Exercise for Anxiety and Depression

Exercise for Anxiety and Depression

Thank you for visiting us, we hope you find the answers you are looking while here. Depression or anxieties, while different, have the same negative affects on our lives. Physical activity will positively affect both conditions in the same ways. Depression and anxiety are incapacitating to our mind and our soul.

Both conditions take away the very fiber of our beings, which is a natural trust and excitement for all things we love. We exist as an animated projection of God, and we each are his gift of something to this world. All of our ‘somethings’ are different. This variety of us as God’s gifts makes our Family of Humanity complete, and you are very much a needed part of our family! Depression and Anxiety make us feel we are not gifts of God at all, but that we are a mistake. Nothing can be further from the God’s truth.

Physical activity can turn those feelings around, and can minimize the effects of our depression to its medical or environmental causes. Part of the felt depression is because of the cause, and a significant part is because of the lack of exercise. Part of the experienced anxiety is because of the cause, and a significant part is because of the lack of activity with our bodies.

Depression by its very nature suppresses our spirit and reduces our desire to animate ourselves with movement. Anxiety, on the other hand, is an elevated state of hypervigillance of our environment. With anxiety we cannot trust, we are always on guard, lest we be unguarded, and never able to relax. If you or a loved one is experiencing depression and or anxiety, you know it is more than just a mood. The mechanics of either depression or anxiety exist because of an imbalance of chemicals in the brain, as well as unprocessed pain from our childhood, realized or not.

Every time you observe, think, or choose an action, the brain releases chemicals within itself to give you good feelings or bad feelings. The flow of these chemicals in the brain gives you the feelings and moods you experience. Part of the flow of mood elevating chemicals comes from the physical activity we do. If we do less, the amount of good feelings from that source diminishes.

The tendency of those who are in depression and experiencing anxiety is the same, and that is to reduce physical activity to very little. In both cases the person feels lethargic and does not feel like doing any activity at all. When we remain inactive, the depression gets worse, due partly to the inactivity itself.

In anxiety, we feel tired mentally, and we equate it to feeling tired physically. The truth is that with anxiety, it is our brain that is exhausted, and not the body. Our brains consume tremendous amounts of energy from our beings; it has no muscles, nor does it burn calories, but it can expend tremendous costs in our vitamin and mineral reserves, especially B vitamins, minerals and potassium.

Low reserves of any vitamins or minerals themselves cause depression and anxiety, and add to the effects, from this third source. These changes are subtle, and added together over time have a cumulative heavy effect on our life.

To the anxiety sufferer, they feel that they are already too tired to work out, so they feel further effort would tire them further. To the depression sufferer, they do not feel the energy to attack anything, and physical motion is an attack on a task with movement of the body. In depression, the brain expends energy in deep sorrow, while in anxiety; the brain expends energy in stress and worry.

Both conditions make the sufferer feel that they are exhausted, too tired to exercise, and that they would harm themselves further if they did. This is just the opposite from the truth, as we will soon see, and this is a good thing!

What happens in the body when we exercise?

Physical effort miraculously reverses the symptoms they experience from when they started their exercise session. When physical activity begins, the brain releases endorphins to heighten its ability to concentrate. The body releases endorphins to counteract the feelings of pain from possible threat and injury.

After exercise, the mental fatigue from the anxiety will diminish, while the fatigue in the body is increased; but the body’s fatigue is a ‘good fatigue’ because the sufferer has started the cycle of exhaustion and recovery by rest.

The result is the anxiety sufferer will feel mentally better after working out, but be physically more tired; in this case, this is exactly what we want, for it is very good.

The depression sufferer experiences similar effects, as the endorphins released by the brain counteract the strong suppressed mood of the depression. While physical activity powerfully suppresses stress in the anxiety sufferer, it likewise has just as powerful an effect suppressing sadness in the depression sufferer.

There is one universal rule to remember, and that is, ‘Activity and Sadness are incompatible’, for the two cannot exist together. The same rule applies to Anxiety, for, ‘Anxiety and Activity are incompatible,’ as well. When one is active long enough, then depression or anxiety will leave.

Let us differentiate between good tired and bad tired. ‘Good tired’ is when we can cease the action that made us tired, as in the case of exercising, while ‘bad tired’ is when we are in a state in which no cessation is possible, as in the case of sadness or hypervigillance. The trick is to move the fatigue into the physical realm where we can use the body’s natural restorative cycles to initiate a reversal.

