Just by being more active and making your heart pump really fast, you can save time waiting in the hospital for your nasty-tasting medicine.

You already know a few physical benefits of exercise to your physical health but how does it affect your mental health?

Exercise for mental health

Any exercise is useful and it can be added to any of your free time or hobbies you’re currently doing.

• Finished an episode of a series on Netflix?
• Scrolling through Instagram and watching everyone’s stories?
• Purchased an item online with your hard-earned money?
• Thinking about what to eat or ordering take-out online?
• Already reached this far reading this post?

Start doing a few minutes of stretches or even better a couple of push-ups.

What I am trying to say is that just by moving around more and doing some sort of physical activity, your body feels much better and even prevents mental illness.

Not only will you raise your physical fitness but also your mental health.

What benefits of exercise to mental health?

1. Ease depression and anxiety symptoms

   Studies have shown that physical activity helps with moderate depression and anxiety.

   With the advancement of medicine and its convenience, we tend to rely on antidepressant medication but there are still some nasty side effects if you don’t take it properly.

   In this case, if you can just add a moderate exercise program to your daily routine, it will help you fight off depression and anxiety just the same without side effects and even increase your mental well-being.

   Exercise is a natural and effective anti-anxiety treatment. It relieves tension and stress, boosts physical and mental energy, and enhances well-being by releasing endorphins.

   Endorphins are powerful chemicals in your brain that energize your spirits and make you feel good. Produced from the brain and spinal cord that brings out feelings of happiness and euphoria, helping you cope with pain and stress hormones better.

2. Decrease stress levels

   Another mental health benefit of exercise is helping you deal with stress. Ever experienced insomnia, pounding pulse, and tightness in the chest(maybe you’re in love)? Such discomfort can be solved by regular exercise.

   Increasing your heart rate can actually reverse stress-induced brain damage by stimulating the production of neurohormones like norepinephrine, which not only improve cognition and mood but improve thinking clouded by stressful events. (Walden University)

3. Sharper memory and thinking

   Have trouble learning new skills or retaining information?

   Exercises that help you sweat a lot will produce more of your brain cells which help in the sharpening of your memory.

   Studies on mice and humans indicate that cardiovascular exercise creates new brain cells—a process called neurogenesis—and improves overall brain performance.

   These brain cells help you keep mentally sharp, and prevent cognitive decline and memory loss by strengthening the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory and learning.

4. Boost self-esteem and self-confidence

   The sense of achievement when you look at yourself in the mirror and notice small changes in your body such as toner legs/arms, slimmer physique and you fit better in your clothes than before. That feeling increases your mental toughness when faced with challenging tasks.

   In our lives at least once, we unconsciously use negative self-talk and focus on the negatives in our life while ignoring the positives.

   With regular exercise, you’ll gain a sense of accomplishment, and that will shine through with your confidence.

   Treat exercise as a long-term investment in your mind, body, and soul. Higher self-esteem means interacting with you will be a lot more fun with the positive mood around you and can help you socialize easier.

5. Increased concentration

   It can be difficult to concentrate for a long period of time, especially in the modern day with social media constantly trying to grab attention and keep you hooked on it.

   Exercise can help you take a break from all the digital distractions and focus on one of the most important things in life, which is your health.

   Physical activity immediately boosts the brain’s dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin levels—all of which affect focus and attention. In this way, exercise works in much the same way as ADHD medications. (HelpGuide)

   Focused attention will assist you in studying, enable faster comprehension, longer focus on a task, job, or goal, and enable you to ignore meaningless and irrelevant thoughts.

Importance of Mental Health

Mental health is essential for leading a happy life. It affects how we feel, think, and live our lives by encompassing our emotional, psychological, and sociological well-being. Prioritizing mental health is, of course, critical.

We all know how challenging life can be and how it’s unfair but it is the struggles in overcoming them that make it worth living.

Most of our mental health issues come from constant worries about the “potential” outcome.

This is why your mental health is so important because it’s linked to your quality of life.

