6 Reasons College Students Should Practice Yoga

College is a phase of transition in any student’s life. It represents the moment when you are no longer a kid, and you start becoming an adult. It is also a period when you leave your home and stop being dependent on your parents. On top of this, students will need to cope with classes, exams, as well as campus life. When facing all these challenges, many students feel overwhelmed. So, the first thing that many students decide to do is establish a routine. Apart from organizing their schedule and trying to stick to their objectives, students can start practicing yoga and change their lives forever. If you are not convinced yet, you should read this article and find why you should practice yoga as a student.

Some of today’s generation of students might’ve been lucky enough to have parents enroll them in yoga sessions when they were kids. From the parent’s perspective, yoga is an effective method of improving focus and concentration for their kids and helps them spend quality time together. So, if this strategy helped you and your parents cope with everyday challenges, it stands to reason it will help you in college as well!

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1. Yoga helps in reducing stress

As already mentioned above, students go through a lot of stress in college. They need to find a balance between attending classes, studying for exams, the possibility of starting a part-time job, and cope with the feeling of missing their home. All this mix of feelings and changes comes with a lot of stress and pressure on students. Thankfully, yoga is well-known as a successful practice that helps people meditate and get rid of stress. When practicing different poses, yoga practitioners enter in a state of concentration and find their inner balance. So, a college student can benefit from practicing yoga as it helps him/her clear his/her mind and develop concentration. Basic yoga exercises like these help students strengthen their attention abilities and prioritization.

2. Better memory

Studies have shown that the students who go to yoga classes, practice meditation and deep breathing have improvement in their scores in memory tests. By practicing yoga, college students take a break from all the daily challenges and activities. They get the chance to practice introspection and think of what they did during the day. Yoga also involves visualizations and chanting, which helps the students to strengthen their visual and some verbal abilities. Therefore, after several yoga sessions, they will notice improved attention and awareness in class.

3. Yoga contributes to better sleeping

The majority of yoga exercises involve a lot of breathing and relaxation techniques in order to clear the mind. College students have many ideas going through their minds and a lot of stress associated with it. So, these situations can affect the way they sleep and provoke a lot of anxiety. Yoga is the ideal exercise to help them re-establish the necessary balance. For example, the pose that requires the practitioners to put their legs up the wall brings the benefit of relaxing the mind and obtaining the highest possible level of body relaxation. By adding breathing exercises to their yoga routine, college students will quickly see the improvements in the way they sleep and the mood they have when they wake up in the morning.

4. Yoga changes the way your body looks

Apart from helping your mind and spirit, yoga will also change the way your body looks. When they are in college, students tend to become sedentary. They spend a lot of time in front of their laptops or lying in bed and doing nothing. In the long term, this type of routine can result in gaining some extra pounds. Practicing yoga will help in counterbalancing this type of lifestyle and routine. When they practice yoga regularly, college students manage to keep their weight under control and become more conscious of how their body looks. Therefore, they will start adopting a healthy lifestyle that allows them to look good and practice different yoga Asanas without difficulty.

5. Yoga encourages self-care and self-love

The main objective of practicing is to look more inside your mind and soul instead of focusing on appearances. Yoga practitioners learn to have more respect for their bodies and love it just the way it is. For college students, this is an important lesson they need to learn. As we live in a world where people are more interested in the exterior package instead of what’s inside, college students need to learn more about self-care and self-love. Yoga teaches a student how to be comfortable with their body and do everything they can to nurture it and understand that this is their most important asset.

6. Self-control improvement

When you are going through a lot of stress, you inevitably tend to be aggressive and agitated. Yoga teaches college students to stop reacting impulsively and think twice before taking any action. With all the exercises that yoga involves, students learn how to control their emotions and make rational decisions only. Whenever they will face a challenging situation, students who have yoga in their routine will immediately understand they should take a moment to breathe deeply, get rid of the tension, and then decide on a subject. Once they understand how to control their emotions, college students will gain more self-confidence and feel that no door can be ever closed for them.

Conclusion

College should be a phase during which students learn a lot about themselves and have the time of their lives. It shouldn’t be a period full of stress and insurmountable challenges. With the help of yoga, college students can learn how to listen to their minds, find a balance in their activities, improve their sleep, and cultivate self-control.