Yoga for Mental Health
Bailey Smith, M.Ed.
If you are like me, you like to take advantage of the fun, free offerings around your city. I have always enjoyed how many free outdoor yoga classes take place in the summer around Atlanta, and I try to attend as often as I can. While yoga has the physical benefits that come with exercise, it also has some unexpected mental health benefits.
1. Yoga mindfully calms the nervous system
As you focus on your breath and body movements during a yoga practice, you are able to mindfully set aside thoughts, worries, and problems that you have been carrying throughout your day. Through the breathwork, movement, and mindfulness of yoga, you activate your body’s parasympathetic nervous system, which sends signals to help calm your body. This can be especially useful for those dealing with anxiety or PTSD to help regulate the nervous system.
2. Yoga helps us release unhelpful thoughts and feelings
Just like other mindfulness practices like meditation or visualizations, yoga helps us learn to notice bodily or emotional sensations, observe them, and release them. When we are dealing with mental health concerns like depression or anxiety, we often become attached or fused to our thoughts. Through practicing yoga, we learn to separate or defuse ourselves from unhelpful thoughts and feelings and release them.
3. Yoga connects us to our body
Often when we are dealing with mental health issues, we are so focused on what is happening in our minds that we end up feeling disconnected from our bodies. Yoga can be a form of mindful grounding that helps center us and reconnect us to our physical bodies, and can help us practice gratitude for all our bodies do for us that we don’t even recognize. Yoga helps us get out of our heads and into our bodies and our physical experience of the world around us.
Try adding yoga to your self-care routine this summer and see what physical and mental benefits you notice!