If you ignore your mental health you tend to find yourself feeling a sense of hopelessness, worthlessness, and sadness which leads you to think you have no control over your life.

Taking medications

You get busy with work because either you absolutely need the money or just want to follow the “hustle” culture. That means you don’t have the time to lift weights at the gym so you look for another simple option. Medicine.

For one thing, antidepressant medications generally take several weeks or months to show their full effect.

Exercise can improve mood almost immediately, making it a valuable supplement to frontline treatments such as drugs or therapy, notes Brett Gordon, an exercise psychology researcher at the Penn State College of Medicine. (Bob Holmes)

Jacob Meyer, an exercise psychologist at Iowa State University found out after doing a survey on over 3000 Americans that those who consistently did physical activity before the Covid lockdown later became less active because of it.

They reported more depression and poorer mental health than those who didn’t consistently do any physical activity.

Ironically, those who had not exercised regularly pre-Covid didn’t report much change. “When you’re already at zero, where do you go?” says Meyer.

Another research done by Northwestern University found that more than half the people who take antidepressants for depression never get relief.

One of the main reasons they found out is that these medications mostly focus on relieving stress but not healing your depression.

Moreover, your doctor may recommend that you change the dose of your current antidepressant, change to another antidepressant, or add another antidepressant or other types of medication to your current treatment. (Daniel K. Hall-Flavin, M.D.)

Negative effects of mental health

You might not notice some of this mental illness but if negative thoughts keep popping up in your mind then sooner or later they will harm your emotional well-being.

Examples of signs and symptoms include: (MayoClinic)

• Feeling sad or down
• Confused thinking or reduced ability to concentrate
• Excessive fears or worries, or extreme feelings of guilt
• Extreme mood changes of highs and lows
• Withdrawal from friends and activities
• Significant tiredness, low energy, or problems sleeping
• Detachment from reality (delusions), paranoia, or hallucinations
• Inability to cope with daily problems or stress
• Trouble understanding and relating to situations and to people
• Problems with alcohol or drug use
• Major changes in eating habits
• Sex drive changes
• Excessive anger, hostility, or violence
• Suicidal thinking

How mental health can impact society

Communities prosper when the mental health needs of community members are met. By having mental clarity we have more energy to spend time with our peers.

It increases your sense of happiness and well-being, and may even help you live longer.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that difficulty focusing often accompanies depression.

Reduced productivity can limit one’s ability to earn promotions, excel, and build successful relationships with supervisors and co-workers, which ultimately affects job satisfaction. (Tulane University)

Poor mental health influences people’s relationships with their children, spouses, relatives, friends, and co-workers. Since we know that poor mental health makes us difficult people to interact it can lead us to social isolation and that will feed depression.

Starting out

Physical activity on a regular basis may not be part of your routine. So how much exercise do you need in order to raise your mental health?

Well, I have some good news for you, your exercise program doesn’t have to be extreme to the point where you’re sweat is dripping all over the place.

Australia’s physical activity and sedentary guidelines recommend adults aim for at least 2.5 hours of moderate physical activity per week, such as a brisk walk or swimming.

On the other hand 1.25 hours minimum of vigorous physical activity per week, such as jogging, fast cycling, or a team sport.

Any other forms of exercise are better than none. Go for a short walk while listening to music or outdoor activities such as hiking and camping.

Looking for the best exercise ideas? Any physical activity that you enjoy doing is the best option since it will help you with being consistent with it.

Whether it is weight training to see your muscles grow bigger or martial arts to beat someone up…I mean to protect yourself and others.

Conclusion

When life gets rough and you start feeling overwhelmed start by doing a few minutes of stretches or even better a couple of push-ups.

Not only will it help you with stress relief but also with your weight loss, increase in energy levels, reduced anxiety, decreased blood pressure, better sleep, and overall mood.

Exercise is a healthy way to deal with constant worries running through your mind.

When you have good mental health conditions, not only will you feel better but your social interactions will also improve and that can be crucial to both your professional and personal life.