Yoga And Mental Health Therapy – How It Helps

There has been a boom in the predominance of yoga in recent years. Celebrities, Medical professionals, and additionally also accept and recommend regular yoga and mental health therapy due to its diverse gains. While some consider yoga as merely one more widespread fashion and link it with the new age mysticism, others certify how overwhelming this form of exercise feels. 

Before exploring the benefits of yoga, we must first understand what yoga is. Yoga is a lifestyle that aims toward a healthy mind and body. 

Balancing the three aspects of well-being, physical, mental and spiritual, is overall well-being. Other exercises like aerobics have very little to do with other aspects of well-being except for physical well-being.

Yoga is about twisting, bending, and taking control of the breadth. It converts your energies to bring a deep and blissful experience. Yoga emphasizes harmony between your mind, body, and soul. When you adopt the functionality, everything works splendidly within you. It enables you to draw to the best of your potential. Before we delve deeper into yoga and mental health therapy, let’s have a look at the definition of yoga.

What is Yoga?

A Hindu spiritual and puritanical subject, which includes breath control, simple meditation, and specific body postures, is widely practiced for health and repose. It has gained popularity in Western culture for various reasons because it promotes and stimulates relaxation, enhances strength and resilience, and mindfulness.

Yoga emphasizes various elements breathing, postures, meditation, and strength. The clients seek different types or preferences of therapy, depending upon their treatment intent.

Yoga and Mental Health Therapy

Yoga improves your physical health. It reduces your stress levels, and it can help you manage your relationships better. As a reward, yoga can help you achieve a better mood. Let’s look at the wide horizon of yoga and mental health therapy.

Yoga lowers depression, improves your mood, and increases impact. Regular yoga practice has calming effects. It is a proven way to reduce the symptoms of anxiety and depression. 

In addition, yoga practice increases the secretion of happy hormones in the brain. It improves concentration. When the stress is reduced, your productivity will increase, letting you work more efficiently.

Regular practice of yoga improves your mental health. Along With, physical health awareness about mental health is also important.

The growing research suggests yoga provides mental health benefits, from reducing depression to PTSD.

Depression

The endurance of depression varies from person to person. The illness may last for months or appear now and then over decades. Symptoms can also display themselves in varying ways.

• Reduce the effect of stress
• Reduce anxiety and depression
• Improve energy

Many people use yoga therapy to control:

• Mental health issues, namely stress, anxiety, or depression
• Situations and disorders, such as ongoing low back pain
• Chronic pain
• Overall well-being

Anxiety

Anxiety is the body’s response to stress and is part of natural combat, retreat, or blocked reflex.

Yoga benefits for Anxiety

• Rewards us with a relaxed body and mind by decreasing the symptoms of anxiety and stress. 
• Provokes relaxation and reduces heart rate on a psychological level. 
• Keeps directive thoughts away from anxiety and future worries.

Eating Disorders

Yoga is beneficial for eating disorders in a variety of ways. Highly-trained yoga therapists with knowledge of eating disorders are most adequately placed to undertake with patients during the more unguarded points in their treatment. 

Residentiary eating disorder treatment centers have been progressively adding collateral treatments such as yoga to their oblation. 

• Adolescents in ambulant eating disorder treatment who have attended yoga showed a decline in eating disorder symptoms.
• Adolescent girls who attended yoga, in addition to standard associative ambulant eating disorder treatment, had reduced depression, anxiety, and body image disturbance.
• People who attended yoga had higher levels of body contentment, and those yoga attendants with prior low body contentment showed more significant rises.
• Patients with Bulimia nervosa showed a decline in eating disorders.

PTSD

“Yoga became a major foundation in our understanding that it is essential to encourage one’s bodily impression to overpower the impression of trauma. Yoga teaches how to abandon the fierceness of sensation and fully rest in the physical experience of the time being. Traumatic flashbacks are not saved in time, but yoga, with its powerful significance on present moment awareness, restores a sense of time in the individual.

Yoga can be such an efficient treatment for PTSD because it works with both the mind and the body while also helping to falsify a sense of safe community from which individuals can draw comfort and support. 

Physical exercise is a must for people who have PTSD, which enhances the resilience of the nervous system and reduces the traumatic experience as yoga is a traditional and safe practice integrating breathing, meditation, mindfulness, and postures. It is a perfect interdependent treatment.

Ways to Implement Yoga in Mental Health Therapy

1. ALTERNATING NOSTRIL BREATHING

Procedure

Place your index finger on your forehead and rest your thumb and middle finger on either side of your nostrils. Inhale through the right nostril while slowly closing off your left nostril, then alternate your fingers to breathe out of the other nostril-complete multiple rounds of living with each nostril.

2. SEATED CAT-COW

Procedure

Sit towards the edge of the seat, place your feet on the floor and rest your hands on your knees. Inhale through the nose, arch the spine, lift the chin towards the sky and exhale through the nose, pushing the chin towards the chest and around the spine. Move the spine in both directions, guided by your breath—complete multiple cycles of this.

3. SEATED TWIST

Procedure 

Sit with both feet situated on the floor. Inhale through the nose, raise your arms adjacent to the body over the head, and draw a circle with your arms.

You should keep your shoulders down and oppose them from reaching up towards the ears. Exhale through the nose, twist your torso to the right, reach the back of the chair with the right hand, place the left hand to the outside of the right knee, and look over the right shoulder. Complete one entire cycle inhale back to center with arms raised overhead– complete numerous cycles like this. 

4. SEATED FORWARD FOLD

Procedure

Sit comfortably on a chair, inhale through the nose, and raise your arms overhead. Exhale out through the nose and extend forward from the waist enabling the torso to fall into the thighs, enabling the head and arms to hand towards the floor. Breath back to sitting upright position and repeat numerous cycles.

5. MOUNTAIN POSE

Procedure

Stand arms down by your side, palms facing out. Practice weight balancing between the feet, pulling your head upwards as some thread is attached to the top, and elongating the spine. Relax your shoulders down and back and contract your abdominal muscles while tucking your pelvis slightly.

Time To Wrap Up

To increase the patient’s comfort in engaging in any of these techniques, we offer to participate with them. It will serve as a possibility to model the technique and strengthen the therapeutic association by sharing the exercises. 

Yoga and mental health therapy have had a strong bond for years, as yoga is not a religion but a tradition to follow. Consistent practice of yoga gives numerous benefits mentioned above.

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