How Yoga Can Reduce Stress and Anxiety and Help You Find Serenity

There are so many reasons why people experience stress and anxiety. It could be due to health problems, work problems, finances, or relationship challenges. It can be from one situation in your life or a mix of many. While the variables are different from one person to the next, the thing that is the same for everyone is that stress and anxiety are not going to just go away. We will all continue to face situations and challenges that cause us to worry. However, yoga can help you learn how to reduce those feelings of stress and find serenity in your life, even in the midst of difficult times.

What is yoga?

If you’ve never tried yoga before you might have a skewed idea of what it is. Most people think of what they see on TV – people sitting on the floor with their legs crossed, hands resting on knees, and saying “om”. But, there is a lot more to yoga than what you see on television. The other thing people usually associate yoga with is exercise. While yoga can be used to improve flexibility and develop strength, that is only a small portion of what it’s able to help you achieve.

If you start researching what yoga is online you can quickly become overwhelmed by the depth of information. So, the simplest definition I could find for you is from Yogapedia. It says, “Yoga is a physical, mental and spiritual practice that originated in ancient India. It became popular in the West in the 20th century. The word, yoga, comes from the Sanskrit yuj, which means ‘to yoke’ and ‘samadhi’ or ‘concentration.’ Thus, yoga is the practice that aims to join the mind, body and spirit. The ultimate goal of yoga is to achieve liberation.”

Ways that yoga reduces stress and anxiety

Helps you physically relax

You may not realize it at the time, but when you are stressed or anxious your body holds onto that tension. This is one reason you experience symptoms such as headaches, sore muscles (shoulders and back), racing heart, and even eye twitching when you are experiencing high levels of stress. You won’t find serenity when your body is holding onto tension.

The practice of yoga uses deep breathing which helps to calm you from inside out. We tend to take shallow quick breathes when we are under stress. When you begin to focus on taking deep breaths it helps to slow your heart and begin to release the tension from your body. And, as you move through the different postures you increase the amount of oxygen and blood that is flowing to the different parts of your body.

Helps you to relax your mind

When we are stressed or anxious about something we tend to focus on it constantly. Even if there is nothing we can do about a situation at the moment we think about it over and over. It seems to consume our thoughts. As you focus on your breathing throughout yoga it takes your mind off the thing that is causing you stress. It removes you from thinking about past failure or future stresses and puts you in the moment. It begins to connect your mind with your body.

Helps you learn to practice mindfulness and meditation

Mindfulness and mediation usually go hand-in-hand with practicing yoga. As you learn to sit in poses you can practice meditating and practicing mindfulness to learn to control your thinking. While it’s easier to learn this skill while you’re sitting on a yoga mat, it’s something that you can practice in everyday life. For example, if you have learned how to practice mindfulness through the use of yoga you can put it into practice next time you are at work and start to experience high levels of stress. Learning how to control and focus your thoughts goes a long way in helping you find serenity in your life.

Helps you to release emotional energy

When we are in stressful situations we can build up a lot of emotional energy. When we don’t have a healthy way to release this energy it often comes out through a short temper with those that we love. Allowing yourself to respond in this way to stress repeatedly can eventually damage relationships deeply. As you move through yoga poses your body releases this energy that you are holding on to. When you are finished your body will feel more relaxed and your head will be more clear. It helps enable you to handle the other small frustrations in life without turning them into a much larger problem.

Finding serenity should be a priority

I understand that your life is full of people and things that are fighting for your attention. There aren’t many people that are sitting around just waiting for something to do. Most of our schedules are overwhelmed with activities to choose from. And, as life goes on, there will be challenging and difficult situations that will arise. Some are consequences of our own decisions and others are things that we have no control over at all. And, that’s why we need to prioritize finding serenity in life.

Tranquility, serenity, and peace are not going to just find you. But, stress, worry, and anxiety will. Do you know someone that always seems to be at peace? They aren’t easily riled up and they seem to have an unshakable calm about them. They are like this because they are choosing to respond this way to what life throws at them and you can too. Yoga can help you learn the deep breathing techniques and mindfulness meditation that helps you reduce stress and anxiety. But, if you are struggling and feel that the weight of your anxiety is crushing you, please seek professional help as well. Yoga is a great tool, but it’s just one tool. Schedule an appointment with a local therapist who can help you discover all the resources and tools that you can use to manage your stress and anxiety in a healthy way.

