Five thousand years ago, yoga was practised as a spiritual journey. But today it primarily promotes physical and mental health benefits. With the availability of online yoga practice, many people have started practising yoga at home. No matter what your age is, or your profession is, or you are more of a gym person, you can still include yoga in your daily life as it is a therapeutic workout that helps active recovery. Apart from repairing muscles, yoga helps in reducing stress and improves the sleep cycle.

Sleep is an essential part of our daily life. That is why we will look at some of the reasons why sleep is important and how yoga helps improve sleep quality. 

Why is sleep important? 

In today’s day and age where achieving things is the utmost priority for everyone, often sleep is not prioritised enough. While we sleep, our body recovers itself, improves the immune system and provides many more benefits. Let’s look at some of the benefits of sleep in detail. 

• Having deep sleep is essential because it repairs our immune systems. When we sleep adequately, our immune systems fight diseases better. Good sleep on a regular basis is directly proportional to solid immunity

• Being deprived of sleep will cause digestive problems. Even overeating just before your bedtime will also cause digestive disorders. While we sleep, our body digests the food, but the digestion process is relatively slow compared to when we are awake. So if you eat a lot before your bed, your body won’t be able to digest the entire food. Similarly, your body won’t be digest the existing food in the stomach if you don’t get enough sleep

• Getting adequate sleep on a regular basis reduces the chances of contracting depression and heart diseases. It also, lower the chances of putting on extra weight
• Research has proven that getting enough sleep will improve your concentration and productivity, improve athletic performance, enhance your social and emotional intelligence

These are some of the primary benefits of sleep, but there is an uncountable number of benefits associated with sleep. Even though sleep is a natural part of life, many people struggle with getting good quality and quantity of sleep. Medical science has evolved a lot in the last hundred years, and today some medicines can help you sleep better. But, dependency on medication for a prolonged period of time can be detrimental to mental and physical health. That is where yoga comes to the rescue. 

How yoga improves the sleep cycle? 

Yoga is a combination of breathing, meditation and asanas. While practising asanas, you also need to focus your mind on breathing. These yoga postures are very simple. You can hold these postures for 3 to 5 minutes and use ocean breathing (the inhalation and exhalation are long, deep and controlled) techniques in this breathing process. Holding these poses for a while provides clam stability, allows you to relax your neck tension, releases tension from your groin and hips area, and has many other advantages. If you start practising asanas slowly, you will begin to get good night sleep. 

7 Asanas to practice for better sleep 

• Legs on a Chair Pose
• Legs Up The Wall Pose (Viparita Karani )
• Reclining Bound Angle (Supta Baddha Konasana)
• Standing Half Forward Bend (Ardha Uttanasana) at the wall
• Standing Forward Bend (Uttanasana)
• Wide-Knee Child’s Pose (Balasana)
• Corpse Pose (Savasana)

You can quickly learn these asanas from the internet. All you have to do is lookup for the best online yoga course and sign up for it. Yoga has been benefiting humans for thousands of years, and today, millions of people across the world have embraced yoga to experience its benefits. So if you are willing and interested to learn more, start your yoga practice online today!!