Alexandru West 
Yoga may be just the thing to help enhance your health and well-being. Not only is it an incredible physical workout, but its mental and spiritual benefits extend far beyond your physical being.
Yoga can help keep you fit and healthy, even reducing the risk of heart disease. Furthermore, practicing regularly can enhance mood levels and aid sleep quality.
Stress Reduction
Yoga is a mind-body practice designed to improve how your brain operates. Yoga helps improve focus, relaxability and memory; all three benefits being realized simultaneously!
Researchers have discovered that yoga helps reduce stress by decreasing cortisol (the main stress hormone in the body). Yoga also trains your counter-stress response system so you are less likely to react negatively when faced with stressful situations.
Researchers conducted assessments to gauge the effects of yoga on stress. At T1 (the beginning), T2 (8 weeks later), and T3 (12 weeks after intervention) participants were assessed on changes in stress perception compared with changes in psychosocial mechanisms which contribute to stress reduction such as mindfulness, self-compassion, spiritual well-being, interoceptive awareness, and self-control.
Increased Flexibility
Yoga can help stretch out muscles and joints to alleviate stiffness while simultaneously building strength in muscles.
As a beginner, it is essential that you take your time and be kind to yourself when starting yoga. Don’t push yourself into poses that cause pain or discomfort.
One study shows that practicing yoga can increase flexibility and balance among male college athletes, as well as enhance sleep quality and decrease stress levels.
Improved Sleep
Regular yoga practice – whether in classes or at home – has been shown to lead to improved sleep, since its poses and stretches help your body enter a state conducive to restful slumber.
Studies have demonstrated the benefits of yoga on sleep quality and severity, and increasing time spent asleep. Practice before going to bed can also promote deeper restful slumber and lengthen sleep periods.
Recent research conducted with adults aged over 60 reveals yoga can improve sleep quality, duration and efficiency for older adults. Participants in the yoga group reported less likely to experience disturbances, less often need medication to sleep and more likely felt rested upon awakening than those not taking yoga. This finding is promising given that untreated insomnia can significantly compromise health and well-being among older adults living with chronic disease or physical disability.
Increased Energy
Yoga offers many advantages to its practitioners, among them increased energy, improved mental health and stress reduction. All of which contribute to creating a balanced mind body and spirit!
Yoga not only promotes mental well-being but can also help manage anger better. A study with adolescents demonstrated how practicing yoga was found to decrease verbal aggression.
Yoga may also increase activity of the vagus nerve, an important component of our parasympathetic nervous system that regulates emotions and has profound health benefits – one reason many report experiencing an increase in happiness after attending yoga class.
Improved Mental Health
Yoga may be an effective way to reduce stress. By employing deep breathing, Yoga helps your body lower cortisol levels and helps you feel more in control of your emotions while providing your brain with more oxygen.
Yoga can also help manage mental health disorders, with studies showing its efficacy at relieving anxiety, sleep issues and depression.
Yoga may even help you cope with trauma; in one study, yoga was shown to be as effective in treating PTSD symptoms than talk therapy.