In other words, Exercising for Anxiety and Depression will make our body take on our minds’ fatigue. This requires will power and some help from others, but it we can do it with help and trusting in our body to strengthen our spirit, which it will. We can talk to our body, and our body will respond but we must create a relationship with it and trust it to help us.

That relationship was ours in our youth, but as we lapsed into depression and states of anxiety in later years, for either psychological or medical reasons, we have lost that primal relationship. Forced exercise will restore us to that primal relationship to our ancestral selves.

What happens in the mind when we exercise?

With a little practice, and once we find the right level and pace of exercises which we like to do, then mentally we return to our ancestral self. Contrary to its name, it is not an animal state full of stress and vigilance as you would think an animal might be. That is the state we are in right now and we wish to change! It is a highly spiritual consciousness where we return to the wonderment state of our existence before childhood, and before our birth.

The spiritual side of exercises

We return to a spiritual state of our tribal past, as hunter-gatherer societies roamed the vast plains in the dawn of humanity. Peoples of the past did not walk as they moved they ran. When we do exercise, any exercise, we begin to reenter that long ago past state where we again are spiritually free from our worries. In this state of accelerated breathing and movement of the body, in a few days we will begin to experience the therapeutic effects of exercise on the mind.

Our mind on its own will begin to release its amnesia holding the painful memories of childhood, allowing us to remember and process them. Your mind will also look with new perspective on the negative circumstances in your present day as well. These two processes we call euphoric processing of past pain and fears. This brain activity is a natural therapeutic side effect of exercise that the brain, at some point will begin to do all by itself.

It takes about seven days for our cellular memory to reset, as in overcoming addictions, and so too does it take about seven days for this to begin to happen with exercise. We may first experience feelings of reconnecting to our primal past, and reconnecting to our original enthusiasms of childhood.

What we are doing is remembering our soul’s energy from before birth. This is all the same brain activity, and soon the memories your ego needs to process will emerge as your mind wanders during exertion.

What kinds of exercise do we do?

Do not confuse exercise with sports, for some of us they are not the same. Keep them different. For some of us, we did not understand the rules of sports naturally so we experienced bad memories of them in elementary or later school years. We learned we were too slowing, weak, or too awkward to be of any value on the playing field.

This is a lie we may still believe today.

Everyone has some athletic ability to the extent that they need to be, and everyone has activities that appeal to them naturally. Look for your activity in the basic movements that you naturally like to do. Tall skinny people like to walk, run, or climb, while shorten heavier people like lift, throw, push, and hit things.

These would have been activities that your elders would have assigned you to do in a primal society, where you would have been very valuable. They would always have been things that you liked to do.

You do not need to do it in a group, as in joining an exercise class. It may be more comfortable to begin exercising in your own home or walking alone on your street by yourself. Whether you go on to exercise with others is not important; what is important is regularity and routine.

Do not miss sessions with yourself; build a routine of at least three times a week, or every other day. Do not give in to the temptation to try to outdo your last session. Keep it the same until you can easily push ahead gradually. Be sure you drink plenty of water and above all else, do not become a scale watcher!

One word about intensity; how hard you do something is not as important as enjoying doing it on a routine basis. Doing it lightly many times enjoyably is much more productive than doing it once and injuring yourself.

The effect is as much mental and spiritual as it is physical. Taking the time to enjoy doing what you want is putting yourself first, and that is healing in itself.

Exercising for Anxiety and Depression can include things not normally associated with exercise as well, such a golf, putt-putt golf, archery, arrowhead hunting, graveyard etchings, hiking, shell collecting, bird watching, photography, or art out in the field. When you are doing activity like that, you are still doing all the exercise you need to initiate the mental benefits we talked about earlier.

The secret is the preoccupation in the activity, which starts the healing processes. We hope we have excited you enough to begin your own personal training sessions in exercise.

For more on this subject please consider our first in series book Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind. In it, we take you through your spiritual journey back home to your Original Self. We talk about God's purpose behind that soul’s journey, as we follow our heart’s dreams to our ultimate destiny. We answer many questions about selfishness, prosperity, psychotherapy, and finding our dreams and happiness. We share much about boundaries. We also talk about the spiritual controls we have within to bring our good to us. Those controls are our Sincerity Switch, Spontaneity Switch, and lastly our Feelings and Dreams Switch.

Thank you for visiting us and please keep in touch, sharing your trials and your victories with us. We promise to answer personally every Email that we receive.

Shayne and Lori North in Aurora, Colorado

Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind The Book

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