Advantages & Benefits of Exercise on Mental Health

Great Benefits of Exercise for Women’s Mental Health.

Exercise results in a positive frame of mind, improves your sense of self-esteem, and betters cognitive function. It helps reduce depression, negative mood as well as anxiety, and improves your mental health. It reduces problems like social withdrawal and makes you feel good about life and those around you.

How Exercise Benefits Your Mental Health

• The release of endorphins or “happy molecules” is one of the crucial ways in which exercise makes you feel good. That is, makes you feel good about yourself, your surroundings, and life in general. By elevating your mood to a positive one, it helps you feel appreciative of the things you have and enjoy them more. Exercise lessens anxiety, reduces depression and provides a mechanism via which you can relieve stress. Overall it makes you a happier person who can enjoy life by handling its pressures better. 
• Exercise improves sleep, by improving its overall quality and reducing the time it takes to fall asleep too. This significantly lessens negative feelings like sadness, tiredness, anger, anxiety, stress, which result from a restless night’s sleep. Regular exercise makes sure that you have a good night’s sleep and feel fresh in the morning. This sets you up properly and positively for tacking the day ahead.

Additional Ways Exercise Benefits Your Mental Health

• Very importantly, exercise reduces and eliminates feelings of loneliness and isolation. Even jogging in the local park for instance, can give you the opportunity to connect with others. The regular exercise routine performs multiple functions of keeping you active, giving you a structured day, and helping you to remain in contact with those around you.
• A regular exercise routine can do wonders for your sense of self-confidence and make you feel like a new you. To achieve this you need to set personal goals, stick to them, and acknowledge each time you fulfill it properly. This will improve your self-image and the belief you have in yourself and your abilities. Ultimately it leads you to becoming a better person, who is able to fulfill her potential while being her best self.

Which Exercises are Best?

Walking is recommended as one of the best forms of exercise to improve mental health. It gets you outside, into the fresh air and literally allows you to breathe. It helps clear the cobwebs in your mind formed by a myriad of thoughts and ideas. This lessens anxiety, stress and even depression and allows for clear calm thinking. Yoga similarly is very beneficial, as it makes the mind calm and brings about a focus. Meditation and various breathing exercises help you relax and gradually lowers anxiety levels. It makes you feel at peace with yourself and lessens depression. More challenging exercise options include, running, High-Intensity Interval Training/HIIT, boxing, resistance training, and martial arts.

The Effects of Exercise on Mental Illness