It is easy to see why many people, especially women, are obsessed with yoga. It helps clear our minds, improve our breathing, and even boost our fitness. Yoga can also help us sleep better, thanks to its ability to relax our minds and bodies. It does help with our flexibility and our focus. But there are other better reasons to try yoga during the pandemic.
Yoga Can Help Patients With Eating Disorders
During the crisis, many people are experiencing anxiety and depression. According to news, people in the U.S. with eating disorders reported that their symptoms worsened mid-pandemic. Here’s why.
After the pandemic hit, we were bombarded with too many restrictions. We now need to wear masks, shelter in place, always wash our hands, practice coughing and sneezing etiquette, and even do social distancing. It changed the way we work, we live, and even how we run our errands.
The lack of structure, the threat of getting the virus, financial stress, and the isolation traumatized most people. As we try to cope, we try going for things we can control. For many people who already have anxiety and eating disorder, eating is their form of control.
The sad thing is, many people are in denial about their eating condition. They try to manage their own disorder, and would often skip professional help. Remember that to really recover from this type of eating disorder, one needs a personalized treatment program for anorexia nervosa for the plan to work.
But what does yoga have to do with eating disorders? As it turns out, yoga can help individuals struggling with body image. Yoga allows patients to experience their bodies in another light, thus improving how they feel about themselves.
Patients with eating disorders often have a distorted body image. They focus too much on their body that they no longer care if they are destroying their bodies internally. With eating habits as something they can control, they turn to self-destructing practices.
When we focus on productive exercises like yoga, this helps decrease our anxiety and improve our levels of body satisfaction. This shows how yoga can support treatments for eating disorders.
Yoga Can Help With Addiction Recovery
These days, drug, cigarette, and alcohol abuse and misuse are on the rise. Stress, anxiety, and depression challenged many people who are already battling issues with alcohol and drugs. With their daily structure gone, they found more time to entertain their urges to binge-drink and use drugs.
Despite liquor bans, many people still found ways to binge-drink while others turned to cigarettes and drugs as a way of coping with their stress. Since the situation is urging people to shelter in place, many found it easier to skip therapies and consultations. This is even with the availability of clinics offering telehealth.
Mindfulness meditation like yoga can help in breaking the addiction cycle. Whenever one feels the urge to drink alcoholic drinks or reach out to drugs to calm their nerves, they can turn to yoga. This helps put their focus away from their addiction.
Yoga helps improve the clarity of mind. It helps us breathe deeper, focus on positive thoughts, and divert negative urges into productive exercise. Despite the need for more studies, yoga proves to be a promising tool that can help with addiction recovery.
Yoga for Pandemic-related Stress
People have different stress triggers. But the pandemic proved to be most people’s cause of stress. It changed how we live our lives and our livelihood.
We are stressed because many of us lost our jobs during the pandemic. This affected our finances and our ability to live a comfortable life. But since we fear getting the virus, we had to find other ways to earn while keeping in mind all the health and safety precautions.
Most of us fear for our family’s health. Some whose loved ones got sick can’t help but worry. Others who had loved ones, unfortunately, succumb to the virus found it harder to move on.
Continuous stress can manifest symptoms like difficulty sleeping, aches and pains, and even breathing issues. Yoga helps relax our mind and body, manage anxiety, and reduce blood pressure. Yoga can also help ease shoulder and back pain, which can all stem from our stress.
This type of mindful exercise brings together physical disciplines that can aid in stress management. When doing yoga, we control our breathing which helps quiet the mind and better control the body. It also helps incorporate relaxation, which is one thing that can help reduce our stress and anxiety.
This goes to show how the pandemic affects our mental health. It caused not only stress but also triggered and worsened addiction and eating disorders. Thankfully, healthcare providers are still doing their best to help despite their lack of time and resources. We can incorporate yoga as a way of coping through the crisis. Studies already agree that yoga is one of the many activities that can help us thrive mid-pandemic.