Yoga is not just yoga. Yoga comes in many different styles, degrees of intensity and difficulty, and not all forms of yoga are suitable as a remedy for stress. Especially the more calm and grounding exercises are good here.
There is nothing that beats good yoga teaching on a team. Both because of the individual instructions, you can get from the teacher and the opportunity to ask questions, but especially also because of the special energy and atmosphere that a good yoga teacher manages to create in the room.
How does yoga work against stress?
There are many reasons why yoga has a good effect against stress. Here are some of the most important:
- Yoga is an active form of meditation, where you have various physical exercises to pay attention to, and therefore for many, it can be easier and better than sedentary meditation.
- Yoga is good training of the mind, as an essential part of yoga is about focusing the attention on the body and the exercises you are doing. Stress is characterized by a scattered and unfocused
attention and yoga help to retrain the attention if one is constantly trying to gather thoughts about yoga. - Yoga can relieve emotionally created muscle tension and provide more direct access to the underlying emotions. The body can expend an enormous amount of resources on encapsulating emotional energy, and when deep emotions such as grief or pain are released, at the same time an enormous amount of energy is released and the level of tension is lowered.
- Yoga on a good team with a good mood can also counteract stress, as authentic and relaxed interaction with other people is an important and very effective remedy for stress. Physical closeness with other people who have peace in the body can also be a great help if you feel comfortable. Physical peace is simply contagious!
- Yoga means “to unite”, and yoga unites body and mind, which, when otherwise successful, is the opposite of stress. The most direct path to calm in both mind and body is absolute presence and acceptance of what is going on in the body. In yoga, the awareness of what is going on in the body is increased, and to the extent that one manages to be present without creating further reactions to what is going on, this can relieve stress significantly.
- Yoga promotes a wide range of physiological and neurochemical processes that benefit the body and counteract stress. A large part of these processes can be collectively described as the relaxation response.
- In yoga, there is often a focus on breathing, and deep and calm breathing and specific breathing exercises can be very effective when it comes to activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms the body.