Mental benefits of yoga

Mental benefits of yoga

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Yoga has a wide range of benefits that cannot be seen with the naked eye. It gives you a more positive outlook on life, helps you to be present and ensures that you can cultivate deep and meaningful relationships.

If you consider an image in the eye of your mind, as you do in yoga nidra and other practices, you can influence changes in your body. Several studies have shown that guided imagery reduced postoperative pain, reduced the incidence of headaches, and improved the quality of life for people with cancer and HIV.

 

Keeps allergies and viruses at bay

Kriya, or purification practice, is another element of yoga. They include everything from quick breathing exercises to extensive internal cleansing of the intestines. Jala neti, which causes a gentle rinsing of the nasal passages with saline, removes pollen and viruses from the nose, prevents mucus from building up and helps drain the sinuses.

 

Helps you serve others

Karma yoga (service to others) is an integral part of yogic philosophy. And while you may not be inclined to serve others, your health may improve if you do. A study by the University of Michigan found that older people who volunteered a little less than an hour a week were three times as likely to be alive seven years later. Serving others can make sense of your life, and your problems may not seem so frightening when you see what other people are dealing with.

Encourages self-care

In much of conventional medicine, most patients are passive recipients of care. In yoga, it is what you do for yourself that matters. For example, Vinyasa yoga can give you the tools to help you change, and you may begin to feel more comfortable the first time you try to practice. You may also notice that the more you commit to practicing, the more you benefit from it. This results in three things: You become involved in your own care, you discover that your commitment gives you the power to implement change, and seeing that you can influence change gives you hope. And hope in itself can be healing.

 

Supports your connective tissue

When you read all the ways yoga improves your health, you have probably noticed a lot of overlap. This is because they are intensely interwoven. Change your posture and you change the way you breathe. Change your breathing and you change your nervous system. This is one of yoga's great lessons:

Everything is connected - your hip bone to your ankle bone, you to your community, your community to the world. This interconnection is essential for understanding yoga. This holistic system simultaneously taps into many mechanisms that have additive and even multiplicative effects. This synergy can be the most important way of all that yoga heals.

 

Uses the placebo effect to influence change

Just believing that you are getting better can make you better. Unfortunately, many conventional researchers believe that if something works by inducing the placebo effect, it does not count. But most patients just want to get better, so if reciting a mantra - as you might do at the beginning or end of the yoga class or through a meditation or during your day - facilitates healing, even if it's just a placebo effect, so why not do it?