When you take a closer look at yoga, it’s easy to understand why it can be used to help with the winter blues. Yoga is something that everyone all around the world proclaims to love, from the A-list of celebrities to the woman that works in the shop down the road. Everyone is doing it…or so it would seem.
Most medical complaints can be helped with regular exercise, and yoga is one of the safest exercises you can try your hands at. Plus you’re not running around like a sweaty mess in lycra which is always an added bonus. They say that physical exercise helps with depression, anxiety and stress, so why wouldn’t it work for SAD?
Before we get into the science-stuff, the fluid and calm nature of yoga gives you the perfect opportunity to add relaxing exercise into your daily routine. Just an hour of Hatha yoga, for example, can burn over 175 calories, and you’d need to walk about two miles in one hour to get the same effect. Plus you’ll feel chilled out and calm once you’ve finished your workout so technically, you’re killing two birds with one stone.
So, aside from the exercise and weight maintenance properties yoga can help with, it also helps with the winter blues by giving you enough hormone production to make you happier. How can you have the winter blues if your brain is happy? Have you ever tried to be in a bad mood when everything seems to chilled out?
Three sessions of exercise per week is what you need to help keep your brain happy by boosting a chemical reaction in it that triggers positive feelings. This chemical reaction helps to chill you out, and keep your mind relaxed. Again, as you’d probably guessed, this can help with seasonal affective disorder.
Also, with scientific studies showing that patients regularly partaking in a spot of yoga having a heightened sense of mood, plus much lower levels of anxiety than those that didn’t do any yoga, you’ve got the men in white coats on your side. After all, you can’t argue with science, can you?
Not just great for relaxing and upping the amount of exercise you do, yoga is a low impact activity which makes it perfect for those that suffer with pain, aching joints, or even other medical conditions. You can do it right in the comfort of your own home, away from the prying eyes of all those beautiful people that always seem to hang around the exercise machines in the gym even though they don’t look like they’ve ever eaten a piece of cake in their life.
Yoga helps to improve your strength, balance, endurance, flexibility and all-round wellbeing, which makes it one of the perfect all-natural treatments you can try to beat those miserable winter blues. With more videos on Youtube than you can shake a stick at, it might be well worth having a closer inspection. When you’re in that mid-winter slump, every little helps!