Regular Physical Activity Will Boost Your Mood and Reduce Stress

The Positive Impact of Physical Activity on Well-Being

Everyone understands the importance of exercise for physical health, but modern research continues to show how psychological health is intrinsically related to physical wellbeing. By engaging in regular activity, it is possible to boost mental wellness significantly.

Because of this change in how we perceive exercise as it relates to wellness, it becomes even more important to remain active to keep the body healthy and make our emotional responses positive and stable.

When it comes to being active, you have many different options. You don't have to get a gym membership or run a mile every day; you just have to take conscientious steps to boost your activity levels in ways you enjoy or are passionate about!

What is Physical Activity?

Physical activity is any action you take that burns calorie and activates your skeletal muscles. The options at your disposal are practically limitless, whether you like to jog, run, play basketball, bike, or lift weights!

How Much Should I Exercise?

As of today, wellness researchers suggest that adults should engage in between 1 and 2 hours of physical activity per week. This pertains to both modest exercise and high-intensity exercise.

Examples of low-impact practices that are good for your health are bike-riding, hiking, and walking. If you're looking for something that will get you in even better shape, consider jump rope, aerobics, swimming laps, or running. If your pulse and breathing speed up at least modestly, you can count the activity toward your weekly goal.

What is Mental Wellness?

Maintaining psychological and emotional well-being is just as important as supporting physical health. Mental wellness is a complicated subject, including but not limited to the following:

Maintaining a sense of value and purpose

Feeling free to make our own decisions and make our own choices

Having a sense of belonging

Being able to roll with the punches and appreciate the positive experiences in one's life

Caring about oneself and being able to enjoy relationships with others

It's important to realize that you don't have to be ideally content all of the time to have good mental well-being. Happiness and sorrow, pain and pleasure are experiences that all people have. It's about maintaining general positivity and keeping yourself on a path that facilitates happiness.

How Does Exercise Improve Wellbeing?

As we mentioned earlier, the human mind does not exist in a vacuum separate from the body. Maintaining physical health facilitates an improved mindset and better psychological health and wellbeing.

Studies have shown that even brief periods of physical activity can bolster our mood. A quick-paced ten-minute walk has been scientifically shown to improve mood, increase energy, and boost cognitive awareness.

Other studies have shown that regular exercise can mitigate anxiety and stress and boost self-esteem in the short and long term. For people that suffer from depression, anxiety disorders, and other psychological conditions, exercise has also been shown to soften the symptoms of these disorders while significantly improving mental wellbeing.

The Effects of Exercise on Mood

In addition to the effects on long-term psychological wellbeing, exercise immediately impacts mood and mood stability. Participants were asked to self-report their mood after different activity levels in one particular study.

Participants who engaged in sedentary activity were found to be in worse spirits than those involved in light exercise such as cleaning or taking a walk.

There is also a strong correlation between physical activity and a variety of particular feelings associated with psychological wellbeings, such as remaining calm and maintaining wakefulness and focus.

One interesting thing about exercise is that it tends to have the most potent effects on people when they struggle. People who rated themselves lower in mood experienced more significant improvements than their peers initially in better spirits.

What Level of Activity is Most Effective at Improving Mood?

Research has shown that even a little bit of exercise puts us in a better mood, but those benefits are amplified when we engage in regular physical activity. The most effective form of mood-enhancing exercise is low-impact cardiovascular exercise.

A 2 1/2-3 month exercise regimen of thirty minutes of activity three to five times per week significantly improved various factors associated with positive emotional well-being.

The Effects of Exercise and Activity on Stress

Above all else, stress has a more degrading effect on psychological health than anything else. Stress can be defined as any outside agitation that causes tension or emotional distress.

Stress directly leads to increased cortisol levels and the activation of the fight-or-flight responses. Stress puts us on edge, and is very draining on the human body, both physically and psychologically.

We act differently when stressed, and we tend to feel emotions more powerfully, predominantly negative ones.

Other hormones also play a role in stress, including noradrenaline and adrenaline. These hormones boost our pulse and increase our blood pressure, designed to help us escape potentially harmful situations.

Stress is a good thing in small doses. It motivates us and helps keep us safe. The problem is chronic stress. When we are chronically stressed, it causes us to become depressed and frazzled. It makes us more likely to sleep poorly and even makes us more likely to make poor dietary choices!

As we mentioned earlier, physical and psychological well-being are intrinsically connected. The same goes for physical and mental stress. Physical activity provides an outlet for psychological stress. Individuals that maintain high activity levels are clearly shown to have less stress than people that are more sedentary.

The Effect of Exercise on Self-Esteem

It appears that Self-Esteem is strongly correlated with activity level. Less active people tend to have lower self-esteem and are more likely to get down on themselves. It's not all about looking better; the effects of regular exercise on self-esteem are apparent even in the absence of physical changes. Being active helps us cope, and it helps us maintain a stronger connection with our bodies and with the world around us.

Word Count: 998