How Yoga Helps Depression And Anxiety
Yoga Really Does Make A Difference
If you have ever been depressed or have issues of high anxiety, you understand just how hard it can be to do anything. What would be trivial to most people like making a bed or taking a few steps down the hall, can feel like a mountain on the chest of someone dealing with depression. Depression is a serious condition and should be treated by a professional. One of the wonderful benefits of yoga is that given the right poses and environment, it has therapeutic capabilities that can help those dealing with increased anxiety and depression.
The following article explains just how yoga can help those suffering from depression and addiction. The studies described in the article goes a long way to explaining how yoga can help. This is great news for those seeking alternatives to medication.
See the article below and be sure to share this with those that could use some yoga in their lives.
Yoga Helps With Detoxification
“Ninety-five percent of all disease is a result of nutritional deficiency or toxicity,” explains Steven J. Saltzman, MD, an anesthesiologist with an interest in integrative medicine who practices Bikram yoga himself, in a question-and-answer session about the medical benefits of hot yoga that I recently attended. Most of our toxins are stored in fat cells just beneath the skin, so we release them by sweating the way we do in a 105-degree room.
Yoga Helps You Control Your Breath and More
Learning how to breathe is a critical component of the yoga practice. If we stay on our mat and don’t lift a leg, but can maintain calm, stable breathing in the hot room, we are still receiving medical benefits from the class, a yoga teacher told me recently. Why is the breathing so important?
“By voluntarily changing the rate, depth, and pattern of breathing, we can change the messages being sent from the body’s respiratory system to the brain,” explain Richard P. Brown, MD, and Patricia L. Gerbarg, MD, in their book, The Healing Power of the Breath. “In this way, breathing techniques provide a portal to the autonomic communication network through which we can, by changing our breathing patterns, send specific messages to the brain using the language of the body — a language the brain understands and to which it responds.”
Bikram designed a breathing exercise, pranayama, to introduce each class because he believes that “improving the function of the lungs is almost always the first repair that needs doing.” Properly functioning lungs send fresh oxygen throughout the body, purifying our blood.
Yoga Provides You With a Caring Community
“The yoga community is one of the most supportive communities of compassionate individuals you’ll ever meet,” explains Sara in her TEDx talk. “We all struggle, thrive, fail, and persevere on the mat together. That’s how to learn what we say in yoga, Namaste, ‘the light within me acknowledges the light within you.’”
I have found this to be the case with my own group of yogis. There is a group of us that show up at 9 a.m. almost every day to fight together. Many of us are battling some kind of chronic illness, and all of us are trying to clear the mental clutter from our brains to make room for more positive and peaceful emotions. It’s extraordinarily encouraging to me to have them beside me as I meet my demons on the mat.
See the full article from EveryDayHealth.com here.
To Your Health And Wellness!
