If you were able to sell the mental effects of a 30 minute run as an anti-anxiety medication, you would be a billionaire.
This is a thought that crosses my mind whenever I go on a run, but I don’t usually bring it up to people because I feel like it comes off pretentious and holier-than-thou. But I’m on my blog so I can say whatever I want!
I think a lot of our ills come from not moving as much as we should. Most jobs nowadays consist of looking at a screen for 8 hours every day, and I don’t think that trend is going to reverse itself anytime soon. This makes it critical that you do some amount of moving in your off hours.
I think a lot of people hear the standard “you should move more” advice from doctors or whoever, and brush it off as something that might make them feel 10% better. I would like to weigh in and say that pre-run and post-run, my mood can get better by a factor of 100% or more. I can be a total mess coming out of a workday, filled with worry about how things are going to go, and come back from running as Confidence Man, a completely different person that has zero neurosis and whose life is going great.
It’s important to note that nothing about my life actually changes before going for a run. The only thing that changes is how well I think I’m able to deal with challenges.
I’m sure there are some complex physical things happening that cause this, but during and after a run I feel like I can do literally anything. A lot of the positive changes in my life have come from having the guts to follow through on something that I thought of on a run – the normal version of me would never be so bold.
Moving your body also makes you not worry about stuff that doesn’t matter
A few years back, I ended up inadvertently annoying this guy at work that was trying to help me out. He was an expert at the thing we were working on together and I was a total noob.
For a few days, I was fretting about how poorly our short interaction went. I was spending time with my family over the weekend, but couldn’t stop worrying about how I came off to this person. It made it so that I had a hard time enjoying things.
And then I went on a run.
This was a HOT run, and it was taking everything I had to just keep going. My mind habitually went to think about my embarrassing interaction, but I literally couldn’t. It’s as if my body was saying:
We are fighting for survival here! I am not going to waste precious resources on worrying about that stupid thing! You are being ridiculous!
And then I didn’t worry about it again.
This illustrates another excellent side effect of exercise: it stops you from worrying about things that don’t matter in the big picture.
There has been interesting new research stating that past a certain point, humans might expend the same number of calories regardless of if we exercise or not. This suggests that the body is capable of expending a lot of energy, even if you’re not doing anything. I think that a huge candidate for high energy expenditure while sitting in a room doing nothing is rumination and anxiety.
If you use some of that extra energy on exercise instead, you simply don’t have the energy to spare to ruminate endlessly about things. I think this is a big part of why exercise is always recommended for people with anxiety disorders.
So if you find yourself worrying about things a little too much, I cannot recommend this enough: get out there!!!!!!
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