Does Yoga Improve Sleep? How Yoga Can Help You Sleep Better
By: Suzanne Kvilhaug
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If someone says they didn’t get a good night’s sleep, we tend to give them a little leeway when it comes to wrongdoing or bad moods. Because we’ve all been there, and we understand that getting the right amount of sleep is essential to our mental and physical health. While we sleep, our body is working to support numerous processes that allow us to function optimally. When you don’t get enough of something your body needs, it shows in more ways than one.
When people struggle to fall asleep they turn to a number of different solutions like prescription pills, over-the-counter sleeping treatments, herbs, teas, sleep doctors, among others. So why not yoga?
Does Yoga Improve Sleep?
It absolutely can! There are a lot of reasons why yoga is a natural sleep aid because it provides people with an opportunity to slow down the mind, relax, breathe better, and get the rest they need. Here’s our shortlist of the reasons that yoga can help support better sleep and a few poses to get you started.
Yoga Can Reduce Stress and anxiety and Increase Calm
A lot of people can’t fall asleep at night simply because they're stressed out. One of the main goals of yoga is helping people to clear their minds and connect with themselves. Their real self. The self that’s buried under stress, racing thoughts, anxiety, and negative emotions that can keep someone from falling asleep at night. When you can’t connect with who you really are or how you really feel, it’s nearly impossible to be at peace. But by doing yoga, you can boost the body’s production of oxytocin, and melatonin, two essential hormones for promoting feelings of happiness, calmness, and good health.
By reducing your anxiety levels before you go to bed, you’ll give yourself the gift of better sleep, which also leads to better moods, better health, and a better sense of well-being. Connecting to your inner self can help create a feeling of calm, awareness, connection, and harmony between your mind, body, and soul. It just makes sense that these feelings can help you get a better night’s sleep.
Yoga Can Relieve Physical Tension and Help Your Body Feel Tired
Our minds aren’t the only place we hold onto stress, it can also take root in our muscles. The practice of yoga naturally involves stretching in ways that can help release physical tension and ease muscle and joint pain. Yoga can also help relax your nervous system, lower blood pressure, and reduce your heart rate, all of which can help prepare you for sleep. Just be sure you’re choosing a restorative yoga style like Hatha or Nidra that is slow and relaxing as opposed to a heart-pumping style like vinyasa, which might leave you feeling more revved up than wound down.
Research has shown that Yoga Can help with insomnia
Do you experience insomnia? Yoga could prove to be your savior. Insomnia can take a serious toll on people’s lives and cause major health problems like depression, anxiety, mental disorders, diabetes, and congestive heart failure. Not only does insomnia cause health problems, but chronic insomnia can also severely affect your ability to do everyday things.
A study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School indicated that yoga can help to improve sleep among people suffering from chronic insomnia. Researchers observed how a daily yoga practice might affect sleep for people with insomnia and found broad improvements to measurements of sleep quality and quantity. They found improvements to many aspects of sleep including sleep efficiency, total sleep time, total wake time, the amount of time it takes to fall asleep, and wake time after sleep onset. When people who have insomnia perform yoga on a daily basis, they sleep for longer, fall asleep faster, and return to sleep more quickly if they wake up in the middle of the night.
Practicing Yoga Regularly Makes It A More Effective Sleep Aid
Maybe you wouldn’t categorize your sleeping issues as insomnia but you wouldn’t consider yourself a “great sleeper” by any means. Yoga can help with that too. Another study showed that young adults who practiced Bikram Yoga regularly woke up fewer times in the night which is a sign of better sleep quality. In one study on yoga and sleep, participants practiced a 45-minute Kundalini Yoga sequence before bedtime that included long, slow breathing and meditation. The results showed statistically significant improvements in sleep. For some people, doing a sporadic yoga routine when you can’t fall asleep may help occasionally, but practicing yoga regularly has a better chance of providing a consistent benefit to your sleep.
5 Yoga Poses To Help You Sleep Better
Try these yoga poses at home to improve the quality of your sleep. Choose your favorites and build them into a routine but, as always, be mindful of your body’s comfort level and make sure you’re using proper form.
One of the most basic poses to help us tune out distractions and focus inward is the Child’s Pose. This “rest and digest” pose activates the parasympathetic nervous system that helps to calm both the mind and the nervous system while also signaling the brain that it is safe to relax.
Legs-Up-The-Wall Pose (Viparita Karani)
Elevating your legs helps promote drainage and supports circulation, while also stretching the hamstrings and lower back. Controlled breathing in this pose also helps promote a lowered heart rate and a relaxation response that can help with anxiety, stress, and insomnia.
Challenging but effective the Pigeon Pose is ideal for people who spend much of their day sitting. This pose helps to stretch hip rotators and flexors to help release built-up tension in the lower body.
Reclining Goddess Pose (Supta Baddha Konasana)
Another hip opener, the Reclining Goddess Pose is a restorative way to get a deep stretch and quiet your mind. This pose will also help open the hips, groin, and inner thighs that tend to get tight from a day of sitting. It also helps support digestion and lowers your heart rate.
Corpse Pose (Savasana)
Deceptively difficult the Corpse Pose is all about total relaxation. It helps to get rid of the day’s stress while promoting inner awareness and relaxing the entire body. Also known as “the final resting pose” this position is ideal for focusing on your breath to quiet your body and calm your senses before going to sleep.
If you feel like you’ve tried just about everything else to get better sleep, it’s never too late to give yoga a shot. Start with a few simple poses and focus on your breathing to help relieve stress so you can successfully drift off to dreamland.
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