Exercises aren’t just for building up your physique or helping you minimize the risk of a foot injury - research has shown that exercises contribute to your mental health, too!
Exercises help to promote neural growth in your brain and reduce inflammation. By practicing exercises on a regular basis, you also gain new activity patterns that can offer you calmness and wellbeing. Your brain also releases endorphins when you exercise, which connects opiate receptors in the brain to reduce pain and produce pleasure positivity. Studies have shown that exercise can soothe mild to moderate depression & relieve anxiety and stress! Here Are Four Healthy Exercises You Should Consider:
1. Walking
Walking may seem conventional, unexciting and dull, but the fact that it is a low-impact activity makes it one of the lightest, most convenient exercises to do - strolling through the promenade for a short while is already sufficient. You can also adjust the intensity of your walking seamlessly by walking on steeper slopes or at a faster pace (i.e. running), allowing more psychological flexibility to your exercises!
2. Yoga
Yoga revolves around meditation, spirituality and psychotherapy. Breathing exercises completed during yoga help to increase body awareness, ease stress and curb muscle tension. They, in turn, lower the heart and respiratory rate, blood pressure and cardiac output, and boost serotonin, which are helpful in soothing depression and lowering anxiety! You can choose from meditative sessions to more physically demanding and challenging classes to practice yoga, whichever suits you and your body best.
3. Resistance Training
Resistance training is an exercise that involves the pushing and pulling of a particular force; a common exercise of this is weightlifting. Resistance training not only facilitates muscle-building and improves bone health, but also improves your cognition and memory, gives you better sleep, and reduces your chances of higher anxiety, depression and chronic fatigue. Of course, the satisfaction that you get from reaching higher levels in your resistance training can also boost your self-esteem and confidence and ensure your mental wellbeing!
4. Boxing
Boxing is, in fact, another rewarding, enthralling way to boost your mental wellbeing. The natural intensity of boxing (as an exercise) allows an abundant supply of endorphins to suffice, and the punching and kicking also enable you to relieve any pent up thoughts or frustrations. Similar to resistance training, boxing enhances your self-esteem and confidence as you continue to develop your self-control, focus, strength and cognitive abilities.
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