Stress And Yoga: Can You Beat Stress With Yoga?

Stress touches all people. No one can escape from it. However, depending on our personal background, some of us are more deeply affected by its consequences. It becomes important to know if stress can be beaten. Yoga enthusiasts suggest trying yoga and meditation. But can we truly beat stress with yoga?

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To begin understanding if something can help us cope with stress, we need to understand how it typically affects the body. When something stressful happens we feel energized. Our heartbeats race, sour senses heighten. Why does our body react so? Why are we stressed?

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Stress Nature

Our brain provokes an immediate response in our autonomic nervous system if we interpret an event as stressful. Our response to stress activates the sympathetic nervous system. As a consequence, our body floods with cortisol and norepinephrine. These are hormones that heighten the senses, increase heart rate, and blood pressure. This response overwhelms the parasympathetic nervous system, which usually makes us emotionally calm and physically relaxed.*

This reaction is known as fight-or-flight. Our ancestors needed this reaction for an effective fight against life-threatening danger. In such situations, this survival mechanism is very useful, bet when we talk about day-to-day challenges, it can be an overkill.

Ongoing stress leads to all kinds of health problems:

• insomnia,
• fatigue,
• anxiety and depression,
• chronic pain,
• cardiovascular disease.

Good news is that we can cope with stress better and improve overall health and well-being.

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Stress Relief

To know how to manage stress is necessary for everyone. It’s important to know your triggers. Is it work-related stress? Do you face reduced work capacity or even burnout? Do you have relationship issues or financial concerns? Knowing your stress triggers can help you identify what you can control. 

Do whatever helps you calm down. Maybe it’s music, a massage, a comedy or a bubble bath. Take time for yourself. In our fast going lives, we forget that maintaining a healthy lifestyle helps us manage stress. Many people benefit from practices such as yoga, deep breathing, or meditation.

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Yoga And Stress

All forms of exercise are a very useful way to relieve stress, but yoga is different from other exercises because it combines both physical movements with an inner self-awareness work.

It is shown that 12-week yoga intervention with specific yoga postures, breathing control, and meditation that slow the mind reduces stress and increases automatic nerve activities.*

Why is yoga so different from other forms of exercise?

To understand why yoga is so powerful for beating stress, let’s take a quick look at yoga philosophy.

Philosophy of yoga suggests that your body and mind are connected. If stress affects your mind, it will also affect your body and vice versa.

Yoga helps us balance the connection between our body and mind. Regular yoga practice drops stress hormone levels that increase our ability to tolerate stress.

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Yoga practices for stress relief

We provide you two blocks of yoga techniques that work great for body and mind. The first block can be practiced by everyone. These exercises should be practiced in a relaxed mode and with full attention. The second block consists of simple asanas, that should be practiced slowly, with care and attention.

Yoga, meditation, as all other mind-body combining exercises teach our body and mind to cope with stress better and improve overall well-being.

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REFERENCES:

Effects of Yoga on Stress, Stress Adaption, and Heart Rate Variability Among Mental Health Professionals—A Randomized Controlled Trial –https://sigmapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/wvn.12097

Yoga For Stress Management – By Sri Venkatkrishnan

Stress: a Social Issue – https://www.brunet.ca/en/health/health-tips/le-stress–un-enjeu-de-societe/

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