Top 5 Benefits of Yoga in the Healthcare Industry

Yoga has been gaining extreme popularity for the past decade or so and for good reason, too. While yoga is a great way to lose weight, toning the body and adding to your daily routine, it also has numerous benefits with it comes to health, especially for those who work in the healthcare industry.

Doctors, medical assistants as well as nurses who practice yoga do so because of the following benefits.

1. It Helps Reduce Stress

Being part of the healthcare industry means that your job isn't just hectic, but it is extremely stressful as well. It doesn't matter if you're a doctor or a medical assistant, but practicing yoga can help reduce the impact of stress on your health. Based on the information provided by the experts at MedAssisting.org, even medical assistants act as an extra pair of hands to a health care team. Because they have the task of greeting patients, measuring vital signs, performing lab tests as well as scheduling appointments, they do so much administrative as well as physical work which can accumulate their stress levels. Adding yoga to their daily routine can help bring down that stress, prevent it from affecting their health and allow them to release the negative energy in a positive way.

2. It Helps Improve Sleep

Most of the people in the healthcare industry work long shifts and can have really disruptive sleeping patterns. However, when practicing yoga on a regular basis, it can help reduce the stress as well as create a routine for the body to understand, making it relax. This ensures that the body gets a deeper and more peaceful sleep, improving the quality of sleep of those in the healthcare industry.

3. It Stimulates Brain Function

Practicing yoga allows the brain to function a whole lot better due to its ability to boost energy levels. Some studies showed that yoga not only improved the brain's executive functions, but also a person's mood. When taking that into the healthcare industry, it is a great tool to help the staff undergoing long, multiple shifts focus and boost their energy levels to get them to survive the long hours, as well as elevate their mood to be able to put up with the stressful environment surrounding them. When a person is exhausted, they tend to lose control over their behavior and emotions and can feel overwhelmed. However, practicing yoga can also help regulate that and allow doctors, nurses as well as medical assistants to control their emotions, and behaviors, to make them amiable towards patients no matter how long they've been working.

4. It Improves Working Memory

Yoga doesn't just help regulate emotions and behaviors, but it also improves the speed and accuracy of working memory a whole lot more than any other aerobic exercise. While the effects are usually evident straight after the session, they are short term, but can really enhance a person's ability to perform their work with immense accuracy. Not only that, but yoga can also aid in mental flexibility, multi-tasking and improving memory amongst older adults, making it an essential tool for any person, especially someone who works in healthcare.

5. It Develops Strength

While yoga seems like an activity that doesn't require much physical effort, it is actually a very useful form of exercise to build strength. Some of the yoga poses work towards your progression in becoming fit and help build your muscles along the way, which can also impact your weight loss and reduce stress levels in the process.

Studies conducted by The American Council on Exercise showed that those who performed 8 weeks of Hatha Yoga not only increased their muscle mass, but also improved their physical strength, making them able to perform more push-ups and sit-ups after the 8-week period. Taking this and applying it to the healthcare industry will enable those who practice yoga to be able to withstand and endure more physical effort without getting burnt out as quickly as they used to.  Yoga not only builds strength but through the different poses it offers, it also increases flexibility, improves the overall stamina, and allows a person to endure more physical activity without getting tired quite as fast as their norm.

Working in the health care system calls for a lot of determination, passion and the physical, mental and emotional ability to be able to endure the stress of it all. Practicing yoga on a regular basis can really aid a person in improving their health, monitoring and reducing their stress levels, as well as boosting their strength to improve their physical form, too.