Yoga has long been known to be one of the remedies for conditions like fibromyalgia and other arthritic conditions. The value of this is to allow our teachers to encourage those who have chronic pain to give yoga a try, especially for people who don’t want to become dependent on medication to treat fibromyalgia. However, if you’re going to market yoga as an alternative treatment for various arthritic pains, you need to understand what it is you’re treating. So, in this case, we first need to define what fibromyalgia is before we can even hope to begin talking about treatment.
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What Is Fibromyalgia?
is a chronic syndrome that is characterized by bodily pain and mental distress. It is easily confused with arthritis and joint inflammation, except that fibromyalgia does not cause joint or muscle inflammation. Some symptoms of fibromyalgia include pain throughout the body, fatigue, and a general sense of discomfort. While the causes of fibromyalgia are unknown, traumatic injuries, autoimmune disorders, and lupus are possible risk factors.
How Does Yoga Help Manage Fibromyalgia?
Most chronic pains take root from a physical injury or even an illness. However, this sensation of pain is often sustained not just because of the trauma to the body, but because of the way that the initial pain affects the mind-body relationship.
Chronic pain is complex, but this is also the reason why alternative treatment can work. While measures such as clinics and pain management centers like Seattle Pain Relief target the pain at its physical root cause, yoga helps relieve pain by taking a mind-body connection-focused approach. Yoga is not just a form of exercise, but it is also an effective self-care tool that puts emphasis on meditation and relaxation through deep breathing.
Understanding the Protective Pain Response
As most of us already know, pain is a signal that is sent from the body’s pain receptors to the brain. Pain is an indication that the body is experiencing a physical threat such as a cut, a burn, or inflammation. The parts of the brain that are responsible for processing emotion are also affected by this and this is what creates the sensation of fear and suffering.
Yoga helps keep the brain from acknowledging the suffering aspect of the pain through mindfulness and deep breathing exercises. Sometimes the pain is not as bad as it actually is, and we tend to suffer more in our minds than in our body.
Is There More to Yoga Than Pain Management?
Yoga is not just limited to pain management. In fact, those who practice yoga regularly enjoy better sleep cycles, are less prone to fatigue, and are also more resistant to depression. We have to look at yoga beyond stretches and poses.
There are many unwritten lessons to be learned from yoga, whether it’s about being mindful of your thoughts, actions, and surroundings, or learning how to detach yourself from your worries. Yoga is as much as a physical exercise as it is a mental and spiritual one
