Your partner wants to know what’s for dinner, your boss wants to talk to you and your phone is ringing. Anxiety and stress are everywhere. In fact, life means hard work. For all of us, there is a busy schedule-getting up super early in the morning for office, juggling sports practice, preparing presentations late at night and improper meals. Simply, you’ve to balance a lot.

Dating back to 5000 years, many considered yoga to be the oldest defined practice of self-development. Generally, the classical yoga includes meditation, ethical disciplines, breathing control and physical postures. It’s a mind-body practice, which combines controlled breathing, physical poses, and relaxation or meditation.

Yoga and stress

When it comes to stress and anxiety, yoga can prove magical. If you practice yoga daily, you will experience radical changes in your life. When you experience a higher level of Stress, anxiety can last for a few moments.  On other hand, it can be chronic and last forever. However, your anxiety manifests, it feels awful.

Yoga employs powerful tools to reduce stress. Yoga disciplines mainly focus on three major parts: the soul, body and mind. It does not matter whether anxiety is a temporary or permanent phenomenon for you, yoga can help you manage it effectively. In fact, stress is a natural feeling which is closely associated with flight or run away system. Adrenaline pours into the body when you stress about the smallest of things. Yoga can help reduce stress because it promotes calmness and relaxation, which is the natural opposite of stress.

Breath control is the fundamental part of all yoga practices. During yoga, you learn how to use the breath to control your body to feel relaxed. In fact, you can choose to regulate your breath despite the fact that breathing is a voluntary act (you’ve to breathe all the time to stay alive). You learn how to take deep breath and hold it to relax your body and mind.

Effects of yoga on mind and body

The following is only a partial list of yoga’s benefits:

Lower blood pressure

Lower cortisol level

Quality sleep

Reduced stress

Smoking cessation help

Enhanced flexibility and strength

Reduced muscle tension and anxiety

Maintained heart rate

Spiritual growth

Slowed aging process

Sense of well-being

Asthma and allergy symptoms relief

Let’s cast a cursory glance at how yoga helps to reduce stress.

Yoga deepens your breathing

You might have heard people saying, ’take a deep breath’. Deep breathing helps to slow down the sympathetic nervous system. Yoga uses slow and deep belly-breathing to lower the levels of cortisol in your body. In addition to that, it also enhances the oxygen supply to the brain. As a result, you feel more relaxed better able to solve the issues effectively.

Yoga teaches mindfulness

Generally, when you are dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, you feel stressed. Yoga helps to learn the skills to concentrate on feeling in the present. This technique is known as mindfulness.  If you employ mindfulness in your personal life, it will help you in combating the stress in your daily life.

Clearing the mind

Our minds are constantly active, dwelling on incidents from the past, spinning possible scenarios for the future, and racing from one thought to another. All this hectic mind work can be painful and stressing.

Yoga offers various techniques to calm the mind. Breathing is one of the effective ways to relax the brain nerves. Each breath is closely related to the present situation. This means you’re not breathing in the past or future but in the present.

When you focus on each inhale and exhale, you clear your mind from other useless or painful thoughts and feelings. Besides, the yoga poses also add up to the relief. You have to do all the poses with full concentration and you also need to exert physical power. In this way, your brain puts all the worries and concerns to the side and gets a much needed break.

Instant yoga during times of stress

If you’re under stress, you can get some relief by doing some breathing which will reduce stress in your nervous system. Such a self-soothing technique helps to calm down the nerves. Anxiety results in shallow breath. The reason is that your entire body system is utilizing all the power whether to fight or run away.

Any type of yoga pose will help you with breathing and offers instant relief. Even if you just put both of your arms up over your head and do a side bend. Besides, yoga also helps to maintain the heart rate which also helps the body respond to stress more efficiently.

Yoga in comparison with other stress reduction methods

Since yoga employs different techniques to reduce the stress, it can be said to offer a combined effect of these techniques including meditation practice, stretching exercises, breathing exercises, fitness programs and guided imagery in one technique.

However, if you have great physical limitations then meditation, breathing exercises and imagery are good options. They can provide you with the similar results. It must also be remembered that yoga requires more commitment, effort and dedication than taking herbs or pills to reduce the stress.

Final words

For most of us stress is the main hurdle. It prevents us from doing the things we want to do. It gets in the way of achieving the goals and attaining the ultimate success that matter to us. In fact, it takes more courage and effort to get on the mat and release the tension than allowing these feelings to control your life. However, the great thing is that you need not to start yoga on a yoga mat.  For instance, you can do yogic breathing exercise on a public transit or even in an elevator. Simple yoga poses can be performed any time and at any place. It’s up to you to take the first step towards a better future. Remember, life only asks for a courageous step and it’s always ready to lay out its mystery.

Author’s Bio:

Ju Facenda

Ju Facenda is a passionate writer at Thai massage salon in Chicago, where she writes intriguing and compelling SEO content for the website and its marketing campaign. Through the years, she has gained experience writing in different styles for numerous target audiences on topics such as music, fashion, and general news and events.