We all know that exercise is good for you, both physically and mentally. The US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion even shares that just 30 to 60 minutes of exercise each weekday can benefit your mood. That’s why exercise has become a vital part of holistic addiction treatment—especially recovery yoga. In fact, yoga for addiction recovery can not only support your lasting healing, but it can also help you establish a lifestyle of long-term emotional wellness.
Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, and Addiction
As we explore the benefit of yoga during your addiction recovery journey, it’s necessary to understand how you got to this point of addiction in the first place. Any type of addiction, whether it’s to drugs, alcohol, or something else, is more than likely rooted in trauma from your past.
This trauma could be the result of adverse childhood experiences you dealt with growing up, such as abuse, emotional or physical neglect, poverty, or divorce. Or it could be more recent events or circumstances. Regardless, past trauma leaves its mark on your present experience in the form of negative feelings, stress, traumatic memories and flashbacks, and more. And as you deal with these struggles over and over again, it’s natural to seek out ways to cope so you can find relief. This is where addictive substances (and eventually, addiction) enter the picture.
When you’re navigating past trauma, you may start using “feel-good” substances like drugs or alcohol as your go-to coping mechanism of choice. When used, these substances cause your brain to release the pleasure chemical dopamine. This causes you to associate drugs or alcohol as rewarding, so you want to seek the same experience out again. And because the effects of trauma continue to linger in your life, you keep going back to your preferred coping mechanism to self-medicate (though its medicating effects are only temporary).
Yet as you consume more alcohol or drugs, your brain develops a tolerance for this dopamine, so you need to use more of your substance (and use it more often) to achieve the same euphoric high. Eventually, your brain develops a chemical dependency on this dopamine release, leading to a total addiction and substance use disorder. Here’s a list of typical signs of addiction that you can experience:
Common Addiction Symptoms
- Spending most of your time thinking about, obtaining, using, or recovering from your substance
- Losing interest in hobbies, interests, or ambitions in favor of your substance use
- Saying no to friends and loved ones in order to use your substance
- Continuing to use despite any negative consequences
- Desiring to quit your substance, but you can’t
- Mood swings and intense emotions
- Using more of your substance for longer than intended
- Neglecting work, school, or personal responsibilities to use your substance
- Engaging in risky behavior while on your substance
- Behaving irrationally or unethically to obtain more of your substance
Why Exercise is Important to Addiction Recovery and Sobriety
When you’re trying to overcome your addiction, it’s important to seek professional addiction treatment. When you partner with a residential treatment center, various forms of exercise will often be part of your holistic inpatient rehab recovery plan. But why is exercise in general a key ingredient to your long-term recovery and sobriety?
For starters, exercise helps you navigate the rigors of your drug, alcohol, or opioid abuse treatment more successfully. Because treatment directly addresses the traumas of your past, exercise can help you build emotional and physical stamina to face any emotional issues during therapy. This improved energy and endurance can be especially helpful when any challenges arise in the recovery process.
Yet exercise can also improve your mood and enhance your emotional wellness. According to Harvard Medical School, exercise can actually help alleviate stress hormones and fill your system with feel-good endorphins instead. As a result, you feel better overall and have a way to reduce stress and build confidence over time, which are important aspects of maintaining sobriety in the long run. And among the exercises utilized in treatment, yoga is often a go-to choice for its comprehensive health benefits.
What is Yoga?
The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health describes yoga as a spiritual practice that has become popular as a way to promote physical and mental well-being. In the US, yoga emphasizes a combination of physical postures, breathing techniques, and meditation.
The practice of yoga actually began thousands of years ago, likely in ancient India. The term “yoga” itself is a Sanskrit word meaning “yoke” or “union,” shares YogaBasics.com. With yoga, the underlying focus is often to unite the physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional aspects of yourself to achieve freedom, peace, and self-realization.
