Yoga for Mental Health
Yoga for Mental Health can help for the better
With its focus on meditation and breathing exercises — both of which can help relax and calm the mind, it’s not surprising that yoga also provides mental benefits like decreased depression and anxiety. The thing that might be more interesting is the fact that it actually helps your brain work more efficiently.
A more sharper brain
When you work out, muscles become larger and stronger. If you practice yoga and your brain cells grow, they make new connections. Also, changes take place in the brain’s structure and function, leading to improved cognitive capabilities, like memory and learning. Yoga helps strengthen the parts within the brain, which have a crucial part in attention, memory to, awareness, and language. Consider it as lifting weights for the brain.
Research made using MRI scans and other types of brain imaging technologies have revealed that those who practiced regularly yoga had thicker cerebral cortex (the brain’s area that is responsible for processing information) and the hippocampus (the brain’s area that is involved in memory and learning) when compared to non-yoga practitioners. The brain’s areas involved in learning and memory generally shrink as you get older however the older yoga students showed less shrinkage than those who practiced none of the yoga. It is possible that the practice of yoga can combat the decline of memory that comes with age and other cognitive capabilities.
The research also suggests that meditation and yoga may increase executive functioning, including reasoning, decision-making memory, learning speed of reaction, and accuracy in tests of mental acuity.
Better mood
Every exercise activity can improve your mood, by reducing the levels of hormones that cause stress. It also increases the production of chemicals that make you feel good known as endorphins, as well as increasing the oxygenated blood flow into your brain. Yoga may also have other advantages. It may affect mood by increasing levels of a chemical in the brain known as gamma-aminobutyric acids (GABA) which is linked with improved mood and less anxiety.
Meditation can also decrease activity in the limbic system, which is the area of our brain devoted to emotion. Since your emotional reactivity is less and you experience more of a calm response to difficult situations.
Talk therapy and drugs are the most commonly used treatments for anxiety and depression. However, complementary methods like yoga are also beneficial as well, and yoga can be stacked very well when compared to other therapies that are complementary.
A study review of 15 studies that were published in Aging and Mental Health, examined the effects on a range of relaxation methods on anxiety and depression in older adults. Apart from yoga, treatments include massage therapies, gradual muscle relaxation, stress reduction as well as playing music. Although all of the methods provided some benefits however, music and yoga were the most effective when it came to treating anxiety and depression. Yoga seemed to offer the most long-lasting effects.
A few small studies have revealed that yoga can aid in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It’s not an option in isolation, but rather as an addition to treatment to reduce the intrusive emotional arousal and memories, and produce a more calm breath that is more steady. Breathing that is slow and deep is associated with a calmer state since it activates the parasympathetic nervous system.
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