Can yoga improve mental health in senior citizens?
Answers
Professionals believe Yoga helps people with their mental health by helping them find peace of mind by going with the flow of the moment and increasing their physical strength, flexibility, and cognitive functions.
Yoga is not just a trend that has been popular for the past decade but is an ancient form of exercise. It’s disciplined yet creative, strict yet fluid, physical yet spiritual. Studies have shown practicing yoga has a positive effect on seniors’ mental health, especially those struggling with psychological disorders. These disorders have no limitations, ranging from simple anxiety to severe depression.
Yoga has many benefits for seniors regarding their mental health, including relieving stress and living more mindfully. It helps you slow down your thoughts and concentrate on breathing techniques.
When you practice mindfulness with yoga, you train yourself to notice things happening in your mind, body, and surroundings.
Doing so enables you to identify negative thoughts and feelings like shame or sadness and address them without acting on them. Mindfulness through yoga helps the elderly attend to their complex emotions like anger, fear, or depression productively and let them go. My sister is a yoga instructor, and she says, “everyone has their own mental issues and needs.”
For this reason, she personalizes every client’s session to address their needs more efficiently. Doing so has considerably helped the clients improve their mental health.
Another benefit of yoga regarding mental health is that it makes the elderly feel more relaxed.
A peaceful mind leads to higher sleep quality. And if you want to be more alert and focused throughout the day, you must value adequate sleep.
Finally, yoga can reduce blood pressure in people with hypertension. And high blood pressure directly impacts stress levels. So, the more yoga seniors do, the less stressed they will be.
Yoga is a mental workout that helps prevent and treat mental conditions by keeping one’s mind fit. One can do yoga to improve their mood, focus, attention span, concentration, sense of judgement, and inner peace. This practice helps one calm their mind by focusing on the moment and only the moment.
Yoga is ideal for people of all ages, particularly seniors, for several reasons. Yoga means training the body and mind in a disciplined way to stay calm, fit, and healthy.
It’s primarily done in the morning when we get fresh air and good vibes which is beneficial for our bodies. So if senior citizens do yoga with a professional yoga instructor and take a balanced diet, it will definitely help them improve their mental health and better and improved physical health.
Yoga is also a mental workout; it improves mood, focus, and concentration, especially concerning the types of yoga, which include meditation as part of their routines.
