“Movement is medicine.” You may have heard this saying before, and it rings with truth. Walking, cardio, strength training, and all other forms of sport help us stay active and keep our bodies healthy. Needless to say, exercise and good health go hand in hand.
Not many people know how exercise also improves your mental health and your quality of life. Exercise is a form of physical stress, but can this physical stress relieve mental stress?
The answer is yes: exercise can beat mental stress and actually be relaxing. Learn about the connection with me, Mark Greenaway-Robbins, and find out how exercise benefits your overall health.
How Exercise Benefits Your Health
Staying active through exercise can offer numerous benefits, including:
Lifts Mood Naturally
If you’ve ever experienced the rush of feel-good sensations after engaging in physical activity, this is caused by endorphins, known as the “feel-good hormones”, lifting your mood and lowering stress.
Engaging in physical activities regularly keeps stress, anxiety, and low mood at bay. You start feeling better over time as physical activity becomes a part of your daily routine.
Keeps You Physically Fit
Remember the saying: “You don’t stop moving from growing old; you grow old from stopping moving.” This means that being active and on the move holds the key to being physically fit and able even in your old age.
Without regular movement and physical activity, your body slowly begins to lose its strength, stamina, and ability to function properly. Regular exercise promotes good health by boosting your energy levels and increasing muscle strength, which bolsters your ability to engage in other physical activities.
Helps You Live Longer
Seventy may be the new fifty, but only if you’re healthy. Regular physical activity can help you live longer and gain healthy extra years of life.
Staying active with exercise delays or prevents chronic diseases and conditions associated with ageing. Without a doubt, exercise is necessary for keeping you healthy for longer and maintaining your quality of life and independence as you age.
Keeps Health Conditions At Bay
Few things are more stressful than health issues. Different forms of exercise reduce stress and, by preventing illness, exercise has extra benefits for your mind.
Regular exercise cements good heart health by lowering blood pressure, improving cholesterol levels, and reducing blood sugar. Exercising can even reduce your risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, colon and breast cancers, osteoporosis and fractures, obesity, depression, and dementia.
Improves Self-Confidence and Self-Image
Keeping yourself fit can do wonders for your confidence levels. Exercise improves your strength and stamina, giving you an instant boost in your self-image, because how your body feels influences how your mind feels.
Plus, sticking to the discipline of regular movement helps you become more disciplined overall, so you’re better programmed to achieve your life goals.
How Exercise Improves Mental Health
We all understand how exercise brings remarkable changes to your body, metabolism, and spirit. But not many of us know that it also has a unique ability to exhilarate and relax us, stimulate and induce calm, counter depression and dissipate stress.
So, how does exercise improve mental health?
There are multiple explanations, some chemical, others behavioural. Various studies confirm the positive effects of exercise on your mental well-being.
Regular exercise lowers adrenaline and cortisol, your body’s stress hormones, while stimulating the production of endorphins, your body’s natural mood elevators and painkillers. That’s why you feel good as well as relaxed and positive after a hard workout session. This forms the neurological basis of how exercise contributes to good physical health.
The behavioural changes that exercise brings also help your mental well-being. As your strength and stamina increase, your self-image gets a boost. You gain confidence, a renewed sense of vigour and energy to succeed in tasks. You’re more focused and motivated, have a healthy appetite, are more conscious about your lifestyle choices, and have lower tension, stress and mental fatigue.
Ultimately, physical fitness with exercise and a healthy lifestyle can promote mental fitness and well-being.
Create Exercise as a Habit in My Sessions
Almost everyone knows it’s important to exercise to maintain good health. But not many of us can push past the barriers that prevent us from working out.
Being active doesn’t mean investing in an expensive gym membership or running marathons. It’s about finding a physical activity that you enjoy and gives you a sense of purpose or something to look forward to.
If you’re finding it difficult to establish a steady exercise habit and improve your wellbeing, my sessions can help. With therapy, you can instil the learned behaviour of exercising daily and maintaining your mental and physical well-being. As a registered counsellor and psychotherapist, I will work with you to make small but impactful changes. Positive change doesn’t mean uprooting your current routine, just building on it.
Text, call, or fill out a contact form to get in touch with me today.
