How do you get healthy by working out? The most obvious answer is that it makes you stronger, but it can help out your mental health as well.
Mental Benefits:
In your brain, you have different chemicals that produce different emotions. Dopamine makes you happy, cortisol and adrenaline make you anxious and/or stressed, oxytocin makes you feel love, and serotonin makes you feel content. Low levels of these chemicals can cause depression and make you sad. When you are feeling sad, exercise might not be the thing that you most want to do, but actually, it can help you increase serotonin levels. Studies show that exercise can treat mild to moderate depression as effectively as antidepressant medication—but without the side effects that certain medicines have. Exercise works even better on anxiety. You evolved from cave people, and the only stress they had was something chasing them or them hunting something. The way you would work off stress was running away from the thing chasing you, and your body hasn’t worked itself out of that evolutionary feature. ADHD is also affected by exercise, as physical activity immediately boosts the brain’s dopamine and serotonin levels, both of which affect focus and attention. Even if you don’t have these mental conditions, studies show that you on average sleep better after a physical activity. People who exercise also have a sharper memory, average higher self-esteem, and stronger resilience.
This sounds awesome! What should I start doing for exercise?
Believe it or not, you don’t need to be part of an official club or gym to reap these benefits. 30 minutes a day at moderate intensity is good enough for most adults. If you have a dog, you could take them for a long walk and that works. If not, a light jog or stroll with some earbuds in is enough. Even gardening for about one hour or playing on a playground can check your exercise goal. Of course, belonging to a gym or a group is great as well. It can help motivate you more due to good peer pressure and a supporting community. This does have its downsides, though. If you’re just starting out, and there are a lot of very fit people in your class, you could feel like you have to prove yourself. Just remember, they have been in your spot, and this is their best day versus your first day. Make sure you like the gym, the coaches, and the people there before you fully commit. If it were up to me, I would find a gym that I enjoy going to, and try to go around three times a week. For the other two days, I would try to go for walks or some form of exercise.
In conclusion, exercise is useful for your mental health, it’s useful for your physical health, and it can be easy to achieve.
RELATED STORIES:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1074418/full
https://www.helpguide.org/wellness/fitness/the-mental-health-benefits-of-exercise
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9902068/
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Join a gym using this link: https://www.lafitness.com/Pages/clubhome.aspx?clubid=1439&utm_source=google&utm_medium=googlemaps&utm_campaign=maps
