Yoga Can Help to Balance Your Work and Home Lives

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Stressful work environments and harried schedules cause difficulty to many people trying to balance their busy lives. More and more, people who have trouble keeping their work and personal lives balanced are discovering yoga exercises. Yoga helps them achieve peace of mind and helps them reach that best work-life balance.

Interest in this traditional practice has been piqued by the mind-body connection, and studies reveal that it can lower stress levels and blood pressure, enhance on-the-job performance, and even slow the aging process.

Although the focus of yoga might vary depending on the environment, its central premise is to relax your body and keep your mind alert and focused. For example, when you do yoga, you focus on body movement, breath, sound or even an object. When your mind wanders, as it inevitably will, you bring your attention back and begin again.

The age-old art of yoga gained new interest in the 60’s as part of the consciousness raising activities of the period. But after this, yoga started to decline in popularity. It may have been because yoga isn’t quite like other types of exercise.

For starters, patience is essential in order to accomplish maximum benefits. The results are slow but steady. This contrasts starkly with the frenzied pace and fast results of aerobics.

Lots of people hurry out to exercise energetically during their lunch break, and then dash back to their workplace. No doubt there are physical benefits, but nevertheless it increases the pressure of an already busy life. Yoga, by contrast, offers a less competitive and stressful way to work out, while supporting and even causing an overall feeling of simply “being.”

One of the major reasons yoga is making a comeback is because it can be so healing as an activity. The over-the-top push for fitness generated by the traditional exercise regimes of aerobics, running, or weight lifting has led to a rash of injuries, including neck pain, back pain, or strained knees.

This day, even health practitioners are getting in on yoga practice, with chiropractors, neurologists and orthopedic surgeons sometimes referring patients to specific yogis during treatment.

As a matter of fact, it’s becoming more and more mainstream all the time. Many business and hospitals are now offering yoga classes; books on yoga are on the bestseller list, and internet discussion groups on the topic abound.

Surprisingly, perhaps, even the Army has gotten in on the act. It has requested that the National Academy of Sciences research New Age practices like meditation to discover if they can improve the performance of soldiers.

In addition, yoga has become a pursuit for some runners, weight trainers or aerobic dancers who don’t find peace in their exercise regimes and want the de-stressing aspects of yoga to be part of their workouts.

Around 60 to 90 percent of visits to the doctor in the U.S. are tied to stress. Cost effective and safe, a mind-body approach is an best treatment for this condition that doesn’t involve surgery or drugs. Among people who use these techniques, 34% of patients who are infertile get pregnant within six months, while 70% of those who have trouble sleeping or even have medically defined insomnia become regular sleepers. In addition, the numbers of those suffering from pain and making regular doctor visits because of it go down by 36%.

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