The 3 Best Yoga for Anxiety Courses Online
ow are you feeling today? Stressed out, anxious, and unsure of what to do about it? If so, then this article is for you. We all know that yoga can be a great way to exercise and relieve stress, but many people aren't aware of the benefits of yoga in relieving symptoms of anxiety. In fact, there are entire yoga courses dedicated to this, many of which can be found online. But where should you go for these online yoga anxiety courses, and do they really help?
The 3 Best Yoga for Anxiety Courses Online are:
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of online yoga courses for anxiety mentioned and break down how the contents of these courses impact your body to relieve these unpleasant symptoms. Additionally, you’ll learn other relevant information regarding online yoga anxiety courses, such as how they differ from basic videos, and we’ll even provide our top three recommendations for the best online yoga courses for anxiety that you can enroll in today.
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Why Take a Course on Yoga for Anxiety vs. Simply Watching a Video?
If you’re a tech-savvy individual, you might be questioning why you need to pay for an online yoga anxiety course when the Internet is filled with free videos on the subject that you can watch, most notably on YouTube. While this is a great resource that has its place in aiding people in their journey to overcome anxiety, it won’t be as effective as one of these courses.
Yoga courses for anxiety are in-depth and interactive experiences that provide the individual with an array of resources to understand what is causing their anxiety, how to make changes to reduce or eliminate these causes, and how to cope with the symptoms of your anxiety in the meantime.
The word interactive is crucial here. When you watch online videos on anxiety or even anxiety yoga, most of the time, that’s all you’re doing, watching. At best, you’re taking notes and trying to soak in what the video tells you, but few people take this information and do something effective with it to reduce their anxiety.
That’s why yoga anxiety courses are superior because, in many ways, it isn’t passive learning. It is a personalized journey where you are guided by dedicated and professional teachers through the physiology behind anxiety and how the incorporation of yoga tactics in your daily life, such as breathing techniques, poses, and meditation, can help you rise above the weight of anxiety and learn to accept and overcome this common challenge.
How Does Yoga Impact the Body's Nervous System?
Anxiety can be a powerful emotion that can wreak havoc on your body and mind, but thankfully, yoga can have the same effect in a more positive manner. This is demonstrated by its effect on the body’s nervous system when performed properly and with mindfulness techniques.
The overarching effect of yoga on the nervous system is that it helps it find homeostasis or balance, which has a calming effect on your overall body, effectively reducing symptoms of stress and anxiety and physical ailments, such as chronic pain and inflammation.
There are a few ways that yoga accomplishes this. The first is arguably the hardest for participants, and that is its mindfulness or meditation aspect.
In yoga, it is crucial that you find a sense of calm in your mind and let go of any sources of stress, anxiety, or other ill emotions in your life and focus on the present. Clearing your mind this way increases focus and allows your body to relax.
This is then paired with deep breathing techniques, both of which affect your body’s HPA axis (or hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) and consequently your sympathetic nervous system (your fight or flight response) and your parasympathetic nervous system (your rest and digest system).
Yoga effectively reduces your heart rate and blood pressure in addition to the effects of the sympathetic nervous system while increasing the effects of the parasympathetic nervous system. When these systems find balance, you’ll realize you feel much more relaxed and peaceful as opposed to the tense and distressed state you were in previously.
The 3 Best Yoga for Anxiety Courses Online
While it’s fantastic to read how beneficial yoga can be for anxiety and how it physiologically affects your body, more significantly your nervous system, to reduce its symptoms, this doesn’t help if you’re trying to find a quality yoga anxiety course to take.
Anxiety yoga courses are relatively common, both in-person and online, and looking at all of the options could easily add to your anxiety, which is the last thing we want. Therefore, to help aid the process, we’ve listed our top three online yoga anxiety courses below.
Each of these courses is guaranteed to help anyone learn helpful techniques to cope with and overcome their anxiety, but one might be better suited for you than another.
Although they all have the common focus of yoga for anxiety, these courses are set up differently and provide their own resources, so read on as we briefly describe each option so you can make the most informed decision regarding your yoga journey and anxiety.
