WHY YOGA HELPS YOUR SLEEP

Yoga helps improve your sleep. FACT.

Studies have proven that yoga can have a positive effect on your sleeping pattern by easing your nervous system and helping you control your breathing. You can believe in science or try it yourself. There have been many studies that have proven that yoga can have a positive effect on your sleeping pattern by relaxing the nervous system and helping control your breath. Learning to breathe through your nose is an important factor as well to improve your sleep and your overall well being (just go ahead and read “Breath” by James Nestor for all the science behind nose breathing!)

There are multiple good articles with numbers and data of people who have improved their sleep via yoga, as well as lengthy explanations on how this works. Some of my favourites are "Insomnia Solutions", "Yoga & Sleep" & "Yoga e Sonno". For the purpose of this post, I prefer to share with you the story of my dear friend Daniela with whom I did my yoga teacher training. We met while I was going to university way back in 2005 in Rome and at the time we would party hard on the weekends together till silly o’clock in the morning. While I’d go to sleep till noon the next day, she would go home, shower and with barely any sleep go to work. In the beginning, it was cool, like a superwoman with superpowers in my eyes. We all envied that she could get away with no sleep but then realised it became exhausting for her. She suffered from severe insomnia and even when we would not go out partying, she still would not be able to sleep. She saw multiple doctors from a young age and experimented with various supplements to support her sleep, however it was not until one doctor advised her to try yoga that she finally resolved her sleeping issue.

Little did she know that not only was she going to start sleeping better but it was also the beginning of her yoga career. We ended up doing our training together, being roommates for a month learning and growing together as yoga teachers and she is now a brilliant teacher. And throughout the training, she was sleeping easily at night. And the day!