The ancient practice of Yoga Nidra is for all ages, and only requires you to lye down and listen. Anxiety is a plague on many in todays society. In this blog we dive onto how the practice can help you if you suffer from anxiety in a wholistic health approach.
Yoga Nidra has been found to help manage stress in the workplace.
Yoga Nidra has been found in studies found it helped employees manage stress in the workplace. That’s because yoga Nidra access is the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest digest, and heal state. It also decreases the sympathetic nervous response, which is living in a state of fight, flight, freeze or funding, which are all trauma responses of a diss, regulated nervous system. By accessing the parasympathetic, you move into a physical, mental, and emotional relaxation in our bodies. Anxiety is found in the sympathetic nervous system state with those for trauma responses.
In our day-to-day lives we have many responsibilities in which most of us really try to keep on top of everything on our never ending to do list. Our society has become great at becoming human doings instead of human beings. We have been indoctrinated that doing equals success, and resting equals laziness. Doing and resting like everything else in life has duality, which means both sides of the coin. If we only live in a doing state, our health will suffer, and we burn out. What our society desperately must re-learn is the being. A constant high stress state is what triggers anxiety.
The body is systematically relaxed during Yoga Nidra.
During the practice of Yoga Nidra, also known as non sleep deep rest, the body is systematically relaxed. Your muscles relax, your heart rate, slows, and your breath deepens. Not only are stress hormones actually removed from your body, but your body actually releases hormones that help with anxiety. This includes GABA, serotonin, and melatonin.
Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is the most common inhibitory neurotransmitter in your central nervous system. GABA lessens the ability of a nerve cell to receive, create or send chemical messages to other nerve cells. GABA is known for producing a calming effect.
Serotonin is one of the natural body chemicals that controls your mood. It works with melatonin to help control when you sleep and wake up, as well as how you feel pain, wellbeing and sexual desire. Medicines that increase serotonin levels can help with depression.
Melatonin is a hormone that your brain produces in response to darkness. It helps with the timing of your circadian rhythms (24-hour internal clock) and with sleep. Being exposed to light at night can block melatonin production. Research suggests that melatonin plays other important roles in the body beyond sleep.
Join us every Thursday – in studio or zoom!
Feel free to join us in studio, or on zoom for our weekly Yoga Nidra class every Thursday EST 7-8:30pm. To learn more or sign up please use this link. To your wholistic health!