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By American pschycological institute:

Yoga helps with stress relief

The American Psychological Association recently shared that 84% of American adults are feeling the impact of prolonged stress

So, it makes sense that the second most cited reason people selected as to why they do yoga was to relieve stress. Thankfully, the science supports that yoga, and especially asana, is excellent at reducing stress

But remember — the physical practice is just one aspect of yoga. Meditation, breath work, and auditory rituals, like chanting and sound baths, have all also been shown to significantly lessen tension and relieve stress

By healthline USA:

Yoga may improve cardiovascular functioning

Pranayama, often referred to as “yogic breathing,” is an important and beneficial aspect of yoga.

The Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine published a review of 1,400 studies looking at the overall effects of pranayama. One key takeaway was that yogic breathing can improve the functioning of several systems in the body (28).

Specifically, the research summarized in the review found that the cardiovascular system benefited mightily from controlling the pace of breathing, as evidenced by favorable changes in heart rate, stroke capacity, arterial pressure, and contractility of the heart (28).

This research indicates that yogic breathing may actually influence the brain’s cardiorespiratory center to improve functioning

By healthline:
Yoga may help improve sleep

When measuring sleep, researchers look at a person’s ability to both fall asleep and stay asleep. Insomnia can affect one or both of these aspects.

Yoga has been shown to improve both how quickly people fall asleep and how deeply they stay asleep. This is partly due to the aftereffects of exercise and the mental calming and stress relief provided by yoga specifically

In addition to improving anxiety (or perhaps because of it), numerous studies show yoga nidra to be particularly helpful at improving sleep

Diabetes.co.uk

yoga in improving diabetes control and
reducing insulin resistance.”

Written byEditor on May 22, 2017

Blood glucose levels in people with type 2 diabetes could be improved after just ten days of practicing yoga, a study has found.
New research carried out by an Indian university dedicated to yoga called S-VYASA also suggests that regularly practising the discipline could result in people with type 2 diabetes having less reliance on diabetes medications.
Blood glucose levels fell by ten per cent in those who had practised yoga for ten straight days and been to seminars about yoga and diabetes, according to the study published in the journal Diabetes &Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research &Reviews.
Lead researcher on the study Dr Venugopal Vijayakumar said: “Even one session of yoga has led to a reduction in blood glucose levels. In the current study, visible changes could be seen within ten days of continuous practice. However, we recommend regular practice of yoga at least for three months to show an improvement in the glycemic control of people with diabetes.
“Our research showed that yoga helps with better glycaemic control in people with type 2 diabetes. This was a large-scale community-based study performed with more than 1,000 diabetes patients from different socio-economic statuses, education, cultural backgrounds and age groups.”
Dr Venugopal believes the increased blood glucose control was not just down to the physical side of yoga, adding: “Yoga has been shown to bring about a reduction in stress hormones, inflammation and oxidative stress, so reducing insulin resistance.”
A total of 1,292 people were studied, with participants either having type 2 diabetes or being at high risk of the condition. The researchers recorded their blood sugar levels both before and after they practised yoga.
Dr Venugopal said that people needed to do yoga as part of their daily routine to get the real benefits but also said that completing 45 minutes of yoga five days a week could also be beneficial.

Harvard Health
:yoga can help reduce stress.
90% diseases are linked to stress

Did you know research shows that up to 90% of doctor visits are linked to stress-related problems? That’s why yoga is such a perfect remedy. It

By Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine,, Harvard Medical Schoo

Yoga is more than just a workout—it’s actually a combination of four components: postures (like tree pose), breathing practices, deep relaxation, and meditation that can transform your health on many different levels. To show you how easy yoga can be and how you can reap the many health benefits, Harvard Medical School experts created An Introduction to Yoga

For years yoga was considered a fringe practice embraced mostly by celebrities and “New Agers.” But today millions of Americans from young children to seniors in their eighties and nineties are practicing yoga. And that’s good news because this mind-body practice actually has the power to help your health in dozens of different ways.

