By: Grace Blumer-Lamotte

Yoga is the practice of your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. It is a physical form of exercise moving your body through various positions. Yoga comes in many different forms. Yoga can be physical exercises, such as vinyasa classes, which boost your heart rate with movement. It can also be mindfulness practice. Another form of yoga is breathing exercises.

Yoga can benefit your mental health. If you are suffering from depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, or other psychiatric disorders, yoga could help improve it. 

The connection between yoga and your mental health is this: It creates a safe, quiet, and still place for your body and mind. It can also create a space for you to express yourself.

According to Dai Manuel, a fitness speaker, these are 7 effective ways to improve your mental health with regular yoga practice: Increase your self-confidence, improve your level of concentration, make you physically fit, avoid stress, good posture, peaceful mind, and increase the quality of your sleep.

The way yoga increases your self confidence is by giving you a peaceful and private space for yourself to heal and learn from past mistakes.

Yoga can improve your level of concentration by focusing on an object or staring at a long distance view. This can enhance your level of concentration. Each pose takes concentration on what you are doing and where it is going on.

Yoga can also make you physically fit by practicing exercise regularly and putting in the effort.

It can help you avoid stress by having good yoga postures. According to Dai Manuel, “When you practice yoga 2 times a day (it’s enough at least you spare half an hour a day) it makes you feel relaxed and puts you away from your level of stress and helps you to become more healthy and successful in life.”

Good posture can also come from practicing yoga. Yoga can help your body maintain its position and relieve stress and inner pains. 

When you first start yoga, it is difficult to find the inner peaceful mind. When you practice yoga more and more you will soon feel and achieve what a peaceful mind feels like. Yoga is poses and breathing practice. Focusing on your breathing can help your brain find your inner peace.

Everyone knows that increasing your quality of sleep is difficult. Again, Dai Manuel has some thoughts on this: “At the end of your day try to spare around 15 minutes for you to recollect all your day memories and sit in your yoga position, try to concentrate on your breathing, which helps you to enter into a state of relaxation, overcoming your day’s hurdle.”

By: Liv MIller

We all know that water is one of the most beneficial contributions to all living things. Plants need water to grow, animals need water to survive, and as humans, so do we.

Not only does water help grow plants that provide food for us to eat, and in turn help us survive, but the human body also needs water to survive as well. I’m sure everyone knows the importance of water and how it keeps us alive, so I don’t need to go into great detail about that. But the amount of water a person drinks significantly affects that person’s health.

Growing up, everyone’s parents told us that we need to drink lots and lots of water if we wanted to be healthy. And even now, doctors and health professionals are constantly advising us to drink more water daily. But why does this help us? If I’m drinking enough water to keep me alive I shouldn’t need more right? Well, this is what most people struggle to understand.

There are many health benefits that occur by drinking as much water as one can during the day. Even drinking just a little bit more water than usual can benefit you, because according to Healthline.com, “Dehydration can have a noticeable effect if you lose as little as 2% of your body’s water content”. Why is this so important? Well, the effects that dehydration has on your body are not fun. As Healthline.com also states, “Your brain is strongly influenced by your hydration status. Studies show that even mild dehydration, such as the loss of 1–3% of body weight, can impair many aspects of brain function”. What can happen is that it can impair your mood and concentration; it can also cause you to be more prone to headaches.

Maybe the risks of not drinking enough water won’t convince you to stay hydrated, so let’s talk about how it can improve your way of life. Again, according to Healthline.com, drinking water can help with weight loss. This happens because drinking water improves your metabolism, which increases the number of calories you burn in a day.

Drinking water can also improve your physical performance. If you are an athlete, staying hydrated is very important if you want to stay at the top of your game. When you sweat you lose 6-10% of your water weight which causes serious dehydration, which as we talked about before, isn’t good.

Some other benefits drinking water can have on your body is that it can prevent constipation and even treat kidney stones.

The benefits that drinking water has on your body is endless. So, why not take the extra effort to make sure your getting the proper hydration you need?