Can Yoga Really Help You Learn to Focus and Calm Down?

Yes, yoga can do all of that and more!

Yoga can be very beneficial for people with ADHD for a number of reasons:

• It can help you focus and concentrate
• It can help you calm down
• It can help with strength, balance, and flexibility
• If practiced regularly, it can teach you about perseverance and patience

Also, here is another resource on 104 benefits of yoga.

How Can Stretching and Bending Do All of That?

Yoga can be much more than just physical exercise, if that’s what you want, but as simply exercise, it can do many things to help your body and mind.

Focus and Concentration

As women with ADHD, we struggle learning to focus and concentrate. Yoga can help us do that for a number of reasons:

Unlike jumping jacks or sit ups, most of us don’t know a lot about yoga poses; therefore, there is much to learn. Learning something new will require focus and concentration.

Also, while a jumping jack is pretty much a jumping jack, yoga poses are more precise. You need to learn to put your body into the correct position in order to gain the most benefits and not hurt yourself.

Finally, yoga is exercise, and it has been proven that exercising for at least 30 minutes can increase your concentration for as long as 24 hours afterward!

Calming

Yoga will help calm your mind because you are focusing on the practice itself – getting the pose right – and not on whatever your mind has chosen to worry about.

The slower pace of a yoga practice, as well as the atmosphere in the classroom (if you choose that route) will also contribute to a peaceful mind.

Strength, Balance, and Flexibility

As we age, strength, balance, and flexibility become increasingly more important.

Balance is especially important as we become older, because it can reduce our risk of falls and injuries. Yoga will help with all three.

Perseverance and Patience

Like anything new we choose to learn, yoga can be challenging at first. Being willing to show up, again and again, and to try to learn more and master or improve what we have learned so far, will teach us perseverance and patience. While those of us with ADHD may have already had many lessons on persisting and trying one more time, patience, as they say, is a virtue, and we could probably all use a little more of that!

How Can You Learn to Do Yoga?

Finding a place to learn yoga shouldn’t be hard at all!

Although I live about 50 miles from Chicago, I am in Indiana, in the middle of farmland.

And yet, my little town (with 2 stoplights now), offers yoga in the park every Saturday morning during nice weather. At least one of the gyms offers it as well. I think most gyms do these days.

And I don’t know if they still offer it, but one of the nearby farms was offering goat yoga for a while. Yes, you do yoga with baby goats. Well, you do the yoga, they basically climb all over you. It sounded like fun to me, but then I like baby goats.

There’s also the YMCA to check out, as well as community education programs.

There are yoga studios, too. There are three within easy driving reach of my house.

And if you’d prefer something more private, say at home, there are plenty of options there too.

Our cable provider has yoga classes on demand through the Gaia channel. You have to pay for the actual channel, but they usually have a class that you can sample for a while.

And I think I mentioned the app Glo the other day when I wrote about meditation.

And of course, there’s always YouTube. I like this series a lot. And if you can’t do the whole video, do what you can.

Yoga. Everybody’s Doing It!

If you still aren’t convinced about the benefits of doing yoga, maybe this video will help. I think it’s very inspiring.