How Daily Exercise Can Better Your Mental Health

Manage Your Response To Stress

Stress is well-integrated into many mental illnesses. For the most part, an individual with a mental illness, such as generalized anxiety disorder, often find they get stressed out much easier than someone without the mental illness. This is similar to how someone with an illness compromising their immune system tends to fall ill with the cold, flu, or other physical diseases easier.

The good news is exercise can do a lot to improve the body’s response to stress. As mentioned previously, exercise releases endorphins, but this is not the only one. One of the stress-moderating chemicals your body produces is called norepinephrine. Low levels of norepinephrine have been linked to mental illnesses such as depression. Moderate exercise helps improve the body’s overall concentration of norepinephrine, which means existing stress and related symptoms of depression can lessen as a result. Continued regular exercise can help maintain the levels of this chemical over extended periods, which provides you with the tools required to manage stress better overall. Continue for more information on how exercise helps boost mental health.

Increase Relaxation Before Sleep

Insomnia, which refers to difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, is often listed as a symptom of poor mental health, whether it is officially diagnosed as a mental illness or not. Regular exercise in the evening can help release the tension in your body, which helps prepare it for sleep, so you can fall asleep faster and hopefully remain asleep for the majority (or all) of the night. The best exercise immediately before bed for assistance with insomnia is, of course, yoga, since the slow sequence of yoga eases muscle tension, increases flexibility, and focuses on your breathing without causing too much sweat. Intense exercise immediately before bed will keep your body running for longer, which is why it is best practiced in the early evening, and something like yoga is beneficial just before you climb into bed for the night.