How Practicing Mindfulness Can Change Your Life

“Mindfulness” is a word that’s gotten a lot of attention lately. It sounds good, it’s usually accompanied by calming images that look very appealing, and most of us accept on principle that mindfulness must be a good thing. If you have a sense that mindfulness is something that you need more of—but you’re a little sheepish to admit that you’re not entirely sure exactly what it is—don’t worry. You are so not alone.

You may have heard of mindfulness in the context of some other concepts – yoga, meditation, therapeutic strategies, and relaxation skills—and that’s because mindfulness really does have a place in a variety of different approaches to stress management, focus, and wellness. At its most basic level, mindfulness is a self-chosen, self-directed way of thinking that allows us to disengage from stressors that seem all-consuming.

Yes, mindfulness is a wonderful thing!  Let’s take a moment to reflect on what mindfulness really means – and also what it isn’t—and then consider how incorporating a practice of mindfulness into our lives can be a really powerful and pragmatic life tool.

The best way to understand mindfulness is to break the word down into its component parts. The word mindful is literally a combination of the words “mind” and “full”. To be “mindful” is to deliberately pay attention to or fill one’s mind with a specific point of focus. That’s why mindfulness meditations always have some point or object . . . the breath, a mantra or phrase, an image, a particular part of the body, etc. When we engage in mindfulness practices, we deliberately and purposefully fill our mind with one point of focus.

Just as we can focus our attention on anything, we can also fill our minds with anything we choose. Mindfulness is a kind of exercise in focus. Mindfulness is different than focus in the sense that the point of focus has been identified expressly for the purpose of creating relaxation, stillness, soothing, and calm.

Often, we become hyper focused on a stressor or problem. It might seem as if—and you might have yourself saying to another person—“I just can’t stop thinking about ______!” This can feel very true when we’re preoccupied or overwhelmed.

And to some degree, this is true: we’re not wired to stop thinking in general, let alone about something stressful. If we could stop thinking, something would be terribly wrong. Our brains are designed to think. A much more practical and viable alternative to stopping thinking about something stressful is to engage in mindfulness, or the deliberate practice of focusing our attention on one thing so that it does not become engaged by another (the stressor).

Here’s an example of how mindfulness works when it comes to “stopping thinking” about something stressful or upsetting:

Let’s pretend you “can’t stop thinking” about something someone at work said to you during a meeting. You feel hurt and disregarded, and it seems like you can’t stop replaying the whole thing in your head over and over, and getting upset all over again.

The replay of this stressor has a number of elements. One is the visual memory: the setting, who was there, etc. Another element is words . . . the words that the person said and maybe what you said in response (or didn’t say but wish you had). Your “mind is full” of the images and words that make up this event.

Minds are a little bit like record players . . . they can only play one track at a time. Similarly, you can only replay one set of words and images at a time. If you mindfully focus (fill your mind) on a neutral or soothing phrase (that you read, verbally repeat, or write), you literally cannot focus on the words of the stressful conversation. It doesn’t matter if the phrase is a bible verse, a nursery rhyme, a Sanskrit mantra, or a Clint Eastwood movie line … your mind will not be able to play those words and the words from the upsetting event. If you deliberately work to mentally picture a relaxing beach or patio, or focus on an actual picture, you cannot simultaneously picture the conference table from the meeting at the same time. Mindfulness is the deliberate activity of filling one’s mind with pleasant, soothing, or neutral sensory input so that no room exists to be filled by the most recent stressor.

If there is a tricky part of mindfulness, it’s deciding to do it. There’s a part of us that—no matter how much we may say we want to stop thinking about the stressor—doesn’t in fact want to stop. Most of us get a slightly addictive and of course completely false sense of control by hyper focusing on a problem, even though doing so makes us miserable.

Try it. Next time you find yourself obsessing about an unpleasant interaction you had with someone, just pause and start saying the word “sunshine” to yourself out loud, while picturing a sun-drenched landscape. This is mindfully focusing on sunshine. And there will be no room for any distressing thoughts.

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