yoga & health
Yoga has a lot of benefits for the health and the well-being. In particular, it can prevent and tackle non-communicable diseases.
What is yoga?
A health practice that combines mental focus, controlled breathing, and body movements to help relax the body and the mind. For this reason, it may be used to help controlled pain, stress, anxiety, and depression, and for overall health. For instance, mind-body practices include meditation, hypnosis, guided imagery, yoga, and tai chi. Therefore, a mind and body practice is a type of complementary and alternative medicine. Also called mind-body modality.
Yoga In Healthcare to foster self-care
Non-communicable diseases are responsible for 70% of deaths worldwide. As a result, they are the main cause of morbidity and mortality in Europe. That is to say that this epidemic is mainly related to life-style habits. Most importantly, the healthcare systems should reinforce patients’ self-care and healing capacity. In other words, patients would profit from the inclusion of complementary therapeutic approaches, such as Yoga.
1 Source: WHO
2 Morbidity: the number of people who have a particular disease (Oxford Dictionary)
About the benefits of Yoga in Health
a mind and body practice
Yoga is a mind-body practice based on physical postures (asanas), breathing exercises (pranayama), deep relaxation and meditation. Consequently, together these techniques promote well-being by reducing the negative effects of physical and mental stress. For instance, it increases individual awareness and consciousness, empowering people to establish more positive attitudes and lifestyles.
Research on the well-beings of yoga
Additional research is needed to demonstrate the efficacy of Yoga as a complementary preventive and curative treatment. However, evidence already shows the advantages of a regular Yoga practice, such as:
reduces back pain conditions
Reduces disability and pain of non-specific low back pain conditions;
decreases cardiovascular risk
Decreases cardiovascular risk factors: overweight, smoking, hypertension and type 2 diabetes indexes;
lessens depressions
Lessens depressions and regulates emotions in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder;
better sleep
Correlates with better sleep, improved body awareness and greater happiness;
learn more about yoga & health
sharing evidence
We aim to share evidence about the benefits of yoga on an online library, social medias and informative sessions.
Scientific Research
YIH is willing to work with academics to develop a scientific research about the positive effects of yoga to the health.
library
We created an online library where we will publish references to evidence-based yoga and YIH summaries.