10 Benefits of Daily Yoga Practice for Entrepreneurs
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the benefits of yoga. Mentally speaking, it helps manage stress and promotes clarity of mind. On the physical side, it increases flexibility, promotes muscle definition and helps improve respiration, among many other benefits.
I go in phases with my yoga practice. I love yoga and when I’m in the right mindset it becomes part of my self-care routine. Then I often stop making it a priority because I’d rather go for my morning walk or because that extra 30 minutes of sleep is enticing! But it’s not just my flexibility and ability to touch my toes that is affected by this, but my energy and focus at work as well.
Which is why I think it is especially helpful for entrepreneurs, and why I and you should make daily yoga a priority in our/your self-care routine.
In this article I am going to share with you why Yoga is not only good for your well-being, but for your business, too.
10 Benefits of Daily Yoga
1. Yoga helps to manage stress
Running your own business can be very demanding. You’re often juggling work life with family life, managing all aspects of the business and working overtime to keep up. All of this is stressful. It’s important to get a break, to unwind. Yoga can leave you feeling relaxed and refreshed, physically, mentally and energetically.
2. It helps to develop patience
Running your own business takes patience, growth takes time, results might not come immediately. Yoga helps to develop this trait of patience in a gentle way.
3. Yoga teaches determination and commitment
A thing that I’ve seen with myself and others, too, is that yoga teaches you discipline. Whether you practice every day or only twice a week you need to stick with your schedule. There will be days when you are flying impatiently to your yoga studio. There will also be days when the weather is demotivating and the mood is not right. But showing up on the mat no matter what teaches you persistence and determination.
As an entrepreneur, these are the qualities you need like air. The most successful people have come so far because they didn’t let circumstances discourage them. Even if everything seemed to go wrong, they kept going.
If you don’t want to join an in-person course, I suggest you look for an online class.
4. Doing yoga can mean more energy and brighter moods
You may feel increased mental and physical energy, a boost in alertness and enthusiasm, and fewer negative feelings after getting into a routine of practicing yoga.
I’m at a point where even a 10-minute yoga session can have a massive impact on how I feel and almost always is a guaranteed mood lifter. It is one of my favorite benefits of daily yoga!
5. Yoga promotes better self-care
Self-care is a general term that describes everything you do deliberately for your mental, physical, and emotional well-being. As easy as it sounds, many of us pay little attention to self-care and add it to the bottom of our to-do-lists. Yet it is crucial that we take better care of ourselves – and I’ve found that it is especially important to remind entrepreneurs to prioritise self-care. Commiting to regular yoga sessions helps you to push self-care up your to-do list.
6. Yoga practice helps to cultivate mindfulness
Besides building strength, the purpose of yoga is to cultivate awareness of your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual state and to be in harmony. Prioritising practicing mindfulness can improve your mood and how you feel in your body. And this ultimately puts you in a better frame of mind to make healthier choices – for yourself and your business.
7. Doing yoga makes you have a better nights sleep
You’ve got your sunrise alarm clock, weighted blanket and calming bedtime rituals but good, consistent sleep still evades you. Why? Well, it could be because you’re not actually calming your nervous system down.
Yoga does exactly this and will improve the quality of your sleep. And we all know that getting a good night’s rest on a regular basis is crucial to our well-being, right?!.
8. Yoga boosts your immune system
Any form of movement is great for keeping the immune system healthy. With yoga’s twisting, inverting, back bending, and calming, the body is able to spend more time within the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) and less with the sympathetic nervous system (the fight or flight system.
Feeling like you’re constantly on the move or thinking about what’s next, can cause stress and inflammation. And I don’t have to tell you that feeling stressed out will only do you harm long-term – and it dramatically lowers the immune system, too!
9. Better focus thanks to yoga
With yoga, your mind will be quieter and clutter-free and it’s easier to direct the energy to where you want it to go. In yoga they say you develop one-pointedness concentration through practice. You train the mind to become aware and present.
Research even has shown that after a yoga class you are generally better able to focus your mental resources, process information more accurately and also learn, hold and update pieces of information more effectively. I personally feel exactly that way after a good yoga session.
10. Yoga boosts brain power
Moving in a way that is different to our daily patterns helps the brain work harder and can help keep the brain healthy. Twisting asanas, and anything which involves crossing limbs over the body are fantastic for balancing the brain hemispheres. Think of how good you feel after the cross-crawl practice where you alternatively extend the opposite arm and leg from a table top position!
When it comes to yoga, I highly recommend practicing Nadi Shodhana, the ‘channel cleansing’ breath, which helps to balance the brain and calm the mind. It helps me to bring things into balance daily.
The benefits of daily yoga
I love that yoga not only helps me to have a better overall well-being, but also supports me in being better for and in my business. As I always say, the strongest asset an entrepreneur could ever have is good health – and this is certainly one of the main benefits of daily yoga.
The question I’m going to leave you with is… How about you get your yoga mat out and get a good yoga session in?!
About the Author
Jade Jemma is a sought after sales growth expert and speaker based in London, UK.
Through her private mentoring, group programs and online courses Jade helps freedom-focused entrepreneurs to simplify and accelerate their sales growth so they can create their ultimate freedom lifestyle.
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> Her website Freedomzest.com