As you practice yoga, you learn to see yourself clearly and let go of the things that don’t serve you well. Yoga helps you cultivate greater awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, empowering you to change any that are negative. Not only can practicing yoga lead to more self-awareness, but also greater compassion, patience, gratitude, forgiveness, and peace.
A typical yoga class may start out with chanting and breathing techniques to establish the mood and get everyone focused. An instructor will then guide you through various poses to emulate as a group. These exercises require balance, coordination, and flexibility as you stretch and bend to match the posture. At the end, a class will often wrap up in a relaxed pose, inviting you to meditate on your experience.
What is Recovery Yoga?
Because of yoga’s ability to strengthen your physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional wellness, it’s often utilized as part of both inpatient and outpatient addiction treatment, as well as ongoing recovery work. Yoga for addiction recovery often takes place in a class format, allowing you to participate alongside others enrolled in treatment, as well as instructors. Each yoga for recovery class may range from gentle, relaxing yoga poses to more challenging ones designed to develop your physical fitness. Often recovery yoga classes are incorporated into your overall addiction treatment plan to help promote greater self-awareness, self-acceptance, mindfulness, and physical fitness.
The Benefits of Yoga for Recovery
There are a number of yoga health benefits, not only for the everyday person but also those in addiction treatment and recovery. According to Integrative and Complementary Medicine, yoga’s positive effects on craving, stress, anxiety, depression, and negative mood may prevent a return to substance abuse for those who practice yoga for addiction recovery. With that said, some of the main benefits that make yoga so worthwhile for addiction therapy include:
Enhanced Physical Strength
The throes of addiction can take their toll on your body as you prioritize your substance use over your physical health. Yet a key benefit of yoga is its ability to improve your physical strength over time. Yoga’s various postures can actually help you build strength by toning your muscles, improving your flexibility, and aiding your ability to stay balanced. Not only does this enhanced strength boost your overall health, it also better equips you to stay the course in your sobriety.
Improved Mental Clarity and Focus
An important aspect of yoga is promoting mindfulness, or the ability to pay attention to the present moment without judgement. Mindfulness helps you learn to let go of negative self-talk, as well as cultivate greater self-awareness and focus. As a result, you’re better able to control your thoughts and safely process the trauma in your life that led to your addiction.
Balanced Emotional Wellness
Unhealthy coping mechanisms and addiction usually arise from our inability to process and manage difficult emotions. And trauma can often drain your emotional energy, too. But recovery yoga can bring emotional balance back into your life by helping you develop better emotional regulation skills and strengthening your emotional resilience. With these tools in place, you’re empowered to cope in healthier ways in the future, preventing relapse in the process.
Reduced Cravings and Restored Mental Health
Yoga actually has the ability to restore your brain’s dopamine functioning from its out-of-balance addictive state. Over time, the regular practice of yoga can reduce both your addictive dopamine surge and any cravings while releasing healthy endorphins that produce pleasure in the process. Yoga is also considered an effective alternative treatment for both anxiety and depression, shares Healthline.com, which are common co-occurring disorders often tied to addiction.
New Community and Healthy Habits Development
It’s easy to become socially isolated due to your addiction. At the same time, it can also be hard to find people who understand what you’re going through in recovery. However, yoga for addiction recovery fills these gaps by providing you with natural community and the support you need to continue the journey. And while you’re building community with others who share your struggles, you’re also building a healthy habit in yoga that you can utilize for the rest of your life, still enjoying its benefits long after your treatment ends.
Experience Yoga and Recovery at Defining Wellness Centers
By enhancing your mind, body, and spirit, recovery yoga can make a major impact on your long-term sobriety. At Defining Wellness Centers in Mississippi, we utilize yoga for addiction recovery as part of a holistic addiction treatment approach. Personalizing treatment to your specific needs, we incorporate several experiential and recreational therapy modalities into your care, including outdoor therapy, mindfulness meditation, physical fitness and nutrition, and more. To learn more about our addiction treatment programs, contact our team today.
