If you or someone you love is interested in alternative or holistic recovery treatment methods, you might consider yoga therapy for addiction. But what is yoga for addiction recovery, and how does it help?
Peninsula Health Center offers holistic addiction treatment at our Palos Verdes drug and alcohol rehab center. Contact us today to learn more about how our programs can put you on the pathway toward recovery.
What is Yoga?
Yoga consists of physical poses, breathing techniques, and mindfulness. Some people use yoga as a form of exercise, integrating difficult poses and challenging movements to strengthen their bodies. Other people use yoga as a form of mindfulness training, focusing on the deep breathing and concentration associated with holding an individual pose.
Yoga and addiction recovery can blend both. However, yoga in addiction recovery treatment will typically emphasize basic poses and movements and their associated breathing.
What Are the Benefits of Yoga?
Yoga for addiction recovery helps train the mind to accept temporary discomfort (holding the pose) while focusing on the present (mindful breathing) and knowing that any discomfort goes away with time.
Yoga has been shown to help with the following:
- Chronic pain management
- High blood pressure
- Depression and anxiety
- Stress disorders
- Schizophrenia
- PTSD
- Insomnia
- Inflammation
- Erectile Dysfunction
How Yoga for Addiction Recovery Can Be Beneficial?
Yoga has many benefits, but one is yoga for addiction recovery.
Befriending Discomfort
We need to learn to remain comfortably uncomfortable. This is something that helps us deal with situations where a work project doesn’t go the way we planned, a friend doesn’t respond how we expected them to, or we are experiencing physical or emotional discomfort.
The idea of samskara or “habit” states that there is a relationship between habit and comfort.
We return to habits because they are comfortable.
The unfortunate truth is that the majority of people who complete rehab will relapse at some point. If you can avoid a relapse within the first year or two of getting clean, your chances of postponing that relapse or avoiding it altogether go up significantly. However, with addiction, habits are not something you want to return to again and again because those same habits lead to a cycle of substance abuse.
For this reason, yoga in addiction recovery plays a vital role: yoga can reduce the risk of relapse early on by teaching you to befriend discomfort. Yoga in addiction recovery can help you become more comfortable with discomfort, which helps you break unhealthy habits.
Self-Soothing
Yoga therapy for addiction can also teach you self-soothing tactics. To alleviate addictive behaviors, you need to learn that in the moment of discomfort, the power lies with you to do something about that discomfort.
When children are anxious, parents put a hand on their children to soothe them. This idea is something you can do for yourself through yoga for addiction recovery.
Research shows that someone with an addiction may not even realize they have the power or ability to self-soothe. People who struggle with addiction don’t look to themselves to self-soothe. Instead, they turn to drugs or alcohol.
Yoga and addiction recovery teaches you that you can address discomfort in a healthy way, from within, using elements of yoga. Yoga for addiction helps you avoid reaching for the unhealthy or destructive alternative when you feel discomfort.
Are There Rehab Centers That Offer Yoga Therapy?
Yoga and addiction recovery come in many forms.
- You might participate in a slow, easy class that includes a Vinyasa. A vinyasa is the same change and movement as inhalation and exhalation mentioned above in the example.
- You might participate in a slightly more intense class like hot yoga, where you are holding poses for a count of 10 full breaths before transitioning into something else, all the while doing so in a very hot room to encourage sweating.
- You might find a much more intense class that integrates a lot of interval training, where you go through a set of moves for a specific amount of time and then repeat that set 3 or 4 times.
With facilities like Peninsula Health Center, you can find yoga therapy taught by professionals, which fits your recovery goals and your physical and mental state of being.
Peninsula Health Center Offers Holistic Treatment and Yoga For Addiction Recovery
With Peninsula Health Center, yoga for addiction recovery is one of many alternative treatment options we provide at our holistic drug rehab in California. Our team consists of top-tier experts in their fields, offering services like mindfulness, yoga, massage therapy, and much more.
When you come to our facility, we will curate a personalized program that gives you the best chance of long-term recovery. During your initial assessment, we will review your personal preferences and history with substance abuse and mental health disorders and use that information to find the right type of yoga and addiction therapy. Let Peninsula Health Center help you start yoga for addiction at our Southern California addiction treatment center.
