Yoga Changed How I Sleep

Do you wish you could sleep all through the night? Are you not flexible and clumsy? If you answered yes, you sound just like me!

Yoga is something I avoided for years. I seriously mean years. Things started to change when I was given a yoga mat as a gift. I remember opening it thinking, 'What the hell. Why this?' When really all I said was thank you and stored it in my closet.

Fast forward four years, and now I was being forced to do yoga warm-ups in a required class. I kept thinking 'How the hell am I going to get out of this one.' At the end of my class, my professor said we could join him before class to do yoga and loosen up, so we aren't as stiff in class.

I decided I was going to take him up on that offer. It seemed like a good idea at the time. When that day came, I broke out my yoga mat and headed to class. You know, the one that was still wrapped in my closet.

Afterwards I realized how hard yoga is.

Sure, we did beginner type poses. They were "easy" and didn't "exhaust" me. They just showed me I was not flexible and too clumsy to do yoga. Or so I thought.

Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon we would start our day with a simple yoga exercise. Eventually a month into it and I was like a pro. I continued with it even after class ended. I was feeling amazing! I could do this everyday!

Of course, I didn't. The new semester was upon me, and I seriously had a lot on my plate. I was juggling an internship, two senior projects, 4 classes, performing and maintaining a social life. Of course my sleep schedule took a major hit. I tried everything to get it back on track even after I graduated college but couldn't. I had a big girl job and spent a really long time on my commute.

Eventually, this plague (yes, I am calling Coronavirus a plague), came about and shut everything down. I was stuck at home again, without a job. Yay me!

I was sleeping horribly. Waking up every other hour, not being able to fall asleep until 6 in the morning, never really getting a deep sleep. You name it. The start of quarantine, I took up running. I realized streching doesn't help enough, I have to really work my body like I used to.

One night, before bed I decided to do the yoga exercise I learned from school. I SLEPT LIKE A BABY. Every night since then I have done yoga and fallen asleep at a normal time and stayed asleep until morning. Not like 4 or 5 in the morning either, like actually 8:30 or later. I woke up feeling refreshed and energized. I hadn't felt like this in forever.

Each night I added more and more yoga poses to my exercise. Very quickly I was able to find which poses really relaxed me; which poses challenged me or got my heart rate up. Afther that it was easy to differentiate which yoga poses to do before bed to relax and sleep AMAZINGLY and which ones to do before/after a run or workout.

Yoga improved my sleeping habits, help set me on a structured schedule, and improved my mood, flexibility and balance. For anyone remotely curious about yoga, I urge you to try it. Now is the time! You don't even have to use a yoga mat if that's what is stopping you!