Yoga is more than just a workout—it’s actually a combination of four components: postures (like tree pose), breathing practices, deep relaxation, and meditation that can transform your health on many different levels. To show you how easy yoga can be and how you can reap the many health benefits,

In this fascinating new report, you’ll discover:

• 3 ways yoga can help alleviate arthritis pain

• The yoga techniques that help improve balance, flexibility, strength, and coordination

• How yoga can help reduce your risk of heart disease

• Why yoga may be the perfect way to relieve migraines and fight osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis, IBS, or fibromyalgia

• A study that shows how yoga increased blood vessel flexibility 69% and even helped shrink arterial blockages without medications!

• Why pain specialists are urging doctors to prescribe yoga for lower back pain

• 4 frightening ways stress harms your body and how yoga can help undo the harmful effects

• And so much more.

Did you know research shows that up to 90% of doctor visits are linked to stress-related problems? That’s why yoga is such a perfect remedy. It’s the one tool that simultaneously releases stress while improving strength, balance, flexibility, and overall health. No pill has the power to improve so many areas of your life at one time.

Yoga works across multiple systems in your body at one time. For example, it helps to:

• Rev up your immunity by raising levels of natural, disease-fighting antioxidants in your body

• Activate areas of the brain that increase joy and diminish emotions linked to stress

• Switch on genes that promote health (in as little as 8 weeks even if you’re a beginner)

• Decrease the need for diabetes medications by as much as 40%

• Reduce depression, anxiety, and stress and increase energy levels

• Lower your risk for falling and may even help you re gain your balance if you stumble

And the meditation component of yoga may even help to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and fight age-related declines in memory. In fact, yoga does so much for your health, studies show people who do yoga use 43% fewer medical services and save anywhere from $640 to more than $25,000 a year!

Prepared by the editors of Harvard Health Publishing in consultation with Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Instructor, Harvard Medical School.

7 Ways Meditation Can Actually Change The Brain
By Alice G
Forbes USA.

The meditation-and-the-brain research has been rolling in steadily for a number of years now, with new studies coming out just about every week to illustrate some new benefit of meditation. Or, rather, some ancient benefit that is just now being confirmed with fMRI or EEG. The practice appears to have an amazing variety of neurological benefits – from changes in grey matter volume to reduced activity in the “me” centers of the brain to enhanced connectivity between brain regions. Below are some of the most exciting studies to come out in the last few years and show that meditation really does produce measurable changes in our most important organ. Skeptics, of course, may ask what good are a few brain changes if the psychological effects aren’t simultaneously being illustrated? Luckily, there’s good evidence for those as well, with studies reporting that meditation helps relieve our subjective levels of anxiety and depression, and improve attention, concentration, and overall psychological well-being.

Meditation Helps Preserve the Aging Brain

Last week, a study from UCLA found that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they aged. Participants who’d been meditating for an average of 20 years had more grey matter volume throughout the brain — although older meditators still had some volume loss compared to younger meditators, it wasn’t as pronounced as the non-meditators. “We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating,” said study author Florian Kurth. “Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain.”

Meditation Reduces Activity in the Brain’s “Me Center”

One of the most interesting studies in the last few years, carried out at Yale University, found that mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain network responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts – a.k.a., “monkey mind.” The DMN is “on” or active when we’re not thinking about anything in particular, when our minds are just wandering from thought to thought. Since mind-wandering is typically associated with being less happy, ruminating, and worrying about the past and future, it’s the goal for many people to dial it down. Several studies have shown that meditation, through its quieting effect on the DMN, appears to do just this. And even when the mind does start to wander, because of the new connections that form, meditators are better at snapping back out of it.



Its Effects Rival Antidepressants for Depression, Anxiety

A review study last year at Johns Hopkins looked at the relationship between mindfulness meditation and its ability to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and pain. Researcher Madhav Goyal and his team found that the effect size of meditation was moderate, at 0.3. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3, which makes the effect of meditation sound pretty good. Meditation is, after all an active form of brain training. “A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing,” says Goyal. “But that’s not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways.” Meditation isn’t a magic bullet for depression, as no treatment is, but it’s one of the tools that may help manage symptoms.



