoga practice will help you to fuel your metabolic system, and help you to burn fat, which leads to weight loss. Practicing daily can also help to restore your hormonal balance in your body, leading to a more normalized body weight.
Increased energy
A few minutes of yoga each day provides the body with an energy boost that helps you keep active for longer periods. Yoga uses a unique combination of body movements and breathing techniques that help to increase your energy levels throughout the day.
Daily yoga practice also awakens your main energy centers, or chakras, in your body. Poses that extend the spine are great for circulating extra energy in the body.
Reduces Stress
Yoga is one of the best stress-busters out there. Studies show that the combination of breathing, poses, and meditation can help to regulate your heart rate variability. This means that your heart rate is lower, and allows your body to respond to stress in a more flexible way.
Better Sleep
A daily practice of yoga can help to reduce insomnia. Relaxing postures and forward folds can help to improve your sleep quality, as they relax the body and the mind.
Breathe Deeper
Breathing deeply is an essential part of a yoga practice. Breathing exercises, or pranayama, focus on slowing down the breath and breathing fully from the pit of your stomach to the top of your lungs. These exercises will help to make you feel more relaxed and balanced and make you feel more confident and calm. There are also more benefits including increased lung capacity.
Boosted Immune System
Yoga helps the levels of stress hormones in your body and helps to also calm the nervous system. Practicing yoga everyday can help lower the levels of pro-inflammatory markers like cytokines.
Happier
Regular yoga and meditation can help improve your serotonin levels, which are the hormones that make you happy. A study has shown that people who practice yoga long term have more mass in the areas of the brain associated with happiness, as well as higher levels of GABA hormones, which is associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety.
Mindfulness
Practicing yoga each day will help you to become more mindful. When practicing yoga, your sensations and thoughts and emotions will come to the front of your mind and help bring your mind into the present moment and help you feel happy and focused.
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By Amy Cavill
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