Practising just 25 minutes of Hatha yoga and mindfulness meditation every day can significantly improve brain function and energy levels, a study has found.<\/p>\n
Hatha yoga is one of the most common styles of yoga practised in Western countries.<\/p>\n
It involves physical postures and breathing exercises combined with meditation. Mindfulness mediation involves observing thoughts, emotions and body sensations with openness and acceptance.<\/p>\n
The study found that practising just 25 minutes of Hatha yoga or mindfulness meditation per day could boost the brain\u2019s executive functions, cognitive abilities linked to goal-directed behaviour and the ability to control knee-jerk emotional responses, habitual thinking patterns and actions.<\/p>\n
\u201cHatha yoga and mindfulness meditation both focus the brain\u2019s conscious processing power on a limited number of targets like breathing and posing, and also reduce processing of non-essential information,\u201d said Peter Hall, associate professor at University of Waterloo in Canada.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese two functions might have some positive carryover effect in the near-term following the session, such that people are able to focus more easily on what they choose to attend to in everyday life,\u201d Hall said.<\/p>\n
Thirty-one study participants completed 25 minutes of Hatha yoga, 25 minutes of mindfulness meditation, and 25 minutes of quiet reading (a control task) in random order.<\/p>\n
Following both the yoga and meditation activities, participants performed significantly better on executive function tasks compared to the reading task.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis finding suggests that there may be something special about meditation–as opposed to the physical posing–that carries a lot of the cognitive benefits of yoga,\u201d said Kimberley Luu, lead author of the study published in the journal Mindfulness.<\/p>\n
The study also found that mindfulness meditation and Hatha yoga were both effective for improving energy levels, but Hatha yoga had significantly more powerful effects than meditation alone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a number of theories about why physical exercises like yoga improve energy levels and cognitive test performance,\u201d said Luu.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese include the release of endorphins, increased blood flow to the brain, and reduced focus on ruminative thoughts. Though ultimately, it is still an open question,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough the meditative aspect might be even more important than the physical posing for improving executive functions, there are additional benefits to Hatha yoga, including improvements in flexibility and strength,\u201d said Hall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Practising just 25 minutes of Hatha yoga and mindfulness meditation every day can significantly improve brain function and energy levels, a study has found. Hatha yoga is one of the most common styles of yoga practised in Western countries. It involves physical postures and breathing exercises combined with meditation. Mindfulness mediation involves observing thoughts, emotions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4068,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4067"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4069,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4067\/revisions\/4069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}