Meditation May Lead to Volume Changes in Key Areas of the Brain

In 2011, Sara Lazar and her team at Harvard found that mindfulness meditation can actually change the structure of the brain: Eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was found to increase cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which governs learning and memory, and in certain areas of the brain that play roles in emotion regulation and self-referential processing. There were also decreases in brain cell volume in the amygdala, which is responsible for fear, anxiety, and stress – and these changes matched the participants’ self-reports of their stress levels, indicating that meditation not only changes the brain, but it changes our subjective perception and feelings as well. In fact, a follow-up study by Lazar’s team found that after meditation training, changes in brain areas linked to mood and arousal were also linked to improvements in how participants said they felt — i.e., their psychological well-being. So for anyone who says that activated blobs in the brain don’t necessarily mean anything, our subjective experience – improved mood and well-being – does indeed seem to be shifted through meditation as well.

Just a Few Days of Training Improves Concentration and Attention

Having problems concentrating isn’t just a kid thing – it affects millions of grown-ups as well, with an ADD diagnosis or not. Interestingly but not surprisingly, one of the central benefits of meditation is that it improves attention and concentration: One recent study found that just a couple of weeks of meditation training helped people’s focus and memory during the verbal reasoning section of the GRE. In fact, the increase in score was equivalent to 16 percentile points, which is nothing to sneeze at. Since the strong focus of attention (on an object, idea, or activity) is one of the central aims of meditation, it’s not so surprising that meditation should help people’s cognitive skills on the job, too – but it’s nice to have science confirm it. And everyone can use a little extra assistance on standardized tests.

Meditation Reduces Anxiety — and Social Anxiety

A lot of people start meditating for its benefits in stress reduction, and there’s lots of good evidence to support this rationale. There’s a whole newer sub-genre of meditation, mentioned earlier, called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness (now available all over the country), that aims to reduce a person’s stress level, physically and mentally. Studies have shown its benefits in reducing anxiety, even years after the initial 8-week course. Research has also shown that mindfulness meditation, in contrast to attending to the breath only, can reduce anxiety – and that these changes seem to be mediated through the brain regions associated with those self-referential (“me-centered”) thoughts. Mindfulness meditation has also been shown to help people with social anxiety disorder: a Stanford University team found that MBSR brought about changes in brain regions involved in attention, as well as relief from symptoms of social anxiety.



Meditation Can Help with Addiction

A growing number of studies has shown that, given its effects on the self-control regions of the brain, meditation can be very effective in helping people recover from various types of addiction. One study, for example, pitted mindfulness training against the American Lung Association’s freedom from smoking (FFS) program, and found that people who learned mindfulness were many times more likely to have quit smoking by the end of the training, and at 17 weeks follow-up, than those in the conventional treatment. This may be because meditation helps people “decouple” the state of craving from the act of smoking, so the one doesn’t always have to lead to the other, but rather you fully experience and ride out the “wave” of craving, until it passes. Other research has found that mindfulness training, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), and mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP) can be helpful in treating other forms of addiction.



Short Meditation Breaks Can Help Kids in School

For developing brains, meditation has as much as or perhaps even more promise than it has for adults. There’s been increasing interest from educators and researchers in bringing meditation and yoga to school kids, who are dealing with the usual stressors inside school, and oftentimes additional stress and trauma outside school. Some schools have starting implementing meditation into their daily schedules, and with good effect: One district in San Francisco started a twice daily meditation program in some of its high-risk schools – and saw suspensions decrease, and GPAs and attendance increase. Studies have confirmed the cognitive and emotional benefits of meditation for schoolchildren, but more work will probably need to be done before it gains more widespread accept

Meditation is not a panacea, but there’s certainly a lot of evidence that it may do some good for those who practice it regularly. Everyone from Anderson Cooper and congressman Tim Ryan to companies like Google and Apple and Target are integrating meditation into their schedules. And its benefits seem to be felt after a relatively short amount of practice. Some researchers have cautioned that meditation can lead to ill effects under certain circumstances (known as the “dark night” phenomenon), but for most people – especially if you have a good teacher – meditation is beneficial, rather than harmful. It’s certainly worth a shot: If you have a few minutes in the morning or evening (or both), rather than turning on your phone or going online, see what happens if you try quieting down your mind, or at least paying attention to your thoughts and letting them go without reacting to them. If the research is right, just a few minutes of meditation may make a big difference.