Jaime's Fantastically Fun Yoga & Mindfulness

Kids Yoga for Calming Anxiety

Find out how yoga can help your kids with anxiety and stress, with some simple yoga exercises your kids can try at home.

The positive effects of yoga on anxiety in adults has been well documented, with continuing research looking into how yoga helps moderate stress. As more children practice yoga and mindfulness too, there is now research looking into the positive effects of yoga practice in schools and more. We thought we’d share more on how yoga can help little minds as well as grown-up ones…

Children’s yoga has been linked with growing confidence, better results in school, stress management and more. It is thought that through breathing and looking ‘inwards’ rather than to the busy outside world, yoga helps children deal better with the stresses they face in everyday life.

Educationalist Sir Anthony Seldon has previously commented that “Mindfulness or meditation has been shown to be an invaluable tool to help bolster young people’s resilience to psychological stress. It also boosts concentration, depth of thought, happiness and achievement”. Minister of education Edward Timpson also recently spoke out saying that yoga and mindfulness should be practiced in all schools “to enable all children to enjoy good mental health and emotional wellbeing”.

Frontiers in Psychiatry talk about yoga as a powerful tool to minimise anxiety and encourage self-regulation in children. Whilst research is still growing in this area, they have a brilliant article pulling together theories on the benefits of children’s yoga for mental health further.

Thanks to our recent teacher survey 2016 we know that when practiced regularly, yoga can have a positive impact on children’s wellbeing, with 99.7 percent of teachers agreeing that they saw positive changes in their classrooms. One teacher even commented “I have several children (in my class) with anxiety. When I put on Cosmic Kids (yoga) I see a marked change in their anxiety”.

Yoga can help calm children from nursery ages, to teenagers through:

– Breathing

Controlled breathing promotes calm, helps relax the body and releases muscle tension. Because of this, using breathing in children’s yoga is a great way of encouraging them to release stress and anxiety.

– Mindfulness

Taking time out from screens, distractions and the stresses of the day to look inwards and think about how we feel in the moment can help to manage anxiety. Mindfulness like this can be incorporated into kids’ yoga and give even young children a moment of calm and clarity.

– Exercise and Strengthening

Many forms of exercise are said to have positive effects on stress, helping to release endorphins that reduce our feelings of anxiety and also trigger positive feelings. One great thing about kids’ yoga is that it is inclusive, meaning children who may not always enjoy sport can exercise and feel the benefits of strengthening through yoga.

Kids’ Yoga for Calming Anxiety

Here are five Cosmic Kids yoga adventures especially created by Jaime to help relieve stress for kids from 3-9 years old. Try them at home and let us know how you get on!

 


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