Yoga Can Help to Balance Your Work and Home Lives

With stressful working environments and hectic schedules, many people struggle with the negative impact of their busy work lives. More and more, people who have trouble keeping their work and personal lives balanced are discovering yoga exercises. Yoga gives them peace of mind so that they can achieve a perfect work-life balance.

The mind-body connection is piquing interest in this ancient practice, and research shows that it can indeed reduce blood pressure and stress, improve your work performance, and even make you age more slowly.

Even though 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. If your thoughts turn to other things, as they probably will, just return your mind to your object of focus and continue on.

The age-old art of yoga gained new interest in the 60's as part of the consciousness raising activities of the period. However, after this, yoga began to fall out of favor. This might be because yoga isn't quite the same as many other kinds of exercise.

For starters, patience is essential in order to achieve 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. Of course, it's probably physically beneficial, but it still adds pressure to an already overwhelmed 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 intense focus on fitness created by workout routines such as weight lifting, running and aerobics has led to an increase in injury, particularly strained knees and back and neck pain.

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

In fact, it's moving to the mainstream increasingly. Hospitals and businesses are now teaching yoga techniques, books about yoga are bestsellers, and discussion groups on the Internet have sprung up to talk about this "new" innovation.

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.

Also, yoga has become popular among those who weight train, run or do aerobics because of its stress reducing benefits.

Approximately 60 to 90% of doctors' visits in the U.S. are tied to stress. Mind-body approaches offer cost-effective and safe treatments for this ailment that don't involve drugs or surgery. 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%.