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It pays to listen to yoga music while doing the poses. Explore the many benefits of calming sounds to your mind and well-being.
1. It Can Promote Active Meditation
The best yoga music can help you achieve active meditation. Now, what does this mean?
Many people think meditation is all about sitting in a lotus position with palms facing upward. In reality, meditation is about stillness, and you can practice that even when you’re doing yoga positions.
Yoga music, meanwhile, can gently and intentionally bring you toward the present moment as you do your asanas. For example, it may guide you on how to breathe properly.
Asanas Definition: It refers to the physical performance of a yoga pose.
2. Yoga Music Helps Get You into the Flow
Sometimes, you will experience days when you feel off. You’re not just at your best.
You may even feel lazy enough to do yoga or anything else. If you’re a beginner, transitioning from one position to another may be difficult.
You may then listen to yoga meditation music to get you into the flow.
In a 2016 study involving 60 participants, the researchers learned that music may help reduce blood cholesterol levels. Those who listened to the sounds of Mozart also had lower blood pressure and heart rate.
Even better, you don’t need to force yourself to listen to the beat. The body has a cool way of aligning itself to the sound so it feels more automatic.
3. It Can Help Calm the Mind
One of the primary benefits of yoga is it can help still the mind, but you know it doesn’t happen all the time.
Perhaps while doing your sun salutations, you find yourself wondering about what to prep for dinner or your upcoming weekend trip.
Worse, you may find yourself second-guessing: “Am I doing the poses correctly?” “Do I look awkward or funny?”
These distracting thoughts can prevent you from getting the most out of yoga. To help silence the mind, you can play calming yoga music.
The brain operates on different wave patterns, depending on its activity:
- Theta state
- Delta state
- Alpha state
- Beta state
The theta state is when your brain has significantly reduced consciousness. During this time, you may already be in deep sleep.
In a delta state, you have lost your awareness of your body. You are already asleep, but you’re still not dreaming.
Meanwhile, the alpha and beta states can occur when you’re awake, but they significantly differ in frequencies. The latter has the highest frequency among them because it implies that your brain is fully awake.
During this state, logic and reason take over. You’ll notice yourself nitpicking information you receive, and it can increase your feelings of anxiety and judgment.
To reduce that, you can use yoga music to move to the alpha state. It’s when your brain is in its most relaxed state while still awake.
By relaxing it, you can get yourself into the flow state, where you’re more engaged and focused with the least effort.
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4. Yoga Music Can Also Help You Fall Asleep Fast
Many people use yoga to help improve their sleep quantity and quality. A 2013 study in the Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine highlighted the benefits of yoga, particularly among older adults with chronic sleeping problems:
- It can stretch the muscles, which promote deep sleep.
- It boosts oxygen saturation, which people with sleep apnea needs. This then results in less snoring sounds and disturbances.
If you struggle with sleep, you can do yoga and also listen to yoga music.
A 2018 research revealed that music could be a low-cost but effective sleeping aid, especially for people with sleeping disorders. These include insomnia, which is the inability to fall asleep or maintain sleep.
Although people are more likely to fall asleep to the music they are familiar with or they prefer (even if it is rock and roll), some general features may encourage a more blissful slumber.
One possible choice is yoga sleep music. It may be slow or low tempo at 60 to 80 beats per minute, which coincidentally matches a person’s resting heart rate.
5. It Reduces Anxiety
Yoga is more than a type of exercise; it teaches you about acceptance, self-love, and calmness.
It can increase your focus, enhance the production of happy hormones, and activate the reward section of the brain. All these can then help reduce your feelings of anxiety.
You can also magnify these benefits when you listen to relaxing yoga music. As mentioned, this type of music can:
- Decrease stress response by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol
- Shift your brainwave pattern from beta to alpha state
- Improve your sleep
- Bring pleasant, happy memories
6. It Boosts Your Memory and Creativity
Do you know how many yoga poses there are? You cannot count them with your fingers.
Bikram yoga alone, which is a kind of hot yoga, has 26 postures. You then need to perform them in a specific sequence.
You can follow many ways to boost your brainpower, especially memory and creativity. Another is to listen to a yoga music playlist while doing your poses.
When you listen to music, it lights up different areas of the brain. For example, it touches on the language center, which interprets the lyrics.
It also stimulates the motor region, particularly when you’re doing movements. Most of all, it works with the sections of the brain involved in memory, problem-solving, and mood.
In other words, it exercises your brain! It then minimizes your risk of developing neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive degenerative condition that leads to loss of cognitive skills.
7. Yoga Music May Reduce Pain or Promote Healing
Yoga can promote healing, faster recovery, and pain reduction. It, however, may also lead to temporary soreness, especially if you’re a beginner.
You can listen to music for yoga to reduce the pain, whether it’s acute or chronic. Take, for example, a study involving patients with fibromyalgia, a chronic disease related to fatigue, soreness, and tenderness.
In the research, the patients experienced reduced pain when they listened to their favorite music. It can be because music may increase the release of opioids in the brain, acting like natural morphine.
It’s also possible that music brings their attention away from the source of pain and make them feel calmer and more relaxed.
Some people prefer to do yoga without music and that’s fine. But if you want to maximize the advantages of yoga and meditation, playing yoga music is worth the shot.
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