Stress Awareness Month
Tip 2 – Exercise
Ever noticed how your body feels when you’re under stress? Your muscles may be tense, especially in your face, neck, and shoulders, leaving you with back or neck pain, or painful headaches. You may feel a tightness in your chest, a pounding pulse, or muscle cramps. The worry and discomfort of all these physical symptoms can in turn lead to even more stress, creating a vicious cycle between your mind and body.
Exercising is an effective way to break this cycle. As well as releasing endorphins in the brain, physical activity helps to relax the muscles and relieve tension in the body.
You can reap all the physical and mental health benefits of exercise with 30-minutes of moderate exercise five times a week. Two 15-minute or even three 10-minute exercise sessions can also work just as well.
As you begin to regularly shed your daily tensions through movement and physical activity, you may find that this focus on a single task, and the resulting energy and optimism, can help you remain calm and clear in everything you do.
The most important thing is to pick an activity that you enjoy.
Official advice at the moment is to stay at home, and to only go outside for one form of exercise a day, to shop for basic necessities, if there’s a medical reason and travelling to and from essential work. Here is a resource to help you find lots of fun and creative ideas on how to get active at home https://www.sportengland.org/stayinworkout#get_active_at_home
For all those who are already active, what form of exercise do you take that helps with your stress levels?
