Get Moving For Stress Relief (part 1)
Movement — gentle or sweaty — is the most reliable stress relief there is, because it floods you with endorphins and trains your body to handle stress more efficiently.
Here is today’s conundrum: you want to work out, but you are just too stressed…
True, there is no one who can’t relate to feeling stressed — but there is also no one who should use it as a reason to stay stagnant. Movement, whether slow and gentle or an all-in sweaty workout, is the best stress relief you’ll ever know. It distracts you from whatever is taking up too much space in your head, and it rewards you with those godsend endorphins.
Just in case you aren’t already a fan of endorphins, let’s review why you should be. According to Merriam-Webster, the definition is:
“Any of a group of endogenous peptides, found especially in the brain, that bind chiefly to opiate receptors and produce some pharmacological effects (as pain relief) like those of opiates.”
When you work out, the brain produces these neurochemicals. Endorphins are similar to morphine — they activate opioid receptors and reduce discomfort, and at the same time they promote happiness and a sense of calm.
But there is even more behind the happy surge. Low levels of the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine are linked to depression, and with movement your brain naturally increases both. Voilà, you feel better.
It goes deeper still. In the CNN article “Why Endorphins (and Exercise) Make You Happy,” sport and exercise psychologist J. Kip Matthews, PhD, explains: “What appears to be happening is that exercise affords the body an opportunity to practice responding to stress, streamlining the communication between the systems involved in the stress response. The less active we become, the more challenged we are in dealing with stress.”
So as we move, we not only increase endorphins, serotonin, and norepinephrine — we increase the communication among all the stress-relieving systems in the body, and become more efficient at handling stress.
And you do not need to be an Olympian to reap the benefits. Whether you have been a sports enthusiast your whole life or feel sluggish and out of shape, movement trumps stress (and gets you in great shape too). A little goes a very long way. Embrace your ability to move through — and beyond — stress.
In Get Moving For Stress Relief, Part 2, I’ll share strategies for keeping healthy movement in your life. But now, it’s time to — you guessed it — move!
From Gina — something I built
For the days when moving is not going to happen
Movement is the best stress intervention I know, and I have built thirty years around saying so. But some days you will not move, and telling you to is not useful.
Those days are why I built SOVA.
It asks nothing of you. No count, no form, no getting changed. Long wordless sound with tones underneath, made for the evening when the day has already taken everything and the idea of a workout is faintly insulting.
What the sound actually is, and how it is made, is set out plainly in Stress Relief That Does Not Ask Anything of You.
Music for Hard Days
1 hour · free on YouTube · nothing to sign up for
Put it on and do nothing else. That is the entire instruction.
When the mind needs somewhere to land
Everything in this wing points, in the end, to the same place — the breath, and the nervous system beneath it. It is why I built SOVA: a quiet companion for the moments in between.
- Today — a daily practice that aligns you before the day pulls you a dozen directions.
- Companion — a place to process any feeling, even the happy ones.
- Pages — a soft place to set your thoughts down and out of your head.
- The House — rooms of calm to step into, whenever you need one.