In the barre class I taught this past week, I closed with a quote on calmness to remind my class of the psychological benefits of exercise. Of course, I now can’t find that exact quote for the life of me, but I did find this one that is as close as I can get:

“You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do, is calm yourself. The storm will pass.”

Timber Hawkeye

After I shared it, I talked a little about how each person in that class had taken a step towards achieving mastery of mental calmness by getting through class that day. I decided to share that both with them and here, because it’s something that people don’t often think about when they think of exercising. People get wrapped up in the number on the scale, the size of their pants, and the number of calories burned on their fitness tracker, and they forget that some of the greatest benefits of exercise happen in the mind.

Worse yet, focusing on number- based outcomes often has the unintended consequence of sabotaging progress or creating obsessive thought patterns. This post is going up on the first full week of February, which means, statistically speaking, most people have let their new year’s resolutions fall by the wayside. I talked about how to create resolutions that have a better chance of sticking in a recent post and I also talked about why I don’t think people should set “losing weight” as one of their goals.

In the same vein as those posts, I thought that for today’s installment, I would share some of the benefits physical activity can bring about that have nothing to do with scales or numbers. Instead, I want to talk about the benefits exercise can have on your mental health.

Most people now know that exercise prompts our body to release endorphins, or the feel good hormones, which naturally boost our mood and relieve stress. Exercise is now well-known to have anti-depressant and anti-anxiety effects.

But there are even more, less well-known, psychological benefits of exercise that people often don’t consider. Here are a few examples:

• Finding calmness in chaos: Life throws us a lot of curveballs. When things get hard, it can be so easy to fall apart or fly off the handle. Getting through a tough workout is like a small microcosm of this. To make it through, you are forced to lock in your focus, filter out the discomfort, find a goal to work toward, and not give up despite the overwhelming desire to quit. It makes you find the calmness in your mind when everything in your body is feeling stressed. The more you do this, the more your brain gets used to pushing through external (and internal) limitations. In fact, research has shown that acquiring mental toughness is one of the ways in which exercise improves mental health in teenagers. Every time you push through to a new physical achievement, you are taking a step towards achieving a mindset of toughness.
• Challenge limiting beliefs: When I provided individual psychotherapy, often our focus was on challenging beliefs that held people back in their lives. One of the reasons I love fitness, is because I often see this happen for people as a natural consequence of becoming more physically fit. They see themselves doing things they never thought they could do and it naturally challenges the limiting and negative beliefs they hold about themselves. They go from “I can’t” to “I can.” Once that seed of belief gets in, it filters out to all the other areas of their life as well. Imagine what kinds of things you could accomplish if you could approach all challenges with a can-do attitude!
• Find the fountain of brain youth: Did you know you can ward off Alzheimers and the effects of aging by getting your workout in?! Research shows that exercise counteracts the cognitive decline that comes along with aging and Alzheimers disease. That means moving more can actually help your brain stay younger longer! And it’s never too late to start – even in the elderly, moderate exercise has been shown to slow the brain atrophy that tends to occur late in life. If this isn’t motivation to keep moving, I don’t know what is!
• Be a bigger smarty-pants: Working up a sweat improves neurogenesis, or the ability to grow new brain cells. This is just one of the ways research has shown that physical exercise can lead to improvements in cognitive performance. Even better, the benefits of your workout aren’t time-limited. While you may notice a short-lived mental boost immediately following a workout, it’s been shown that regular exercisers experience enhanced brain function over the course of their whole lifetime. So, if you’re dying to be able to beat your partner at trivia (maybe someday?), getting your workouts in is a step in the right direction!
• Instant affirmations: Do you feel like it’s hard to come up with affirmations for yourself? Pay attention to what you have to say to yourself to get to the finish line of a tough workout. You’re going to hear a lot of “you can do this” and “don’t quit, you’re almost there” kind of stuff. These are great statements to jot down and use later when you need a boost. But the even better ones? Those are the ones that you forget to even say to yourself after you kicked some butt in a sweat session. Those statements sound like “you’re a rockstar,” “if you can do that, you can do anything,” “wow, look how strong you have become.” Those? Those are pure gold. Take a minute at the end of a workout to check in with yourself. Think hard about what you accomplished and then CONGRATULATE yourself for what you just did. Take those congratulatory statements and WRITE THEM DOWN. They are your reminder that you have the ability to accomplish hard things. If you can do it in a workout, you can do it in life.

Why is any of this important? This might be something you’re asking as you finish reading this post… and I get it. We are all so used to thinking of physical activity in a very unilateral way. We do it to stay in shape (i.e. look good)… maybe with a side of heart health here and there. But the reality is, those things rarely keep us going for very long and if they do, they often lead us to an unhealthy focus on appearance and weight. We forget that exercise has more value than the effect it has on a scale.

So the next time you find yourself stressing about the numbers, take a second and remind yourself that movement doesn’t have to be about punishing your body. It can, instead, be about finding peace, joy, and mental strength!

As always, Stay Healthy as Heck, KH