Exercise & Mental Health

What you believe and focus on becomes your reality. If you go out looking for trouble, you'll find it. If you focus on happiness, it will appear. Once you decide what you're looking for, your brain will go to work to find it and make it your reality.

Michael McMillan

Exercise & Mental Health

The National Institute of Mental Health recognizes exercise as a valid treatment for anxiety and depression. Levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine are higher in those who exercise. These, in turn, may elevate mood, reduce depression, and improve mental focus. Exercise or physical activity assists the psycho-physiological adaptation of emotional stress. Weight training, in particular, has shown to raise body image and global self-esteem. Exercise has been shown to improve mental function and is speculated to enhance creativity and problem solving ability. Exercise can be seen as one of the components essential for physical and mental health in today's society.

Mental Health

• Exercise improves
• Mental Health
• Emotion
• Mood
• The National Institute of Mental Health
• Recognizes exercise as a valid treatment for anxiety and depression.
• Exercise is self-impowering
• Bring responsibility toward self
• Positive addiction
• May replace negative addictions
• We don't know (Landers)
• Optimal intensity or duration
• Optimal mode
• Dose/response curve
• Time course (acute)
• Law of initial values
• Relative values - ceiling effect
• Lower initial value - greater potential for improvement
• Unfit, anxious, depressed - greater improvements
• Exercises effect on emotion
• Fit vs unfit - lower anxiety for fit
• Chronically trained / adaptation - lower anxiety
• Acute bout of activity - lower anxiety

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.
~Dale Carnegie