Your mood benefits from just 20 minutes of exercise can last up to 12 hours!
When you have anxiety or depression, exercise often seems like the last thing you want to do. But once you get motivated, exercise can make a big difference.
Exercise helps prevent and improve a number of health problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes and arthritis. Research on anxiety, depression and exercise shows that the psychological and physical benefits of exercise can also help reduce anxiety and improve mood.
The mood benefits from just 20 minutes of exercise can last up to 12 hours.
How does exercise help depression and anxiety?
Regular exercise helps ease depression in a number of ways:
By releasing feel-good brain chemicals like endorphins and dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that creates feelings of pleasure and happiness. Studies suggest that as we age, we’re constantly losing our stores of dopamine, which is why we should exercise regularly to release dopamine.
Exercise reduces the levels of the stress hormones cortisol, which is the body’s primary stress hormone, and adrenaline which stimulates your fight or flight response and creates feelings of anxiety.
Staying active and exercising on a regular basis has been shown to improve sleeping problems. Not only can regular exercise significantly improve your sleep quality, it can also give you that pep that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning and do things.
Regular exercise has many psychological and emotional benefits, too:
· Gain confidence. Meeting exercise goals or challenges, even small ones, can boost your self-confidence. Getting in shape can also make you feel better about your appearance.
· Take your mind off worries. Exercise is a distraction that can get you away from the cycle of negative thoughts that feed anxiety and depression.
· Get more social interaction. Exercise and physical activity may give you the chance to meet or socialise with others.
· Cope in a healthy way. Doing something positive to manage anxiety or depression is a healthy coping strategy. Trying to feel better by drinking alcohol, dwelling on how badly you feel, or hoping anxiety or depression will go away on its own can lead to worsening symptoms.
We have a great team at Anytime Fitness Mandurah that can help you find the right exercise plan for your current level of fitness. We’re also open to members 24 hours a day, so you can come in and train whenever you want.
The team at Anytime Fitness Mandurah can help design an exercise program just for you. For more information call us on 9583 4715 or click here for a 7 Day Free Pass to get started today.
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