Have you been thinking of adding yoga to your morning routine?
Yoga is a powerful practice that involves the melding of body and mind. If you’re someone that experiences lots of stress and anxiety in your life, a quick yoga session in the morning can help you get through your day with more confidence and relaxation.
Just jumping into yoga isn’t really a great idea, though. It’s tough on the body, so you need to work up to a certain level of expertise.
You also need to have some idea of what the benefits of yoga in the morning are. They’re countless, really, and you’ll find out more about yourself and what you get out of yoga with time.
For now, you just need to give yourself some basic knowledge of the potential that daily morning yoga has to improve your day. Today we’re going to look at 10 of these yoga benefits in detail, so you can have an idea of how you’ll feel when you start practicing.
Giving yourself a boost in the morning will trickle down throughout your day. Let yoga be that boost and find out how it can have a truly positive impact on your health and your life.
What Are The Benefits Of Doing Yoga In The Morning?
1. Yoga Gives You More Energy In the Morning
Most of us rely heavily on coffee or tea to break us out of the morning funk. But, that isn’t very healthy for the body. A morning yoga session can do everything that coffee does and more, without any of the health repercussions.
Yoga stimulates the body and mind. The breathing exercises alone are enough to get the brain in motion because you’re concentrating on the flow of oxygen into your body. When you move around after these breathing exercises, your cells oxygenate quicker and your body will be left feeling completely rejuvenated.
That fuzziness that you feel in the morning can be eradicated with a 15-minute yoga session. Then you can go about your day with a little more pep in your step.
2. Yoga Brings About Better Sleep
The quality of your sleep can have a massive effect on how you feel throughout the day, but especially when you get up. When you get in the routine of doing a morning yoga session at the same time every morning, your biological clock will get you moving instead of pounding on the “sleep” button to delay the inevitable.
Not only will the simple routine help you get up, but practicing yoga improves your breathing and promotes meditation. These things have a positive effect on your endocrine system, which is responsible for generating hormones and maintaining your overall health.
The act of meditation can help produce more melatonin in your body, which is the hormone that promotes sleep. With a little bit of yoga and meditation, before you know it you’ll be falling asleep earlier and getting up feeling way more rested (one of my favorite benefits of yoga).
3. Yoga Can Set the Tone For Your Day
When you’ve got a hectic working life, it can be easy to get wrapped up in the daily routine of waking up, showering, going to work, coming home, eating, and going to bed. But you’ve got to make time for yourself, even if most of your energy is focused on being productive at work.
Taking those initial moments after you wake up and making them productive for your body and mind will carry you through your day. You’ll be firing on all cylinders by the time you arrive at work because yoga will boost your confidence and overall happiness.
Even the simple feeling of accomplishment at having done yoga before work can boost your mood. When you start to get good at it, though, it’ll change your entire approach to your day.
4. Yoga Boosts Metabolism
One of the best health benefits of a morning yoga practice is the metabolism boost that you get. People with busy schedules don’t really think much about what purpose the food they eat serves. It’s more of a necessity; the thing you do to get rid of the feeling of being hungry.
Then, after they eat, they’ll sit at a desk and get their day’s work done. A healthy metabolism will take the (hopefully healthy) food that you’ve eaten and convert it into energy to carry you through your day.
Some of the positions that you’ll do in the morning will also help your liver and intestines digest your food better. Twisting poses help internal detox pathways.
5. Yoga Increases Awareness
Do you have those moments throughout the day where you’re completely zoned out?
So many people are attacked by this feeling of haziness and a lack of concentration during the day, but fail to do anything about it. A morning yoga session, by connecting you with your body and mind, will give you that energy boost we talked about earlier. This can help you focus on things a bit better.
When you feel focused, you can accomplish tasks much more efficiently, and you’ll be able to make more of your time at work.
6. Yoga Can Reduce Stress Levels
It seems like stress, anxiety, and depression have really taken over people’s lives as of late. Whether it’s always been there and we’re just acknowledging it now or people are feeling more stressed because of the way our society has shifted is hard to say. What’s obvious is that it needs to be dealt with.
This goes back to taking time out of your day to focus on yourself and heal your body and mind. Yoga and meditation are proven to have a calming effect on those that practice them. In fact, that’s the biggest benefit of yoga that these things provide.
Giving yourself the feeling of being centered first thing in the morning will allow you to slow down and approach stressful things more mindfully. Yoga helps you remember that stress doesn’t have to control your actions or how you feel.
7. Meditation Can Clear Your Mind
A clear mind is a happier mind. Yoga and meditation go hand-in-hand, and yoga is a very meditative process. You can also start to practice mindfulness meditation separately to raise your consciousness and clear your mind.
Meditation allows you to look inside yourself for a few moments and make note of some of the things that might be holding you back. When you do this, you can be more mindful of how you react to different things that happen throughout the day and how you can have better reactions.
Taking this approach to uncloud your mind will help you focus on completing tasks without being held back by those negative tendencies.
8. Yoga Is Exercise
One of the more obvious benefits of doing yoga is the simple fact that it’s exercise, and exercising first thing in the morning is a positive thing. When you get into a daily routine, you’ll start to notice more tone in your muscles and more flexibility in your joints.
If you experience chronic pain, it can help you stretch out, as well. Overall, yoga will make you feel healthier and better prepare you for other types of exercise like cardio and weight lifting.
9. You Might Be Friendlier With Yoga
Practicing yoga and meditation can help improve your relationships with your friends, family members, and coworkers, especially couples yoga. Daily morning yoga in particular can assist you at work. If you find yourself flying off the handle whenever someone asks you for help, then you might need to eradicate that pent up energy with yoga.
Because of the relaxing properties of yoga, you’ll be able to approach everything with a level of calmness. If you’re at peace with yourself, it’s much easier to be at peace with everyone else around you as well. A lot of interpersonal problems are rooted in issues with one’s own self-confidence.
10. Yoga Gets You In Touch With Yourself
The world that we live in today is so interconnected and constantly “turned-on” that it’s difficult to feel a sense of calmness or connectedness with yourself or your surroundings. Thousands of years ago, we didn’t have all of the “stuff” that distracts us from being human.
Now, we need to look to things like yoga and meditation in order to get in touch with our own humanity. Practicing yoga as soon as you wake up can help put a lot of things in perspective. The world is moving really fast; if you don’t slow it down, then you’ll run the risk of letting your best years pass you by.
Use a daily morning yoga routine to appreciate the finer things in life, like your incredible mind and body, the world we live in, and the other people you’re in it with.
Yoga In The Morning Offers Many Additional Benefits
These are only a few of the many benefits of morning yoga. Building this routine into your day will unveil more and more of them with each passing week. Before you know it, you won’t be able to fathom a time before you started doing yoga.
To learn more about the positive effects of yoga, meditation and mindfulness can have on your life, come back and visit us again at IMCentered.com