As anxiety can often be triggered by stress, there are ways you can help your body relax. Yoga has been proven to benefit your physical health but it can also benefit your state of mind. Exercise naturally releases endorphins that helps you feel relaxed and relieves any stress you’re feeling. As yoga is a soft and spiritual exercise, it can be very beneficial against anxiety.
Here is how yoga can help you:
Reduces Stress
An anxiety attack can be caused by stress. Feeling stressed can increase your heart rate and rush your breathing.
Doing yoga naturally reduces stress. Slow and controlled exercises can help you feel calmer and more relaxed. Deep and controlled breathing is commonly recommended for anxiety sufferers because it helps reduce your heart rate and achieve a state of calm.
Controlled breathing combined with yoga exercise can help reduce stress. If you practice yoga just a few times a week you’ll be able to see the positive effects it has.
Improves Sleep
Lack of sleep can often make you feel more stressed. There are different reasons that can cause you to struggle to get the recommended sleep you need. Drinking caffeine and eating late are common reasons, but stress can also cause a lack of sleep. As yoga can help you feel more relaxed, it can help you sleep better at night.
Doing 20-30 minutes of yoga in the evening can help you meditate and relax before you go to bed. As yoga is a low active exercise, you could do your exercise in your pajamas.
Benefits Immune System
Along with stress, feeling unwell can trigger anxiety attacks. Keeping fit can benefit your immune system and increase blood flow in your body. As yoga helps you exercise different parts of your body and engage muscles that aren’t regularly used, it can help improve your physical and mental health. Relieves Pain
Chronic conditions and injuries can increase your stress levels. Gentle yoga exercises have been known to help relieve pain from arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome and other chronic conditions. Relieving pain naturally benefits your mood and helps against anxiety.
Relaxes Your Body and Mind
Practicing yoga and meditation has proven to help relax the body and the mind. Basic yoga exercises like the Mountain Pose or the Tree helps release tension from your body. Often, after an exercise, you can feel more relaxed because you’ve removed all the stressful tension inside you.
As yoga is a soft and slow exercise, it gives you the opportunity to focus on your controlled movements and your breathing. Yoga exercises often feel very cathartic because they help you release stress and feel relaxed. Feeling relaxed helps relieve anxiety.
Yoga is a popularly recommended exercise because it helps battle against many different physical and mental ailments. Yoga has proven to be especially helpful against anxiety because it helps relieve stress.
By Benjamin Fry
Benjamin is a psychotherapist, accredited by the BACP, who contributes to the media in the UK and is politically active in lobbying for better access to better treatment for all sections of society, working with the Centre for Social Justice and through his own social enterprise Get Stable. He set up Khiron House after experiencing a serious mental illness and getting no effective treatment for it in the UK. You can find out more about him at his website."