how exercise can improve your mental health
Forming a positive relationship between exercise and mental health is one of many helpful techniques to improve your overall mood and outlook on life. Exercise is often seriously underappreciated in its ability to make us feel better not just physically but mentally.
Why is exercise good for your mental health?
You already know that exercise is good for your body. But did you know it can also boost your mood, improve your sleep, and help you deal with depression, anxiety, stress, and more? Here are some of the reasons why exercise is good for your mental health:
1. Brain training - Exercising not only encourages the brain to release helpful, positive chemicals, but it can also increase the size of our hippocampus, the part of our brain responsible for our memory.
2. Outlet for frustrations - We all get angry and frustrated on occasion, and finding a healthy outlet for those feelings is important to ensure they don’t affect your health or personal relationships. By releasing serotonin, endorphins and other feel-good chemicals, exercise helps the frustration to subside.
3. Achievements in exercise - Exercise is a great way to set goals and pushing to achieve those goals gives us feelings of accomplishment and self-worth, which in turn makes us feel happier about our lives in general.
4. Natural energy source - While starting an exercise routine can feel exhausting and energy depleting. The more you exercise aerobically, the more mitochondria the body will produce in order to provide you with the appropriate amount of energy needed.
The most prominent benefit that physical exercise offers for our mental health is the release of feel-good brain chemicals like endorphins. Endorphins relieve pain and stress in the mind and give us a feeling of enjoyment during a physical activity. You might have heard about “the runner’s high” which essentially describes when exercise releases endorphins into your body.
Endorphins are one of the many neurotransmitters in our brain that determine how we think and feel about certain situations. When these are activated during exercise, they trigger the release of helpful chemicals throughout the body which not only help us get through the activity at hand, but improve our general mood. These chemicals include:
· Dopamine
· Norepinephrine
· Serotonin
· Adrenalin
This release of chemicals along with several other benefits of exercise offers is why it is such a useful course of treatment for a variety of mental health issues. Even a 30-45 minute walk either all at once or broken into 10-minute chunks has been shown to be beneficial for your mindset and mental health so you don’t have to do a hardcore HIIT workout to reap the benefits.
