Could better stress management techniques help you? Do you want to learn how to increase your body’s own relaxation ability? And improve your life by getting less stressed? Then yoga might be for you.
When practiced regularly, yoga leads to a reduction in your everyday stress levels and boosts feelings of joy and serenity. With a little practice, anyone can reap these benefits.
 |
Read on below or download the article as published in the May 2010 issue of Yoga Magazine, one of the UK's largest selling yoga magazines.
|
A stressful modern life
Yoga has gained tremendously in popularity during the last few decades, and today over 30 million people practise yoga on a regular basis. Yoga is the most rapidly growing health movement of today, despite having existed for thousands of years already.
In the midst of our modern world characterised by daily stress, fatigue, and pollution, more and more people are seeking a sense of relaxation and inward awareness. Yoga has long since provided people with a refuge away from the everyday confusion and information overload, and has transported an increasing number of people to a peaceful oasis within. The benefits that yogis or yoga practitioners have been experiencing for thousands of years are only being now gradually proven by medical science.
What is stress?
When you perceive a threat, your body releases chemicals such as adrenaline, hormones such as cortisone and aldosterone, and neurotransmitters to rouse the body for action. In the stress response, your heart rate increases, stomach acid production increases, muscles tighten, blood pressure rises and breath quickens.
Stress is a normal physical response to events that threaten you. It helps you rise to meet challenges. But when the stress response is constantly active, it causes major damage to your health, your mood, your success, your relationships and your whole quality of life.
Okay. So how does yoga help?
The perfect combination
Yoga offers you a combination of the three main stress-management techniques – breathing exercises, muscle exercise and meditation. Both the physical and the mental benefits of yoga provide a natural defence against stress, and strengthen the relaxation response in your daily life.
The relaxation response
Your body has its own natural relaxation response which is a powerful antidote to stress. It brings your system back into balance by deepening your breathing, reducing stress hormones, slowing down your heart rate and blood pressure and relaxing your muscles. Yoga can help activate this relaxation response, as well as teach you how to manage stress by applying relaxation techniques as you need them.
Hatha yoga
Hatha yoga is a particularly good choice for stress relief. This style of yoga is specifically designed to encourage a calmer mind. Hatha yoga includes poses and breathing exercises.
Breathing and stress relief
Yoga teaches Pranayama, or breath awareness. It’s great for busting stress, especially if you’re feeling scattered or overwhelmed. Conscious breathing slows you down, increases mental focus, oxygenates the lungs and regulates the nervous system. And when you take deep breaths from the abdomen, rather than shallow breaths from your upper chest, you inhale more oxygen. The more oxygen you get, the less tense, short of breath, and anxious you feel.
Controlling your breathing is an important part of yoga. Controlling your breath, a major life force, means you are controlling your body and your mind, releasing stressful thoughts and relaxing the body on a deep level.
Muscle exercises and stress relief
Almost all yoga classes end in a relaxation pose. But classes that emphasise slow, steady movement and gentle stretching throughout are best for stress relief. The Corpse Pose is a good one – it involves lying on the floor and reaching total relaxation. And as your body relaxes, so will your mind.
The combination of working the muscles during a posture and then releasing and relaxing them at the end allows for very deep relaxation. It also releases very deep seated tension in muscles. The bonus is, it tones your body inside and out.
Meditation and stress relief
Meditation is a way to focus the mind and slow down. You can start by sitting comfortably and focussing on nothing but your own breathing. Sitting still for even five minutes like this brings calming benefits and relaxes you because it takes you away from everyday life and stressful situations.
Yogic mindfulness means being fully engaged in the present moment, but without over-thinking it. So rather than worrying about what you will do after yoga, or dwelling on yesterday, you switch your focus to what’s happening right now. What can you feel? Are you warm or cold? Are you comfortable or tense? You do this without any judgement or criticism; you’re just observing what is. This is effective because it takes you away from the stress of rushing through a chaotic day, allowing you to focus wholly on yourself and on this moment.
Did you know?
Mindfulness meditation actually changes the brain. It strengthens areas associated with happiness and relaxation, and weakens those involved in stress.
Yogic philosophy and stress relief
Because yoga fosters self-awareness, through mindfulness and awareness of breath, yoga actually trains the body to recognise the stress response as physical symptoms. If you practice yoga regularly, you will be acutely in tune with your body and really feel the rapid heart beat, fast, shallow, breathing or gastrointestinal upset of the stress response. You will be able to respond to the request for relaxation on a muscular level and do some deep breathing or mindfulness meditation, even if you’re sitting down at work.
Daily yoga allows you to experience the sensations of the body, and to ease them. It draws your focus away from your busy, chaotic day and more towards this calming moment where you experience the sensations of your body. Being in the present moment also makes you feel alive because this is where life is really happening. The past has gone and the future hasn’t happened yet. Both only exist as constructs in our mind.
Yoga practice creates a habit of relaxation that can be very helpful in turning off the stress response – helping you to live a less stressful, more balanced life in the first place, and to be able to manage stress if you do experience it.
If you are interested in finding out more or learning yoga, then have a look at my
about me page and browse
my classes and
workshops. I am a qualified yoga teacher, trained by The International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres, a yoga organisation recognised worldwide.
More benefits
Apart from relieving stress and all its symptoms, yoga also offers you:
-
-
-
-
- improvement of many medical conditions
- relief from allergy and asthma symptoms
- help in quitting addictions
- increased strength and flexibility
In my yoga classes I incorporate the whole yogic system (breathing, postures, meditation and Vedanta life philosophy.)
