Exercise for Anxiety: How Physical Activity Promotes Anxiety Relief

Exercise Stays a Step Ahead

Exercise is a proactive way to safeguard your mental health. Whether it’s going for a jog, walking to the park, or practicing yoga, you can stay a step ahead of anxiety. Simply moving your body helps to relieve the most common anxiety symptoms.

Exercise activates the creative part of your brain. It’s not uncommon to realize you’ve solved a problem simply by going for a jog. Also, exercising has a way of helping you feel less worried and afraid.

The key to ongoing symptom relief is to establish a regular exercise regime. Exercise for anxiety is most helpful when it’s strategic. A steady routine of physical conditioning can also help symptoms of depression.

Exercise Loosens You Up

As you may know, anxiety isn’t only experienced in your mind. Rather, it’s an experience that resonates throughout your entire body. Manifesting in tense muscles and an overall feeling of tightness, anxiety is uncomfortable.

For instance, tense muscles can wreak havoc on your downtime. Anxiety makes it hard to get comfortable or even to relax. But exercise is a beneficial way to release tension that is pent-up in your muscles. The movement sort of forces your muscles to “let go.”

Because of the tension, anxiety often causes unexplained aches and pains. When you exercise for anxiety, these painful annoyances tend to dissipate. Exercise helps your body breath more fully as well. Even when you’re not focused on cardio, your lungs respond positively to bodily movement.

Exercise Releases a Happy Chemical Concoction

Endorphins are the body’s happy juice. These natural chemicals are well-known for enhancing your mood. And they work in a fascinating way.

Your body releases endorphins when it recognizes that you’re in pain. As you exercise, endorphins do their job of relieving the pain your body feels as it labors. As a bonus, endorphins also lift your mood. They do this by decreasing the cortisol your body released in response to stress.

The best way to fight symptoms of anxiety is by aiming at the chemical producing them—cortisol. So, to exercise for anxiety means you’re purposefully releasing endorphins to dominate over the negative cortisol in your system.

Exercise Trains Your Body to React

When you exercise, you raise your threshold for things like pain, discomfort, and fear. Pushing through that extra mile on your jog or accomplishing that difficult yoga pose—these are no small feats. And both your body and mind recognize this.

Anxiety, when left unchallenged, can make your body incredibly sensitive to stress. Often reaching the point of a full-blown panic attack, anxiety can rue the day.

Exercise puts anxiety in check by decreasing how intensely your body responds to it. Instead of being overwhelmed by shortness of breath, you’ll find that you have a larger capacity to control your breathing, for instance.

—

If you’re ready to find relief for your anxiety, please reach out to me. I can help identify key issues in your life that cause grief and work together with you to find relief.