Utilizing both yoga and mindfulness practices while in inpatient treatment centers can be helpful to patients. Yoga and mindfulness work together to help reduce physical and mental distress among patients while also improving sleep and allowing patients to process their own emotions more easily.
What Is Mindfulness?
The practice of mindfulness is being brought up more and more nowadays, and the importance of the practice is being noted. The main idea behind practicing mindfulness is to be completely aware of what is going on in a particular moment. Those practicing mindfulness give their undivided attention to whatever is taking place in a particular minute without being judgmental or making assumptions about whatever is happening, instead, accepting what is. The idea is not to categorize experiences or things that happen as good or bad, but simply to observe them for what they are.
How Yoga and Mindfulness Enhance Your Rehab Stay
- Improves Physical Health: Both yoga and mindfulness have been proven to improve the physical health of those completing the practice. While at an inpatient drug rehab, taking part in yoga and mindfulness can help lower blood pressure and keep it lower. Yoga is also used by many as a way to stay physically fit. It allows patients at inpatient treatment centers to keep on top of their fitness and remain flexible. Yoga will help patients stretch out and stiff muscles they may be feeling as a result of withdrawals.
- Helps Mental Health: One of the big aspects of both yoga and mindfulness that helps improve mental health is the sense of calmness that comes along with the practice. While staying at an inpatient alcohol rehab or inpatient drug rehab, emotions tend to run high. Practicing mindfulness and yoga helps keep patients who are feeling stressed calmer than they may have been otherwise. Mindfulness in and of itself is also a great practice for mental health, as the idea behind the practice encourages those taking part to recognize what is happening simply for what it is instead of having an emotional reaction.
- Improves Sleep: Research shows that both yoga and mindfulness have been proven to help those facing problems with insomnia. It is thought that stress reduction could be one reason sleep is improved among those taking part in mindfulness and yoga practices. While staying at an inpatient treatment center, sleep may be hard to come by. Yoga and mindfulness practices can help patients combat loss of sleep or insomnia caused by withdrawal. As well, less stress not only increases the amount of sleep patients receive, it may also increase the quality of that sleep, allowing patients to feel more rested faster.
- Improves Pain: Taking part in a yoga/mindfulness practice can also help to greatly reduce pain in those staying in inpatient alcohol rehab. At the beginning of an inpatient rehabilitation facility stay, it’s possible patients will go through withdrawal symptoms. Patients may also suffer from chronic pain that has been numbed by drugs or alcohol abuse. Once arriving at an inpatient drug rehab or inpatient alcohol rehab, they won’t have those coping mechanisms. Yoga and mindfulness help keep the body in shape and certain yoga positions can help to relieve various pains throughout the body. Practicing mindfulness during yoga can help prevent patients from associating anger or frustration with their pain, instead, allowing them to simply accept their feelings for what they are.
- Helps Dual Diagnoses: Those staying in inpatient treatment often have dual diagnoses, meaning they face mental health problems as well as substance abuse problems. Yoga and mindfulness help patients to address both their substance abuse as well as their mental health without relying too heavily on emotions and instead only on what is fact.
Conclusion
Yoga and mindfulness practices can benefit patients at inpatient rehabilitation facilities greatly by reducing mental stress, physical pain, as well as increasing sleep and calm feelings.