How Exercise Improves Mental Health
The impacts of movement on mental health are well documented. They can be experienced personally, and are recognizeable right away. Taking a walk when you’re depressed, going on a bikeride daily, even a short jog to catch the bus, all increase our energy and mood.
The potential for exercise to improve your mental health is infinitely greater than that when the intention of the movement is to use the mind to understand the body and all of the ways it reflects the mind back to itself. So the question is to what extent are you using the mind well in your exercise habits?
The mind is how we notice sensations in our body. Sensation is our bodies language. It sends us signals of our emotional state, our need for a change of position, our misuse of the body. The problem is that we have been conditioned to ignore these signals. In some ways we have gotten confused on what they are saying. An example of that is, if everytime you felt thirst you drank soda, you may now recognize a thirst signal as a craving for soda. You may not notice an actual thirst. Other examples: Pain is one that is often ignored for the sake of getting a task done, or because of good old marketing taglines like “no pain, no gain.” Our body knows it doesn’t want to sit in a desk all day, it tells us, until it doesn’t anymore, or until some body part gets so out of whack, we cannot ignore it.
Now that you are considering that, imagine if you worked your way back to understanding and responding to your body fully. Imagine how your actual physical health improves. Imagine the mental health benefits of a body that functions well and feels good. When you invest your time in exercise that reconnects you with the bodies signals, the benefits are endless.
A question we could ask, is do you even know what it feels like to “feel good?” If you’re like most of us, and have had sedentary and repetitive work, you have tension and pain that may not even register as such because it is so normal to you. Your mental stress is similar. You have anxiety and stress and depression that may not register as significant because you have no comparison of a quiet and peaceful mind.
When it is normal in our society to feel bad, mentally and physically, and we accept that. There is very little effort made to truly change it, simply to mitigate it. So yes, exercise will improve your mental health. And when you exercise with the intention of connecting fully to your body, to learn and recognize what it is to feel good, then you practice that regularly, in 3, 6, and 12 months you will be meeting versions of you, you can’t yet fathom.