Yoga Poses to Help You Sleep Better

Your body requires enough sleep. But very often when bedtime comes at the end of a busy day, it’s hard to for your body and mind to slow down.

When you start looking into a sleep routine, you may be looking at better ways for sleep and relaxation.

For most people, the closest they get to adding yoga into a sleep routine is adding it as a meditation in the lotus position. So, you may not even think about doing yoga right before you go to bed as something that can help you sleep, but it can.

Certain yoga poses are known to help relax both the body and the mind. This helps your breathing and reduces stress.

That is why yoga exercises help promote a more restful sleep. Better sleep contributes to a better quality of life.

When you are well-rested, this allows the mind to function more optimally.

Here is a step-by-step yoga routine for sleep that you can do in your bed or beside your bed before sleep.

Forget counting sheep; ease your way into a better sleep with this yoga routine.

Yoga Poses – Downward Facing Dog

The downward-facing dog pose is the most common and where you should start. It works out the leg muscles and back muscles to remove tension. The concept of this pace is to make a triangle with you both.

Your feet are flat on the mat, and your hands are in front of your feet, making a triangle with the rear as the point.

This can be modified over time to be easy on the body and slowly move the feet and hands closer to make it a tighter, more flexible building move.

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Side Angle Pose

Moving out of the downward-facing dog pose, you can easily move into the side-angle pose. This has you rising up to a standing V shape, with the core being the point of the inverted V and your feet spread out flat on the ground.

Raise your arms and lean to one side and then the other. Your goal with this is to stretch your side muscles and do it slowly to work out any tension. You will hold and breath slowly through each side for at least twenty seconds.

Yoga Poses – Forward Bend

Moving out of the side angle pose, bring your feet together and bend at the waist. The idea with this bend is to be able to put your hands flat on the floor in front of your feet.

Though this may seem impossible to do, you can work your way to this.

The key point at first is to bend at the waist and try to touch your toes without causing harm to your body.

Lotus Pose

You can move to a sitting position once you have finished the forward bend. The ideal position is called the lotus pose. This has you sitting with your legs crossed and your hands turned palm up on your knees.

You can then close your eyes and begin your breathing techniques in slow, steady, meditative breaths.

Corpse Pose

The final pose is the corpse pose. This is done by laying flat on your back with your legs out, just slightly further than a shoulder-width apart. The soles of your feet should be facing outward.

Your arms should be at a 45-degree angle out to your sides, with your palms facing up. Lay in this pose for several minutes, breathing slowly.

By doing this routine as the end of your sleep ritual, you can find that you will sleep better over time.

If you share the bed or have kids, this can be tougher to do, but you can work around that and get your yoga routine together for bedtime and better sleep.

Consistency is important – you need to do your nighttime yoga regularly!