Yoga Can Improve Your Overall Wellness
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Yoga Can Improve Your Overall Wellness
You’ve heard about the importance of self-care. If you can’t take care of your own body and mind, who will? While there’s something to be said about having positive relationships, it’s still true. You can have the greatest impact on your wellness.
But what does that mean exactly? More importantly, how can you get into self-care? Believe it or not, one of the best ways you can improve your overall wellness is through yoga. This age-old technique is more than just stretching in weird poses. It can help bring a balance and mindfulness to your life that can fight depression, drug addiction, chronic pain, and more.
For Physical And Mental Health
Wellness can mean a lot of things, but it generally covers both your physical and mental health. Improving your overall wellness means you are taking care of your body and your mind.
Many people forget how the two are interconnected. If you’re physically healthy but depressed, you’re more likely to binge eat and lay about instead of exercising. Likewise, if you’re mentally healthy but are overweight or in chronic pain, you’re more likely to slip into irritability or depression. That’s why it makes sense to worry about both instead of just one.
Improving Your Mindfulness
This is where yoga really helps. Research has been done on the impact of yoga, not just in physical health, but in how it impacts your overall wellness and life. People who used yoga regularly were more motivated to find other ways to exercise and stay fit. These same people are also more motivated to eat better.
A big reason for both is how yoga emphasizes focusing and centering your mind to create a state of mindfulness. This is when you are focused on the here and now, keeping aware of what’s happening in the moment. When you lack mindfulness, it’s easy to start obsessing over old fights or getting anxious over things that haven’t even happened yet.
Yoga encourages this mindfulness because it builds upon the interconnectivity of your body and your mind. Instead of making one suffer when the other suffers, yoga improves one by making the other one better. That’s what the quiet poses and slow, deliberate movements in yoga is all about. Sure, it helps improve your muscles’ durability and flexibility. But in doing so, it also helps you focus better.
Fighting The Big 3
Chronic pain, depression, and drug addiction all have definite physiological origins. It’s not like doing a few downward dog poses will suddenly cure you of your alcoholism. However, yoga and mindfulness can definitely help fight all three.
Yoga has been shown to help relieve rheumatoid arthritis and other sources of chronic pain. By improving your mindfulness, yoga helps fight depression and anxiety. It can even reduce inflammation throughout your body. And by replacing artificial highs with natural ones and giving you better control over your mind, yoga can even help fight drug addiction.
Yoga Improves Your Overall Wellness
Whether you have specific problems like pain or addiction, or you just need to get to a better place in life, yoga can be an invaluable source of self-care. It improves both your mind and your body at the same time.