8 Reasons to Try Yoga For Chronic Pain Relief
You wake up in the morning, again feeling the dull ache that has plagued your body for what seems like forever. You wonder if you’ll ever feel normal again, or maybe this constant pain is your new normal. Perhaps it’s time to try yoga for chronic pain.
Research shows that the number of people doing yoga in the United States has more than doubled in the past several years, ranging from 20.4 million back in 2012 to a projected 55.05 million in 2020.
Trying out yoga for yourself, too, may be just what you need if you’ve been dealing with chronic pain for years and feel there is no solution. Here are eight reasons to try yoga for chronic pain relief this year.
Let’s get started!
1. Listen to Your Own Body with the Help of Yoga for Chronic Pain
Yoga is a form of exercise that involves controlling your breathing, adopting specific physical postures and meditating to achieve relaxation and a higher level of health.
What’s so great about yoga is that through it, you can learn how to refocus your brain to transform your physical pain experience. For instance, you can learn how to change feelings of anger, fear, frustration, and sadness.
On top of that, you can master the art of listening to your own body and addressing your personal needs. This, in turn, will enable you to take part in those activities you care about the most.
Yoga can essentially help you to regain a sense of courage, safety, and control — all of which you need to get past your chronic pain experience.
2. Stress Management
Chronic pain can, unfortunately, worsen your ability to manage other stressors in your life. But practicing yoga regularly can boost your stress management.
After all, yoga has been proven to reduce the heart rate, blood pressure, and stress levels.
In other words, this type of exercise may have a stellar feedback effect that ultimately improves your chronic pain.
3. Pain Response
The more you practice yoga for chronic pain, the more effectively you’ll be able to respond to pain, thus reducing the amount of suffering you perceive yourself to be experiencing when you feel pain.
Research on the anatomy of the brain revealed that those practicing yoga ended up having larger amounts of gray matter throughout various regions of the brain.
As we age, our gray matter levels decrease. But scientists didn’t see this same decrease in yoga practitioners, suggesting that yoga might be neuroprotective — or protective of the nervous system.
Researchers specifically saw a major boost in yoga practitioners’ pain tolerance and thresholds.
Let’s take a quick look at what most people do when they expect pain.
The majority of people go into “fight-or-flight” mode when they anticipate pain. As a result, their sympathetic nervous systems cause their levels of cortisol — a type of steroid hormone — to skyrocket.
On the contrary, in yogis — those who practice yoga — their parasympathetic nervous systems activate. That means you’ll go into a “rest-and-digest” mode instead.
The result? You’ll feel much more tranquil and can better maintain a long-term, healthy balance in your life.
4. Arthritis Help
If you suffer from arthritis, performing yoga for chronic pain may be one of the best moves you could make.
As you stretch those muscles and move a painful joint through its range of motion, you’ll find your pain’s intensity levels drop. In fact, your pain might end up being relieved completely.
Research also shows that yoga can improve your joints’ function and flexibility, thus helping you to overcome joint stiffness.
You can even modify your yoga poses if you have arthritis in your knees and thus can’t bend your joints as much as other people may be able to, for instance. In addition, with a particular type of yoga called Iyengar yoga, you can use aids such as chairs and blocks to help yourself to stay balanced during poses.
5. Muscle Tension Relief
Got stiff muscles? Yoga for chronic pain may, again, be the antidote.
Combining yoga-related physical movements with breath awareness can naturally help to release the tension that your muscles are holding.
6. More Energy
You find yourself running to and fro to get your to-do list totally scratched off on a daily basis. Perhaps you travel for your job, or maybe the kids have you running from ballet to soccer practice on the regular.
If you could use more energy in your life, you’re not alone. Fortunately, yoga can make it happen for you.
Yoga increases oxygen flow to your muscle tissues and brain, thus ultimately boosting your level of energy and overall well-being.
7. Pain Relief
Did you know that moderate or even mild exercise decreases your level of physical pain? Fortunately, yoga qualifies!
Most chronic pain-related pharmacological treatments are unfortunately opioid-based. In other words, they are extremely addictive.
Fortunately, meditation and yoga have been proven to have a powerful pain-relieving effect on your brain. In fact, long-term, yoga may even be far more helpful than drugs for overcoming the unrelenting grip of chronic pain.
8. Stronger Brain
Another major benefit of being a yogi? You can strengthen your brain.
Constant pain triggers brain structure changes, and these changes are far from good. They are associated with the likes of decreased cognitive function, depression and anxiety.
But new research reveals that yoga’s mental and physical practices have the completely opposite effect. Your brain will instead get a boost, and this can relieve your chronic pain and make you feel better about yourself both now and in the years to come.
How We Can Help
We offer several isochronic meditation packages based on brainwave entrainment research findings. Our programs are tested and proven to work time and time again.
Our goal is to help you to experience the meditative/spiritual and emotional benefits of using isochronic tones — a revolutionary audio-based brain stimulation technique.
If you’re dealing with stress and chronic pain, get in touch with us to find out how we can help you to experience life at a whole new level both cognitively and physically.
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