1. Yoga Therapy for Anxiety by My Vinyasa Practice
Another prominent name in the yoga community is My Vinyasa Practice. Similar to Yoga International, this institution also teaches yoga participants as well as aspiring yogis through their in-depth and highly informative online classes.
And don’t think free means its low quality. Quite the opposite. Participants will learn all of the life-changing skills and techniques associated with yoga for anxiety, from meditation to mindfulness to poses to breathing techniques and much more. The course includes video lectures, practices, journaling activities, and guided meditation, so you’re taking an active role in understanding and overcoming your anxiety.
If you’re unsure of whether yoga anxiety is for you? Give this course a try.
2. Yoga Therapy for Anxiety by Yoga International
The first option we would like to recommend is Yoga International’s Yoga Therapy for Anxiety online course.
If you’ve been practicing yoga for some time and have used online resources before, then you’ve probably heard of Yoga International before. This renowned institution is some of the most exceptional yogis and teachers you can find, and they do everything from hosting classes for beginners to expert yoga participants in addition to their yogi training and certification courses.
This course, in particular, focuses on learning how to address anxiety head-on and learn its root causes, as well as incorporating yoga techniques to create states of sympathetic/parasympathetic balance you can utilize in moments of stress or anxiety throughout your daily life.
We particularly enjoy this course’s determination to teach students the physiology behind the stress response and its effect on the autonomic nervous system, so you understand how it affects your body and why it makes you feel this way. This level of understanding helps many individuals with anxiety feel validated in how anxiety has affected them and their lives.
The course contains 5 hours of learning over four sections that are all accessible indefinitely after purchasing the course for its current rate of $129.
3. Kundalini Yoga to Support People with Anxiety by Yoga International's
We’ve already sung Yoga International’s praises, so let’s get right into what their online course, Kundalini Yoga to Support People With Anxiety, has to offer.
Kundalini yoga is a type of energized yoga that focuses on the present and incorporates poses that shift energy from the lower part of your body into the upper part of your body and paired with the kirtan kriya meditation mantra sa ta na ma.
This course is best either for yogis in training who want to get their feet wet with anxiety yoga, as it provides 1 CEU (Continuing Education) credit upon completion, or anyone struggling with anxiety which is fed up with it holding them back in life.
Compared to Yoga International’s previous course, this one, taught by a licensed pharmacist and Director of Yoga Teacher Training at Semperviva International College, Gloria Lathman, only provides an hour worth of learning and is more of a crash course on how to manage anxiety through breathing technique, mantra, and various kundalini yoga poses.
While you will learn how the chakras are connected to your anxiety and nervous system, this course is less in-depth as far as teaching elements of the nervous system and the physiology of anxiety. So if you’d prefer to skip all of that and focus more on tactics, then this is the course for you, also offered for $129.
How Often Should I Practice Yoga to Help With Anxiety?
A common question yoga participants ask, especially those new to yoga who have recently joined for anxiety and stress reduction purposes, is how often they should practice yoga for optimal results. While we’d like to give you a clear answer, it’s impossible.
Anxiety is different for every person, and so, how often you should practice yoga to reduce its effects depends on you as an individual.
For some, anxiety happens very rarely in their life, and they might feel like they only need to practice yoga during uncommon periods of anxiety and stress. For others, anxiety is a daily challenge they struggle with, and so it is best that they practice yoga daily, or even multiple times a day, to counter these effects.
Ultimately, a brief 10-minute session of yoga daily can do wonders for your health as well as your anxiety and stress levels. While this isn’t essential for everyone, it’s an amount of time that’s reasonably easy to incorporate into your daily schedule to keep your body and mind in a good place.
Conclusion
Anxiety is something that nearly every person experiences at some point in their life, and utilizing techniques from yoga for anxiety can help reduce their impact on you, both during a session and in your daily life. If you’re struggling with anxiety, or you’re searching for healthy coping techniques and tools for the rare burst of anxiety, consider enrolling in one of the three online courses we’ve listed above so you don’t have to lose one more second of peace of mind to this unpleasant emotion.
Check out this article on the best yoga therapy training certification courses.
