Abstract

Background: Quality of Life of a person is a concept indicating to what extent he/she encircles “the goodness” of multiple aspects in his/her life. This includes psychological and physical wellness, life fulfilment, work satisfaction, and satisfaction in personal relationships. Yoga is a practice contributing to both physical and psychological health benefits. Objective: The study has attempted to analyze quality of life of people before and after the practice of yoga and understand the influence of the characteristics of the respondents on quality of life achieved after starting yoga practice. Materials and Methods: The study was carried out using a questionnaire among a sample of 100 yoga practitioners, which contained the items of the WHOQOL User Manual, sex, marital status, period of yoga practice of the respondents, and whether they had any psychological problem/s during the past six months of this study. The data was analyzed as proportion and through statistical test. Results: The study has shown the influence of yoga practice in improving Quality of Life (QOL) of the respondents, with statistically significant difference in the QOL scores before and after the practice of yoga. The positive QOL parameters have improved after the practice of yoga, while the negative parameters have reduced after its practice. Statistically significant difference was observed between the mean score of many of the QOL parameters before and after the practice of yoga. Unmarried yoga practitioners got a higher score than married respondents, higher period of yoga practice resulted in a comparatively higher QOL score than lesser period of practice, and those who did not report psychological problem/s during the past six months got a higher QOL score than those who had such problem. Conclusions: The study has clearly shown the influence of yoga practice in improving the Quality of Life of the respondents, as compared to before its practice. Conducting such studies by yoga training centres and disseminating the findings to more people through seminars and other awareness programmes would probably help in improving the number of people practicing measures such as yoga.

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