Yoga postures advices with worldyogaforum.com today? Yoga may help improve sleep: When measuring sleep, researchers look at a person’s ability to both fall asleep and stay asleep. Insomnia can affect one or both of these aspects. Yoga has been shown to improve both how quickly people fall asleep and how deeply they stay asleep. This is partly due to the aftereffects of exercise and the mental calming and stress relief provided by yoga specifically. In addition to improving anxiety (or perhaps because of it), numerous studies show yoga nidra to be particularly helpful at improving sleep. Find even more details at Standing Poses in Yoga.

Move more, eat less—that’s the adage of many a dieter. Yoga can help on both fronts. A regular practice gets you moving and burns calories and the spiritual and emotional dimensions of your practice may encourage you to address any eating and weight problems on a deeper level. Yoga may also inspire you to become a more conscious eater. One of the benefits of yoga is how the practices resonate through other areas of your life. Yoga lowers blood sugar and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and boosts HDL (“good”) cholesterol. In people with diabetes, yoga has been found to lower blood sugar in several ways: by lowering cortisol and adrenaline levels, encouraging weight loss, and improving sensitivity to the effects of insulin. Get your blood sugar levels down, and you decrease your risk of diabetic complications such as heart attack, kidney failure, and blindness.

Want to strengthen your relationships? Meditation has been shown to better your ability to relate to others. How? It improves your ability to empathize, and it hones your ability to pick up on cues indicating how others are feeling. Meditation also increases your emotional stability, making you less likely to be influenced by any negative people in your life.

Studies suggest that meditation functions on specific parts of the brain that are known to create depression, anxiety, and stress responses. For example, the medial prefrontal cortex, or the ‘me-center’ of the mind gets into overdrive during the depression and anxiety states. As a result, we experience more negative feelings about ourselves and keep sabotaging our self-esteem cluelessly. Amygdala, or the ‘fear center’ is a part of the limbic system that creates fear responses and activates the fight-or-flight system in the body, that consumes a significant portion of our energy, leaving us to feeling tired and weary for the rest of the day. During the depression and anxious states, the ‘me-center’ and the ‘fear center’ work simultaneously, causing a chain of reactions, as illustrated below.

I myself have experienced yoga’s healing power in a very real way. Weeks before a trip to India in 2002 to investigate yoga therapy, I developed numbness and tingling in my right hand. After first considering scary things like a brain tumor and multiple sclerosis, I figured out that the cause of the symptoms was thoracic outlet syndrome, a nerve blockage in my neck and chest. Despite the uncomfortable symptoms, I realized how useful my condition could be during my trip. While visiting various yoga therapy centers, I would submit myself for evaluation and treatment by the various experts I’d arranged to observe. I could try their suggestions and see what worked for me. While this wasn’t exactly a controlled scientific experiment, I knew that such hands-on learning could teach me things I might not otherwise understand. Discover even more details at cow’s face pose.

Shallow breathing, poor posture and tense muscles are both results and causes of anxiety. If you’ve been stuck in an anxiety cycle for a long period of time, it’s likely that your body has almost learned to protect itself by remaining tense, physically closed off and with very short, sharp breaths. The mind and body are so closely interlinked, that physically deepening the breath, improving posture and relaxing the muscles in a safe space can all help reduce anxiety. Decreased stress levels, better blood and oxygen circulation, and an increase in ‘happy hormone’ neurotransmitters all help to decrease inflammation. Calming Pranayama practices, in which the length of the out-breath is increased, can also be a way to powerfully reduce inflammation.