Addiction recovery takes enormous strength, and the more tools you have in your arsenal to keep you sober, the better. One hammer to add to your kit is physical activity. Yoga fits the bill for many reasons.
This ancient practice encompasses both mind and body. Therefore, it’s the ideal therapeutic tool for a disease that affects all aspects of your life. Here are four benefits of yoga for addiction recovery.
1. Yoga Eases Withdrawal Symptoms
For someone with an addiction, quitting alcohol or drugs isn’t as easy as saying “no more”. Excess substance use causes physiological changes in the body and brain that don’t reverse themselves overnight. For example, imaging scans of those with alcohol addiction show significant brain shrinkage. Such individuals also often suffer thiamine deficiencies that further reduce mental power.
Yoga helps to increase the volume of gray matter, while improving connections among white matter in the brain. Much like dance, yoga can help increase neuroplasticity. It also helps in the mind’s healing from the damage done by alcohol and drugs.
Just as a person’s mental state influences their physiology, the opposite effect also occurs. Healing the body can lead to lasting mental changes in attitudes toward drug and alcohol use.
2. Yoga Serves as a Replacement Activity
If someone’s former life revolved around acquiring and using various substances, they could find themselves with a lot of time on their hands. That mental space can dwell on thoughts about how good it would feel to indulge just once, and can become a slippery slope toward relapse.
Yoga makes a great replacement activity. The various styles allows the practitioner to find a form that fits their mood and keeps them active regardless of how they feel physically.
For example, many people with chronic pain turn to alcohol and drugs to ease their aches? If a rheumatoid arthritis flare makes a person miserable, attending a vigorous ashtanga class is probably a no-go. However, yin yoga is so gentle that people even do it in bed, keeping them active on days when they feel like they were hit by a truck.
3. Yoga Helps People Meet a Positive Support Circle
Another problem many people in recovery face is loneliness. If going to the pub was their only social outlet, they may find themselves lost without their old drinking buddies. The problem compounds if they feel alienated from friends and family members who might otherwise lend support.
Walking into the right yoga studio is like being enfolded in a big embrace of acceptance. While many yogis may seem quiet, they’re among the friendliest folks in the world, because yoga emphasizes on spiritual growth. People will quickly connect with others who share similar interests, eliminating the need to have a drink in hand to feel outgoing and wanted.
4. Yoga Eases the Trauma That Drives Urges
Yoga isn’t just a physical exercise. It’s a way of helping the body heal from trauma. Better yet, it offers genuine recovery, not a temporary mask for pain.
If a person has severe issues related to past abuse, they might want to seek a teacher who specializes in yoga for trauma recovery. For example, many victims of sexual abuse find it challenging to do poses like Happy Baby or Crouching Puppy.
The right yoga guide will let a person enter these poses at your pace or modify them. They’ll cue working through and processing the emotions these poses evoke instead of burying them under bad habits. Moving through this journey can transform people’s relationship with their bodies, restoring their sense of agency over themselves and easing their need to escape.
Reaping the Benefits of Yoga for Addiction Recovery
Overcoming unhealthy misuse of drugs and alcohol takes tremendous courage, strength, and the right tools. Yoga can help you power through your addiction recovery.
If you need help establishing a healthy lifestyle, book your personal yoga retreat at Sewall House. Choose any available 3+ consecutive days for your retreat. Bring friends or come alone. The expert yogis at Sewall House will work with you at your level during two daily yoga sessions. You’ll also receive three delicious, healthy, vegetarian meals each day. Once you understand your routing, you can continue your yoga practice at home, and use these cookbooks to keep your diet clean. Find a room and book your personalized yoga retreat online now!
