coping skills — Positive Psychology and Mindfulness Practices to Help You Thrive

Yoga: Overcoming My Stress and My Assumptions

For a long time, I had a lot of false assumptions about yoga. Before trying it out myself, the only examples I had of individuals doing yoga in my life were women, so naturally I thought it was mainly an exercise for women. Yoga seemed like a weird workout where you sweat and twist yourself into pretzels. I figured you had to be flexible to do it, and I have always been very inflexible. So all-in-all, I thought that yoga was not for me. As I got into college, I got very stressed with everything that I felt I had to do. While studying psychology, I learned that exercise is crucial to regulating anxiety and other symptoms like depression (APA, 2017). However, I have never been good at consistently going to the gym. At that time, someone recommended yoga to me, citing all the benefits of how it might help with anxiety. I was skeptical because of all of my misguided assumptions. I lingered on the idea and when the time to sign up for more college classes came, I noticed my school offered a yoga class for a credit. I figured if I had to attend a yoga class at school, then I would be more likely to consistently do yoga.

Usually, when people think of experiencing grief, they think of someone who is mourning the death of a loved one. While this is a very real and plausible grief situation, there are other less obvious circumstances in which grief is encountered. Grieving the death of someone is the most common way to grieve, but the loss of a place or the loss of time and associated opportunities are other ways to experience grief (Gitterman & Knight, 2019). The social acknowledgement of grief in response to a non-death loss is minimal, and oftentimes people who grieve these losses suffer silently. Therefore, I’ll be exploring ways in which people who grieve a death or non-death loss can cope and overcome these trials.