Exercise endorphins are wonderful and what some might even describe as healing, but it’s essential to tune into what your body needs.
That said, exercise and mental health can also be triggering depending on the relationship you have with your workout. “There’s a difference between, I have to do this versus I’m doing this for myself,” said Dr. Patti Kim, Naturopathic Doctor and Acupuncturist. “From the Chinese medicine perspective, we don’t think of exercise as exercise, but encourage patients to think of it in relation to mental health. Similar to how we use acupuncture as moving chi, moving energy. We tend to think of exercise as resistance reps, heart rate, time, and distance, but what if we let go of all those parameters? Am I moving chi? Am I moving energy? Am I moving some blood?”
You can also boost endorphins with gentle movement.
It doesn’t always have to be a sweat-inducing, hard-hitting workout. “When we say, be gentle, it may not even mean going outside if you’re too depressed to get up,” added Kim. “Put some cushions under your knees, lay in your bed, get in a restorative yoga pose, and do some deep breathing. That’s still movement. There are paraplegic patients who were doing Qigong, and just through mental visualization of moving chi, they had nerve regeneration. They had vitality come back, even if they were still paralyzed. So, movement doesn’t have to be actual physical movement if you are not in a place to be able to do that. Just try and do something daily.”
And while exercise is a big part of taking care of your overall mental health, it’s different for everyone and not a cure-all.
“For some people, the medicine of exercise can become poison in a way; it’s abusive for people who have eating disorders or obsessive-compulsive disorders and things like that,” said Psychotherapist Annie Armstrong Miyao. “But largely speaking, physical exercise helps us in so many ways release tension, release stress and anger, helps us work through fear, and does wonderful things for our physical health, physiologically speaking. In terms of brain chemistry, it boosts dopamine, balances serotonin, and balances blood pressure.”
It’s also important to pay attention to how you feel before, during, and after exercising to clue you into what your body needs.
“Some people need cardiovascular exercise and some people need it to let go of anger or stress,” added Armstrong Miyao. “And for some people, something like yoga has a really nice parallel to learning to tolerate uncomfortable emotional feelings. You can look at how those things pair or where they can marry the psychological and the physical. So exercise can be a beautiful tool, or medicine, helping manage mental health.”