The Role Of Yoga And Meditation In Boosting Immune System Health

The Role Of Yoga And Meditation In Boosting Immune System Health

If you want to know one of the biggest killers of immunity, it’s stress. Stress dulls your mind, it dulls your senses, it leaves you weak. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that one of the best ways to boost your immune system health and beat stress is by practicing yoga and meditation.

When it comes to trying to strengthen your mind and body, yoga is an effective exercise. If you question everyone you know who is prone to catching every bug going, you’ll see a pattern. They tend to be on the run, constantly working long hours and missing out on sleep. They’re the people who operate at warp-speed and ignore their health and diet. Bugs catch us when our bodies are unbalanced, and our bodies become unbalanced when we ignore our basic needs.

Yoga To Boost Immunity

Yoga provides your body with a gentle, natural way to support your immune system daily. It doesn’t matter how hectic your schedule gets, it’s easy to work into a quick yoga session. While stress hormones can compromise your immune system, practicing yoga can combat the presence of cortisol in your system. It also has anti-inflammatory effects, which is helpful for anyone dealing with chronic pain (https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/urban-survival/201802/new-research-how-yoga-boosts-your-immune-system).

Yoga also helps condition your respiratory tract and lungs by stimulating your body to purge toxins from your system. It’s not like other forms of exercise – it combines deep breathing and gentle movements. There are a variety of postures as well, which means you can focus on certain areas or issues you have through the power of movement.

There are poses to encourage sinus blood flow and poses to drain the lungs and help you battle a cold. Poses like the camel, child, and cow face are often used to provide relief from bronchial congestion.

So, while I would suggest you practice yoga regularly as a preventative measure, there are plenty of options available to you as a reactive measure as well. If you have IBS, then poses like the gate, half-seated spinal twist, and the reclining abdominal twist are perfect.

While yoga postures are the foundation of boosting your immune system and preventing infections, the benefits continue. The cold and flu both attack the body’s bronchial passages, therefore, by conditioning the lungs through breathing exercises, you are building your resistance to these illnesses.

A weak immune system means you are more prone to cold, flu, allergy problems, and a range of other respiratory issues. Yoga provides you with both an immune system boost and a boost in lung health.

Meditation To Boost Immunity

Now that we’ve addressed yoga, let’s move our focus to meditation.

Meditation provides stress relief for your mind and body, which means it will reduce the likelihood of ailments. Meditation decreases the level of cortisol in your body and increases endorphins, which fosters a positive state of mind which also improves your health.

According to the Mayo Clinic, meditation can improve asthma, headaches, sleep issues, depression, heart disease, and chronic pain (https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/meditation/in-depth/meditation/art-20045858).

A Healthful Combination

While either yoga or meditation can help you boost the health of your immune system, the combination of the two is in your best interests. While are a variety of free apps available to carry you through guided meditations, you will also find some great options from UCLA Health (https://www.uclahealth.org/marc/audio).

That’s a good place to get started in terms of meditation. As far as yoga goes, you can find plenty of free options on YouTube. However, you can also find a helpful guide to beginners’ poses from the Yoga Journal (https://www.yogajournal.com/poses/poses-by-level/beginners-poses).