To understand how exercise can help to cope with anxiety we first need to understand our physical reaction to increased anxiety levels.
Nearly everyone these days has increased anxiety levels in one way or another. Anxiety is now almost considered to be a part of modern living. There seems to be something to make us anxious around every corner in our modern world. Anxiety about job security, worry about performance, money worries, anxiety about relationships.
It shouldn’t come as any great surprise then, that record numbers of people are developing anxiety disorders? 20 million worldwide and counting. So what can we do to reduce our anxiety levels?
Learn to Cope with anxiety through exercise
First of all we need to understand how anxiety affects our bodies. When you start to feel anxious, you will experience a wide range of physical symptoms. We feel anxiety as an emotion, it has a huge physical effect on us. Increased heart rate, faster breathing, even getting the shakes or feeling faint; there are literally hundreds of side effects to anxiety.
These side effects are caused by our body’s natural reaction to stress. We are programmed to respond to stress with the fight or flight response. This is nature’s way to prepare us to either face danger or flee from it. We produce adrenaline, a hormone that stimulates the body. It increases our pulse rate, makes our breathing deeper and faster, reduces the blood supply to our extremities and generally readies our body for action, which is where the side effects come from.
If you are repeatedly exposed to stress or suffer a severe trauma your body can start to over-react to even small levels of stress, reacting inappropriately to almost any stressful stimulation. It is when this happens that you are likely to have developed an anxiety disorder.
Exercise helps reduce anxiety levels in two ways, firstly by burning off the adrenaline that our body has produced so that everything can return to normal and secondly by teaching our subconscious that an increased heart rate and accelerated breathing is not a sign of impending danger which helps us to ignore the side effects of adrenaline and feel less anxious when in stressful situations.
So what kind of exercise should we be doing and how often? Aerobic exercise is the key. Aerobic exercise is the kind of exercise that uses the major muscle groups of the body, the large muscles of the thighs and arm muscles will, when exercised quickly increase the pulse rate and breathing. So exercises like, fast walking, jogging, running, rowing and swimming will all help. What you are trying to do is increase the heart rate and breathing level, ideally for between 20 and 30 minutes at a time.
But don’t get obsessed about the type of exercise. If things in your life are causing anxiety, any level of exercise will help. Start with short walks, perhaps walking to the local shops instead of driving, use the stairs at work instead of the lifts, take the dog for a walk. Just do something to increase your normal levels of activity. Let yourself gradually build up the amount of exercise. Signing up to a gym membership when you haven’t done any exercise for years is probably a good way to put yourself off the idea.
So try to find twenty minutes extra exercise every day to start off with. The great thing is that exercise is addictive, your body gets used to the feel good factor that comes with it and before you know it the gym membership is sounding attractive, not daunting.
Exercise is also a great way of taking your mind off your worries. It is amazing how little you think about when you are strutting your stuff and focusing on your breathing, so get moving and start relaxing.