Yoga Can Help to Balance Your Work and Home Lives
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008With stressful working environments and hectic schedules, many people struggle with the negative impact of their busy work lives. More and more, people who have trouble keeping their work and personal lives balanced are discovering yoga exercises. Yoga helps them achieve peace of mind and helps them reach that ideal work-life balance.
The mind-body connection is piquing interest in this ancient practice, and research shows that it can indeed reduce blood pressure and stress, improve your work performance, and even make you age more slowly.
Although the focus on yoga may be different depending on the environment, its basic premise is to relax the body while keeping the mind focused and alert. For example, when you do yoga, you focus on body movement, breath, sound or even an object. When your mind wanders, as it inevitably will, you bring your attention back and start again.
The age-old art of yoga gained new interest in the 60′s as part of the consciousness raising activities of the period. But after this, yoga started to decline in popularity. It may have been because yoga is not quite like other types of exercise.
For starters, patience is essential in order to achieve maximum benefits. It offers steady but slow results. This contrasts starkly with the frenzied pace and fast results of aerobics.
Lots of people hurry out to exercise energetically during their lunch break, and then dash back to their workplace. Of course, it’s probably physically beneficial, but it still adds pressure to an already overwhelmed life. Yoga, by contrast, offers a less competitive and stressful way to work out, while supporting and even causing an overall feeling of simply “being.”
One of the major reasons yoga is making a comeback is because it can be so healing as an activity. The over-the-top push for fitness generated by the traditional exercise regimes of aerobics, running, or weight lifting has led to a rash of injuries, including neck pain, back pain, or strained knees.
Today, even health practitioners are getting in on yoga practice, with chiropractors, neurologists and orthopedic surgeons sometimes referring patients to specific yogis during treatment.
In fact, it’s moving to the mainstream increasingly. Many business and hospitals are now offering yoga classes; books on yoga are on the bestseller list, and internet discussion groups on the topic abound.
Interestingly, even the U.S. Army has demonstrated its interest in yoga. It has requested that the National Academy of Sciences research New Age practices like meditation to discover if they can improve the performance of soldiers.
Also, yoga has become popular among those who weight train, run or do aerobics because of its stress reducing benefits.
Approximately 60 to 90% of doctors’ visits in the U.S. are related to stress. Mind-body approaches offer cost-effective and safe treatments for this ailment that don’t involve drugs or surgery. Among those who practice these techniques, 34 percent of infertile patients get pregnant within 6 months, and 70 percent of those who have sleep difficulties, including insomnia, get a good night’s sleep on a regular basis. As well, a decrease of 36 percent is seen in the number of people suffering from pain and making regular visits to the doctor.