Practicing Yoga for Your Wellbeing

Nowadays, yoga seems to be the popular answer to numerous health challenges. From treating back pain to lowering stress levels, yoga is often promoted as a cure-all remedy to modern life. Originating in India, yoga is an ancient physical, mental, and spiritual practice whose origin can be traced back 5,000 years, and which is now more relevant than ever. Yoga is mostly seen as a careful combination of exercise and meditation, but is practicing yoga really as beneficial as we think it is?

Let’s take a closer look at how this ancient tradition can improve our daily lives! 

Stretch it out

When it comes to the physical impact, it is highly possible to see both long-term and short-term benefits after doing yoga. Following a quick session, the immediate effects include increased flexibility and decreased musculoskeletal pain. Yoga can work wonders for our health on a deeper level as well: including yoga in your everyday routine is proven to successfully improve tertiary cardiovascular health, which helps to maintain a healthily functioning body overall. According to a recent study, yoga practitioners even reported a 10% lower risk of  chronic disease diagnosis when compared to their risk prior to integrating yoga into their lives. This means that yoga can provide us with amazing benefits when it comes to our physical wellbeing! 

The right balance for your inner world

Since practicing yoga is all about establishing balance in our lives, the benefits naturally apply to our mental health as well. While promoting the wellbeing of the whole self, yoga encourages us to integrate more nutritious food into our diets and be more careful about what we take into our bodies. The mind also easily benefits from the stability of emotions and an improved intellect that can be acquired through practicing yoga. As it gets easier to understand our inner world, the mind-body connection is established as we accept and embrace what we are going through rather than ignoring or rejecting our negative experiences. This can allow us to focus on our mental health and experience a peaceful mood much more easily.

Regular yoga practitioners can also easily see benefits when it comes to lowering anxiety and stress levels compared to those who do not include the practice in their everyday routines. Needless to say, good mental health has a great effect on our social selves, since less stress means smoother relations with our loved ones. We are all currently dealing with the pandemic blues, and we should all be careful to social distance when possible. The good news is that not only is yoga an individual, holistic experience that lends itself well to practicing outdoors, but – according to recent studies – it may even help against the virus itself!

Feel better while keeping your social distance

While promoting a positive perspective on life, yoga can have a positive impact on how we see the world. This means it can also help us to stay optimistic about our current socially distanced situation. The regular practice of yoga is capable of making us acquire a better sense of control, sparking a more positive point of view of the lockdown. According to a survey about the perception of COVID-19, long-term yoga practitioners mentioned higher wellbeing and lower depression levels during the pandemic.

The more time we dedicate to this holistic activity, the more benefits we can reap from it, even when our environment doesn’t seem the most optimistic. With a more positive attitude and greater self-confidence developed at home, there is no doubt that we can improve our social wellbeing outside the home too, once social distancing is at an end.

The bottomline is that we could all use some help dealing with our current tough situation. Yoga can be a wonderful tool to improve our mental wellbeing by promoting feelings of happiness and positivity even during difficult times. 

Putting it into practice

Simply find yourself a flat and relatively soft surface – that is really all it takes to start doing yoga! As an added bonus you could play some calming background music or go outside to breathe some fresh air and hear the birds chirping! No matter the context, it is always easy to integrate a bit of yoga into your daily routine. That’s the beauty of it: you can start practicing yoga anytime or anywhere, just as long as you are present in the moment (and yes, that means yoga is even achievable during your lunch breaks!) 

Since the benefits of yoga help us to improve different aspects of our physical, mental, and social health, it also benefits overall wellbeing. At the end of the day, yoga can help us all to be happier and healthier individuals, which makes for a wonderful contribution to a felicitous society! If you’re looking for a place to start, you can check here to try out some of wellyou’s awesome yoga sessions.

Keywords: yoga, physical wellbeing, social wellbeing

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