As if you need any more excuses to take up yoga (apart from looking cute in those pants), here are four reasons why everyone at Time To Log Off is totally in love with yoga:
1. It helps you sleep.
A new study indicates that yoga can help to improve sleep among people suffering from chronic insomnia. Researchers at Harvard Medical School looked at how a daily practice might affect sleep for people with insomnia and found improvements to measurements of both sleep quality and quantity.
2. It helps you eat better.
Research from the University of Washington shows that people who regularly practice yoga eat more mindfully compared to other exercisers. Mindful eating is associated with more accurately recognising the feelings of hunger and satiety (fullness) and stops the kind of mindless grazing through a whole carton of ice-cream before you really know what you’ve done. Mindful eating also makes everything taste great as you appreciate and notice every taste sensation.
3. It makes you smarter.
Twenty minutes of yoga improves the brain’s ability to quickly and accurately process information (even more so than running does), said a study published in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health. Rather than zen-ing out, your practice actually encourages you to be present and mindful. Because mindful awareness encourages positive changes in your prefrontal cortex (the bit of the brain that handles working memory and attention), yoga really can make you smarter.
4. It de-stresses you.
This is the thing that everyone thinks they know. But surely a few leg stretches would achieve the same result? Well, no. A University of Texas study in 2011 found that yoga helped women undergoing radiation therapy reduce fatigue, improve mental outlook, and regulate the stress hormone cortisol. And the study found that while basic stretching exercises also counteracted fatigue, patients who specifically participated in yoga exercises had the steepest decline in their cortisol levels across the day, showing that yoga alone has a particular ability to help regulate this stress hormone.
We could go on and on about how amazing it is but we’ll stop here for now and go off and practice some. Namaste.
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