Why Yoga for Stress Relief?
Life can be stressful. For starters, there's your busy schedule — waking
up super early for school, studying late at night for tests, juggling sports practice,
homework, and meals. It's a lot to balance!
Everyday issues can add emotional stress, too — counseling a friend through
a breakup, regretting a disagreement with a parent, weighing an important decision,
or stressing over whether you'll make final cuts for the varsity team. With lots on
your mind, it's easy to feel stressed.
There are many different ways to cope with stress. Talking with friends, exercising,
and seeing a school counselor are just a few. Yoga can help reduce stress because
it promotes relaxation, which is the natural opposite of stress. Yoga can benefit three
aspects of ourselves that are often affected by stress: our body, mind, and breathing.
You don't have to wait to feel stressed out to do yoga, and you shouldn't! People
who do a little bit of yoga each day often find they're better able to handle things
when life gets a little crazy. Practicing yoga builds your ability to calm, focus,
balance, and relax yourself.
Yoga Is More Than Just Stretching
Lots of people think of yoga as stretching or twisting the body into various impossible-looking
pretzel shapes. But yoga is easier than it looks. There are simple
poses as well as complicated ones, so there's something for every ability.
Yoga requires no special equipment, so you can do it almost anywhere.
Yoga poses are good exercise and can help loosen up the tense muscles in your body.
The areas of the body that tend to carry the most stress are the neck, shoulders,
and back. But other parts of the body (like the face, jaw, fingers, or wrists) also
can benefit from simple yoga stretches.
Yoga is so much more than just physical exercise, though. The key to getting the
best out of each pose is to focus not only on your body, but also on your mind and
breathing.