Sometimes I have a hard time deciding what topic I want to write about. Sometimes I have a million things I want to stuff into one post and other times I seem to have writer’s block and can’t get anything down. Today is neither of those. Today I want to talk about our mental health. These past 13 months have been some of the most challenging ever experienced. We haven’t seen loved ones in over a year, some have lost their jobs, kids miss their friends and sports teams. The covid pandemic has taken an incredible toll and much of that damage will be felt for years to come. For this reason, I want to bring up something that I think can help us ride out what will hopefully be the tail-end of the pandemic. That thing is exercise.
Really? Exercise? That’s what you want to talk about? It is, and for good reason. I know we have heard that exercise helps with our mental health, but I want to lay a little groundwork on what it’s doing for you and how it can help you get through some of these tough days. Exercise may be one of the most misunderstood forms of care and it’s time we rethink it. If you ask the average person what they think of exercise, they will liken it to a 30-minute torture session and they might rather listen to nails scraped across a chalkboard for the half-hour. I think under a lot of circumstances, this may be a fair response to exercise. However, I believe this is not due to exercise in and of itself, so much as it is our misunderstanding of how and why we should exercise. Let me ask you if this sounds familiar. You see yourself in the mirror at a new angle or roll the scale over another couple of digits and you snap. “That’s it I’m going to get in shape!” You buy a treadmill or a subscription to the latest fitness craze and tell yourself this time you are gonna work until the weight is gone, and then keep it off! After nearly killing yourself for two weeks, you decide it’s not worth it. You give up and use that new treadmill as a very expensive clothesline. This is not an abnormal chain of events, in fact, I would say it’s pretty much the norm. But what if we decided to exercise for another reason? Instead of exercising for weight loss and because we wanted to fit into our pants from 10 years ago.
What if we exercised for our mental health? What would that kind of exercise look like? Well, a good place to start would be doing something that you enjoy, or at the very least don’t mind. For many people, that’s a walk, a hike, or a leisurely bike ride around the neighbourhood. You probably won’t get your heart rate to 200 beats per minute doing those things, and you probably won’t feel like coughing up a lung either. It turns out that something as simple as a leisurely walk or a 30-minute bike ride has huge benefits for our mental health. Studies have shown that even a small amount of non-intense exercise can elevate our mood and give us more energy and more drive. Studies have also shown that our brains are better at processing emotions when we are moving (there is actual biology and mechanism behind why it’s easier to talk about hard subjects while out for a walk). The reality is that our minds need to exercise just as much if not more than our physical bodies do. If you talk to someone who runs several times a week, some may say they do it because they want to lose weight, but many people who exercise several times a week do it because it helps keep them emotionally stable and they would be lost without it. Don’t get me wrong there are times when you just don’t feel like getting outside or even getting off the couch. However, I have yet to meet a person that says they regret all that time they spent walking the trails of Sudbury or going on a family bike ride.
It is my firm belief that exercise is for every single person on the planet, but it also probably won’t look the same for every person. For me it might be running, for my wife it might be yoga, for you, it might be hiking and for that crazy guy you know down the street, it might be a 100-mile ultra-marathon. We are all different and have different needs and interests, but in one thing we are all the same, we are all biologically made to move.